Musing on America 2005

Stop By My New Blog

2006-06-01T08:31:00.000-07:00

Dear friends,

I'm blogging again. My new blog can be found at http://makingsenseofnews.blogspot.com. Please stop by.

Jerry

Hope for a better 2006

2005-12-31T09:52:00.000-08:00

12/31/05

The half-empty side of my personality is ending this most dreadful year on a downbeat note.

Relentlessly on message (who cares if that message is a lie?), the Bush Administration has bounced back in the polls, looks likely to win its battle to swing the Supreme Court further to the right, and responded to the uproar over domestic spying by aggressively investigating the press and its unnamed sources, a move that if successful will further dampen the already muted criticism of this administration's outrageous usurpation of power.

The half-empty side of my personality reminds me that this is the year to renew my passport, a document my German-born father always warned his sons to keep current.

And then I repeat to myself the words I told my younger daughter time and again as she grew up: "Look at the glass half-full, not half-empty." So let me end the year by trying to practice that advice.

If 2005 was filled with bad news, from the escalating bloodshed in Iraq to the devastation of New Orleans, it showed signs of being a year of reawakening. No less a pillar of traditional news than the New York Times, the newspaper liberals chastised for buying into administration claims that there were weapons of mass destruction behind every sand dune in Iraq, published an editorial a week ago headlined "Mr. Cheney's Imperial Presidency." The lead read: "George W. Bush has quipped several times during his political career that it would be so much easier to govern in a dictatorship. Apparently he never told his vice president that this was a joke."

Wow.

Next week, a member of the Massachusetts congressional delegation is holding a town meeting in America's birthplace, Lexington. The topic: domestic spying. And he's sharing the stage with the state director of the ACLU. Wow 2.

Then there's the filibuster that forced the president to sign a short-term extension of the Patriot Act. It succeeded in large part because several conservative Republican senators broke ranks with their party to voice concern about the sweep of the act and its potential to intrude into the lives of law-abiding Americans. Wow 3.

The next month will tell us much. We'll discover whether Samuel Alito, whom I fear more for his rubber-stamp views in support of presidential power than for his potential opposition to Roe v. Wade, is the next justice of the Supreme Court. We'll find out whether Jack Abramoff cuts a deal with prosecutors and sings -- loud enough all signs indicate to take down a row of Republican congressmen with him. Most importantly, perhaps, we'll find out to what extent Congress is willing to put partisanship aside to demand that the President of the United States stay within the law.

I admit that I'm less than confident. But that's the half-empty side of me speaking. The half-full side counts the growing list of Republican senators willing to speak out on select issues such as torture and invasion of privacy. There's McCain, Hagel, Stowe, Chafee and Collins. More recently Specter, Craig and Sununu have also made some noise. Can more traditional conservative voices such as Warner or Domenici be far behind?

I confess: I don't trust Republicans. In politics, you are, in a sense, what you earn -- or just take -- in the tens of thousands from lobbyists. But then, I don't trust Democrats for the same reason. Still, even elected representatives must occasionally have a conscience. They, too, must have studied about the Founding Fathers, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights -- all that stuff we learned every three years from fifth grade social studies on.

Perhaps 2006 can go down as the year in which responsible leaders of both parties found common ground to roll back or at least stop the unbridled expansion of presidential power. Perhaps the Senate Democrats will build on the newfound resolve that allowed them to sustain the Patriot Act filibuster so that they will demand legislation that explicitly forbids the internal spying and the suspension of the due processes of law that have become trademarks of this administration. And if not, perhaps someone in the Democratic Party will have the guts to call openly and forcefully for President George W. Bush's impeachment.

This is supposed to be a time of year for predictions. But the world of politics has me baffled. Will 2006 leave the glass of democracy half-empty, or worse, drink it further dry? Or will it begin to replenish that glass, recognizing that much of its content evaporated over the last five years while we as a country fixated, often in fear, on a president wrapped tightly in the flag that's supposed to represent the values we're ostensibly fighting for?

In small ways, each of us will help answer these questions in 2006. I for one, plan to start my new year by attending that Lexington town meeting on domestic spying. And when I stand to ask a question, I'll spell my name out loud and clear -- in case any spies from the administration are there taking notes.

In the house of the setting sun

2005-12-11T05:02:00.000-08:00

The piece below appeared on Commondreams.org on Dec. 12, 2005

It has been three months since Katrina struck and (New Orleans) is a complete shambles.

-- The New York Times (12/11/05)

I wonder how the history books will cast the death of a great American city.

They'll note, of course, that while President George W. Bush and his vice-president, Dick Cheney flew around the country, insisting to Americans that the war in distant Iraq was being won, and while the opposition party, The Democrats, fought among themselves about how they could best call on the president to extricate the U.S. from that tough war without looking weak, no one seemed to much notice that an historic American community, a place of jazz and joie de vivre, home to some of the country's best cooking and delightful eccentricities, was dying of neglect.

They'll conclude, no doubt, that this rich and human city, where the real block parties had nothing to do with the drunks on Bourbon Street, where unlike most of the country people really did know their neighbors, was in the end abandoned by an America that just didn't care enough to tune in.

Abandoned by a ruling Republican Party consumed by scoring ideological points, giving more tax cuts to the rich, winning a war it couldn't win, and covering up its own growing corruption.

Abandoned by a Democratic Party grasping desperately for leadership, and coming up short.

Abandoned by a news media bleeding from too many corporate cuts and grasping for news, however trivial, that sold well the next day instead of news that might have built a better country tomorrow.

In the end, however, historians will conclude correctly that it is we who killed New Orleans. We let it be abandoned by politicians and ignored by the press. You and I, preoccupied by how much we could spend on Christmas gifts or whether Matt Damon's betrothed was really pregnant.

You and I, mesmerized or just numbed by the finger pointing and shouting over Iraq, an easier story to grasp, no doubt, because people die there every day. You and I, conned by the silence into believing, or at least deceiving ourselves into believing, that in the aftermath of Katrina, the aftermath of a week of utter incompetence, a week in which we watched Americans dying on national television while the government burped, that same government was now doing something of substance to rebuild the Big Easy.

By all signs, it's not. The New York Times recently told us large swaths of New Orleans remain without electricity. It sounded sort of like Baghdad. Representatives of New Orleans' colleges toured Boston last week, pleading with the displaced students of Tulane and Loyola and Xavier, to come back. Most, they insist, are planning to re-enroll. But what about next year? Who wants to study, and live, and work in a city left shattered and largely to its own devices.

Some people, of course, might argue that New Orleans doesn't deserve to be rebuilt. It's largely below sea level, they say, a city awaiting its next disaster. But then, so is the Netherlands, and that's a country. It is possible to invest in a solution. But it takes will -- and billions of dollars -- to do so.

Some might argue that it isn't the rest of America's problem. That big government can't solve all problems. That the United States was built on entrepreneurship and a pioneering spirit and that the people of New Orleans should apply their quotient of both. But that's poppycock. The people who talk about getting government off of our backs are the very same people who have frittered tens of billions of dollars of government money in Iraq and push to spend more and more there.

I am astonished that neither of our political parties has yet come up with even a coherent framework for rebuilding New Orleans and its levees. With the life support system turned off, they're just waiting for it to die.

I'm particularly astonished that The Democrats have said next to nothing. It is, after all, the party that brought us the New Deal, Head Start and other programs which, at crucial turning points of American history, extended a hand.

I'm still waiting for Democrats to propose a new New Deal, programs that create jobs for, and extend tax credits and incentives to, those who help rebuild New Orleans. I'm waiting for a Democratic economist to construct and trumpet a clear and simple graphic that shows we could rebuild New Orleans many times over for what we've invested in the corruption, torture and mayhem we're passing off as democracy in Iraq.

I'm waiting for a Democrat to lead, to demand construction of a levee system that will stand when the next hurricane comes, to point out that the latest $90 billion tax cut passed by Congress is three times the estimated cost of reconstructing New Orleans levees to withstand even a truly catastrophic storm. Without new levees, no one will return.

Why have the Democrats been silent? And if they're capable of nothing but a whimper from Capitol Hill, why should we, an increasingly disgusted and disenfranchised public, support either party? Is anyone capable of earning our votes? But I digress. The Republicans arrogance is ultimately our arrogance as a nation. And the Democrats silence is ultimately our shame.

Writes The Times: "If the nation has decided it is too expensive to give the people of New Orleans a chance at renewal, we have to tell them so. We must tell them we spent our rainy-day fund on a costly stalemate in Iraq, that we gave it away in tax cuts for wealthy families and shareholders. We must tell them America is too broke and too weak to rebuild one of its great cities. ..... Whether we admit it or not, this is our choice to make. We decide whether New Orleans lives or dies."

The Times is right. But are we listening?

How about a contract for ALL America?

2005-10-24T20:42:00.000-07:00

10/10/24

Call it Security Starts at Home, or Good Government Means Clean Government, or A Contract for ALL America. Call it whatever you want. But it's past time for the Democratic Party to run on something other than, "We're not the other guys."

It's time, in other words, for Democrats to lead.

Certainly the Republicans have given them an opening. They've had a run of news about as toxic as the black water that surged through New Orleans streets after Hurricane Katrina. Congressional leaders and top White House aides are under investigation or indictment. The late and ineffective response to Katrina's devastation poked gaping holes in the President's public persona as a man of action and resolve. And Harriet Miers, the President's nominee for the Supreme Court, has become a lightning rod for criticism from within his own party. That's just the short list against a backdrop of a failed war and mounting and mountainous debt.

But before Democrats dance on the table at poll numbers consistently showing George W. Bush with the support of less than 40 percent of the public, they should recognize those same polls show support for congressional Democrats and Republicans alike even lower. It is those numbers that suggest the public won't readily embrace a Democratic alternative in 2006 as long the Democrats are perceived to be content to hide in the shadows rather than promoting a coherent agenda of action and hope.

Given the deafening silence from Washington, I thought I'd do my bit to help. (Forgive my lack of credentials; I've never owned a baseball team, headed a bar association or had anything to do with Arabian horses.)

Here, then, are a few surefire Democratic themes:

* Security starts at home

This could be the slogan to draw attention to any number of issues at which this Admnistration has failed. Let's start with economic security. The Republicans have repeatedly beat back attempts to raise the minimum wage to a level at which people can afford to feed themselves. That's part of the reason the number of those living below the poverty level is 37 million and rising. Other than rewarding their friends with no-bid contracts, the Administration also has not articulated any coherent plan for helping to reconstruct New Orleans or to remploy the tens of thousands thrown out of work there either. It's not too late for Democrats to mount a campaign for the contemporary equivalent of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps, but with an urban twist. Why not hire displaced New Orleans residents to clean their city of debris and rebuild it? Why not give new tax breaks to those who do something rather than own something -- to people willing to volunteer time and expertise to help revive New Orleans? And why not speak out at every opportunity for a fair minimum wage?

Let's move to safety. Much has been written about the Administration's failure to invest in local policing, in security of our ports and train lines and nuclear plants. Under this heading, Democrats also might point out the need to keep the National Guard at home to help out in times of national emergency and to invest in new equipment for those guard units. Not only was nearly a third of the Louisiana and Mississippi Guard overseas in Iraq when Katrina struck but nearly all the units' best equipment was there with them. To avoid Republican charges that they are "tax and spend liberals," the Democrats should calculate how much has been spent in tax breaks for the top 1 percent of the population under George W. Bush and show what could be done by redistributing half of that to internal support and security. It would go a long way. Or Democrats could show how the direct and indirect costs of the Iraq War -- estimated in one New York Times graphic at over $1 trillion in a three- to five-year time span -- might better be spent strengthening security at home.

* Good government means clean government

If Democrats can't have a field day with the corruption rampant in the ruling party they should retire from the political ring. It's not just the investigations into the arrogance and abuse of power of Monsieurs DeLay and Rove and Libby and Frist and Abramoff (and more undoubtedly to come). It's also the cronyism that has led to the likes of Michael D. Brown as head of FEMA, Karen Hughes as an Assistant Secretary of State or -- yes -- Harriet Miers as a nominee for the Supreme Court. And it's the secrecy that has increased spying within this country, shut off public records to the press, gutted the Freedom of Information Act and so distorted American notions of just behavior in wartime that torture of prisoners overseas has surfaced time and time again in Iraq and Afghanistan alike. In discussing our overextended military, Democrats can start by taking a stand for decency, integrity and transparency in the actions of our military overseas. The U.S. Senate, remember, has voted 90-9 to prevent torture of U.S. prisoners overseas. But the President is threatening to veto the measure. It's an untenable position that the Democrats could easily turn against him.

* In a global world, multilateralism isn't a choice, it's a necessity

If Democrats can't agree on whether to pull out of Iraq and when, I'd hope they could agree on a call for multinational involvement in beginning talks and actions leading to U.S. disengagement. The Bush Administration's Coalition of the Willing was never much more than a slogan. But now so many countries have pulled out of Iraq that the Administration makes little effort to hide the unilateral nature of the war. But a coalition we may well need to help us figure out a dignified and less-than-defeated means of extricating ourselves from a country that's teetering now on the brink of Civil War, new Constitution or not. And we clearly need the world's help in keeping, for example, a worldwide pandemic of bird flu at bay and in fighting the global warming forces that made 2005 the warmest year on record. The Bush Administration has thumbed its nose at the world since it came to power, from the appointment of John Bolton to the United Nations to our refusal to sign the Kyoto Treaty on global warming. Democrats can offer a clear alternative here, too.

Once I'm offered a paycheck -- or at least a baseball team to run -- I'd be delighted to add to this list. But in truth Democrats, that's your job. If you hope to win, the time to start is now.

A whiff of Rovian rhetoric

2005-10-18T07:17:00.000-07:00

10/18/05

Mark my words: Karl Rove's new rock group, The Hatcheteers, began tearing into special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald this morning with arguments so cynical that they'll take your breath away.

No. Karl Rove, facing a possible indictment, isn't stupid enough to publicly take on his accuser.
He never operates in the public view. But John Tierney's column in today's New York Times sure reeks of Rovian logic and tactics.

As rumors spread of imminent indictments in the investigation of the Valerie Plame/CIA operative leak, Tierney positioned the Republican response in three ways.

1. By branding the scandal with a snide moniker that undercuts its very validity. Tierney has coined the logo "Nadagate" in the hope that the press buys into it. That precisely the kind of "out front and on message" approach the administration has used repeatedly to frame the words of American journalism. (A recent example is "up or down vote," repeated so often by the Bush administration in connection with the approval of federal judges that it's now used regularly and mindlessly by journalists all over the country.)

2. By warning journalists that an indictment of Rove or I. Lewis Libby, the vice-president's chief of staff, for hawking classified information could, if it came to pass, dry up the ocean of off-the-record leakers in Washington. By undercutting the prosecutor's moral authority with the people who will translate the case to the public, Tierney is trying to change the tone of press coverage.

3. By suggesting that plagiarism and obstruction of justice aren't real crimes anyway. This is cynicism as an art form, particularly by supporters of the political party that spent months and millions of dollars imipeaching a Democratic president for lying about nothing more central to national security than his sex life. Writes Tierney: "Besides switching to the vague law against disclosing classified information, (Fitzgerald) might indict Libby or Rove for perjury or obstruction of justice -- crimes that occurred only because of the investigation (emphasis added) .... Unless Fitzgerald comes up with something unexpected, neither is Nadagate."

Translation: It's fine for government officials to lie under oath, to smear undercover agents (just politics as usual) and to strong-arm others to keep the truth from getting out. It's fine, that is, as long as they are Republican officials devoted to fighting the War on Terror.

Expect to see much more of these three tacks. John Tierney has merely fired the first round.
You can bet the rest of the Right will be on message as it tries to divert attention from the sleaze
oozing out of Washington.

All the news that's fit to spin?

2005-10-16T11:50:00.000-07:00

This article appeared on CommonDreams.org on Monday, 10/17/05

10/17/05

"The Times is in turmoil. " That's how media critic Howard Kurtz began CNN's Reliable Sources Sunday. If he's right, it seems to be a turmoil at least in part of the paper's own making.

At long last, The New York Times this weekend printed its version of the Judith Miller saga, including a substantial piece by Miller on her testimony before a federal grand jury.

Substantial, I should say, in length. Because the article seemed to lack a significant component of the truth. When it came to revealing who might have given Miller the name "Valerie Flame," jotted in one of her notebooks, the veteran reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner wrote that she couldn't remember. That's it. She couldn't remember -- even though the outing of the covert CIA operative, whose actual name is Plame, was at the center of the controversy that landed Miller in jail and even though the words "Valerie Flame" appeared in the same notebook as notes from an interview with Lewis "Scooter" Libby, vice-president Cheney's chief of staff. Miller says she does not believe Libby himself provided the name because the notes from his interview were in another part of the notebook. Story finished.

So says Judith Miller anyway -- and so, it seems, accepts The Times by running both her long explanation and a longer staff piece in which the reporters tell readers that Miller neither would show them her notes nor answer many of their questions.

But who is The Times kidding here? Does the paper consider it a service to its readers to print what any skeptical journalist might well consider to be a lie: that Judith Miller, who spent 85 days in jail for refusing to testify and name a confidential source, can't remember who her key source is? Does The Times management truly believe her? And if not, why print such an assertion? Better that she write nothing at all.

For those who don't live within the sometimes narrow confines of journalism, some context is in order. Miller went to jail when she was subpoenaed to testify in a special prosecutor's investigation of who had leaked the name of Plame to the press. In addition to being a CIA operative, Plame is the wife of Joseph Wilson IV. He is the diplomat who infuriated the Bush admnistration by publicly contradicting its claim that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Niger, a story used by the administration to prop up its assertion that Iraq was building weapons of mass destruction. It is against the law in some circumstances to reveal the name of an undercover operative in the CIA.

Interestingly, Judith Miller never wrote about Valerie Plame; columnist Robert Novak did. But somehow -- it's still not clear exactly why -- the investigation of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald led to her doorstep. She chose to go to jail rather than talk, ostensibly protecting one of the most sacrosanct principles of journalism: Reporters who grant their sources anonymity must protect them.

But from the start, this smelled bad. Why is it a reporter's job to protect someone powerful within government who is trying to do someone else harm? Why would a news organization even print a story based on such an offer of protection? (When I was an editor for the San Jose Mercury News, the managing editor established a policy that the veil of anonymity could not be used to attack someone else.) And why did the journalistic establishment, or at least the publisher and editor of The New York Times, so quickly rally around Judith Miller, a reporter already under a cloud of suspicion for writing sourced articles in the run-up to the Iraq war that helped establish the administration's claim -- later proven false -- that the Iraqi government was on the cusp of having weapons of mass destruction?

Reading between the lines of a front-page Times article today about the Miller case, it's clear that many of her colleagues are perplexed and downright angry at their paper for special treatment Miller has received from its editors. It's equally clear that she remains a favorite of the publisher who has taken her cause as his own without digging deep enough to find out what her agenda might be beyond protecting a source.

I'm not sure I want to speculate on that agenda, but something is fishy here. Let's just say that perhaps Miller has reported on insiders so long that she's forgotten her job isn't to be one herself. If so, in the second term of an administration that's manipulated and at times even infiltrated the press like no administration before, that's a dangerous place to be.

Here Miller provides some of the evidence herself.

First, she implies in her article that she in the past had government clearance to look at classified documents. "I told Mr. Fitzgerald that Mr. Libby might have thought I still had security clearance," she writes, "given my special embedded status in Iraq." It is a sentence, deep in her article, that former CBS correspondent Bill Lynch jumped on in a letter to the Poynter Institute's Jim Romenesko, who compiles a widely read column on the media at www.poynter.org. Such security clearance, Lynch suggests, "is as close as one can get to government licensing of journalists and the New York Times (if it knew) should never have allowed her to become so compromised."

Why? He explains: Anyone cleared to look at classified documents would have to sign a "standard and legally binding agreement" that she could not reveal the contents of such documents -- a decision that flies in the face of the journalist's role as the public's voice and watchdog. The price for getting inside information, in other words, would be a legally binding promise not to reveal it. That's hardly a compact of trust between writer and reader.

Secondly, Miller in her own article, acknowledges agreeing to a source relationship with Libby that clearly would mislead the public. Libby in his second interview with Miller asked that instead of being identified as a "senior administration official," he would like to be identified as a "former Hill staffer." Miller says she agreed to the new ground rules "because I knew that Mr. Libby had once worked on Capitol Hill." What she didn't say is that such a sourcing agreement was a smokescreen, a way for him to attack Joseph Wilson with impunity and for Miller to mislead her readers into believing the critic -- in this case the vice-president's chief of staff -- was actually associated with a different branch of government.

So Judith Miller, who cut a deal to get out of jail and testify only about what Libby told her, says she can't remember who passed on the name "Valerie Flame." But she appears to know full well that she in effect gave Scooter Libby a free pass to pillory Joseph Wilson.

Whew. And journalists wonder why the public doesn't trust them anymore?

.

Mon Dieu!

2005-10-06T04:50:00.000-07:00

10/06/05

The drumbeat of bad news has been unrelenting. The Arctic ice cap: melting. The pillars of our pro-family, pro-flag, pro-morality Republican leadership: under indictment or investigation. The city of New Orleans: first under water, now caked in mold. And our President ... oh, our President.

It's not as if I've taken all this in stride. I spend most mornings muttering at my newspaper. My wife has to restrain me from flipping the bird to humvee road hogs, cruising down Main Street to the nearest Starbucks. I turn my TV off when King George comes on.

But all-in-all I've coped fairly well as a liberal in America, 2005. Until this. Today I learned that I may soon be pumping Pinot Noir into my tank -- French Pinot Noir. C'est vrai. C'est tragique. I love the land where Freedom Fries are still simply just French. France, to me, is the home of all things stylish, all things romantic, life carefree. It is the country of three-hour meals, wide boulevards and women worth watching as they walk down them. A place where guys really do wear berets and argue animatedly on street corners while their dogs sniff each other indelicately. The cradle of consuming cuisine -- and overflowing carafes of vin blanc and vin rouge to wash it down.

And now this? I have it on the authority of my New York Times: By the end of this year, France will turn 100 million liters of wine -- "enough for 133 million bottles" -- into crystal-clear ethanol. What next? Camembert converted to crazy glue? Mon Dieu.

"If my grandfather could taste what I'm turning into alcohol," vintner Olivier Gibelin told The Times. "he'd turn over in his grave."

So please. Forgive me in advance, if you see me stopped by the road in a few months, siphoning gas from the tanks of those humvees. What is afternoon cheese and crackers without wine? I might as well enjoy a bit now before the Bush-authorized Army marches into Lexington, birthplace of the American revolution, to cordon us all behind the lines of the killer bird flu quarantine.

Funny money

2005-09-26T04:52:00.000-07:00

09/26/05

"Rita leaves a $6 billion mess," reads the banner headline in my morning Boston Globe.

I don't know how to react. That's a lot less than the $200 billion estimate to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast after Katrina. And that in turn is but a fifth of the $1 trillion plus the war in Iraq will cost over its first three or four years, according to a New York Times graphic some weeks back -- a figure that included "peripheral" costs for things such as new limbs for shattered lives.

But $6 billion still sure sounds like a lot of suffering -- unless, out of sight and out of the headlines, some of it proves to be so much padding for much higher-end looters than those who were stealing food and diapers from deserted New Orleans stores.

In the world of politics, it appears, there's congressionally sanctioned skim and just plain skim. In the first category falls this Administration's tax cuts. It's well-established that the top 1 percent, and especially the top .1 percent, of people on America's economic totem poll, have benefitted disproportionately from President Bush's tax cut. Oh, the conservatives still argue that the rich must be freed from tax bondage for their hard-earned wealth so that the fruits of their entrepreneurship and business acumen can trickle down to the masses. But it's established fact nonetheless that they're getting a lot more back than the rest of us.

In the aftermath of the hurricanes, however, comes a new category of corporate welfare. Having already soaked the rest of us to get their big tax cuts, the President's political and corporate buddies show signs of playing on the pity for the suffering to extend their profits in new and dubious directions. According to today's New York Times, more than 80 percent of the clean-up contracts signed thus far by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, were no-bid contracts, many arrived at by handshake agreements.

And guess whose hand FEMA is shaking? For starters a subsidiary of Halliburton, the all-pervasive giant that's cornered the lion's share of contracts in Iraq and -- surprise -- for which Vice-President Cheney served as chief executive officer before re-entering politics. That company and another major contractor that's cleaning up -- in more ways than one in Katrina's aftermath -- are both represented by Joe M. Albaugh, the president's former campaign manager, the former director of FEMA, and the good fellow who recommended his buddy, Michael D. "Brownie" Brown, to head the agency when he left.

Considering what a mess this Administration made of the federal response to Katrina, it's remarkable how tidy its connections are to the clean-up. Perhaps top officials are figuring nobody will bother looking now that the news has moved on to Rita and the President is everywhere, showing that true leaders never sleep. Perhaps they'll be proven right.

I hope not. As a student in graduate school, my professors gave me one overriding piece of advice: "Follow the money trail." It can be a convoluted trail with few signs. But more and more of them seem pointed in the general direction of Pennsylvania Avenue.

The pain-free presidency

2005-09-17T05:45:00.000-07:00

This post appeared first on CommonDreams.org on Sunday, Sept. 18.

09/17/05

The White House advance team did its usual bang-up job in shining a bright light on President George W. Bush Thursday night as he stood in the darkness of New Orleans' Jackson Square and promised that, with his administration's help, the devastated and largely deserted city would rise again. Too bad our Compassionate Conservative has never invested a tenth as much interest in the federal bureaucracy as he has in his image consultants.

By the very next day, Mr. Bush had made clear that his gain-with-no-pain presidency hadn't changed its tune. As The New York Times lead headline pronounced "FEMA, slow to the rescue, now stumbles in aid effort," W. pledged that the rebuilding of New Orleans -- estimated by some at $200 billion -- would be accomplished with no new taxes. In fact, he continued to call for an extension of his tax cuts, which, The Times noted, stand to drain $1.4 trillion more from federal coffers over the next decade.

These are astronomical numbers, too big for anyone but a macro budget wonk to fully grasp. But anyone who has run up their credit card debt past what they can conceivably repay has a good intuitive sense of what the President is doing to the federal budget. It's already as awash in red ink as New Orleans' flooded neighborhoods are in toxic waters. Yet once again the President is insisting he'll solve a massive problem -- in this case, New Orleans' problem -- with no pain, no sacrifice and no reprecussions for the rest of us.

Will this country allow itself to be fooled once again? Do we really think this reconstruction will work a whole lot better than Iraq's, where our soldiers regularly get blown to bits because of a shortage of body armor and where billions earmarked for reconstruction have disappeared with little to show for it?

The early signs are not good. While it's too early to tell whether the administration will revert to its Iraq pattern of doing things on the cheap and inventing priority and rationale as it goes, we've already seen what five years neglect of the Federal Emergency Management Agency has accomplished.

New director or not, that agency's efforts still are coming up short, The Times reports. Storm victims can't get through to FEMA by phone. Many federal help centers, which are supposed to be central sites for aid and information, still don't exist. Evacuees struggle even to get information about family members scattered around the country.

"The problems clearly stem largely from the sheer enormousness of the disaster," The Times acknowledges. "But the lack of investment in emergency preparedness, poor coordination across a sprawling federal bureaucracy and massive failure of local communication systems -- all of which hurt the initial rescue efforts -- are now impeding the recovery."

Most eerie, in a century of computer databases and up-to-the-second communication systems, is that even efforts to reunite parents with an estimated 2,000 separated or missing children apparently are so scattershot three weeks after Katrina that the cable network CNN is dedicating much of this weekend's news to showing some of the lost and separated children on television.

So who again is in charge here?

Calling on God's help, as the President did Saturday in his weekly radio address, falls short of an answer. And promising the American public a free pass, when it comes to taxes or any other form of sacrifice, will do nothing but assure that the bill collector and repo man will come calling in the next administration and in generations to come.

The 'blame game,' Mr. President?

2005-09-09T03:54:00.000-07:00

09/09/05

President Bush is revving the gears of his spin machine. He and his staff are whining that Democrats are playing the "blame game" rather than showing unswerving support in the face of an unnerving national disaster.

Poor George. He seems to have forgotten -- and so, perhaps, have many of us -- the still uncounted dead from Hurricane Katrina who may number in the thousands (the Federal Emergency Management Agency has ordered 25,000 body bags.) I wonder how many died while the president vacationed and his federal managers fumbled? I wonder how many drowned, trapped in wheelchairs and attics or clinging to roofs and trees, in the hours and then days that it took a full-scale federal rescue effort to take shape? I wonder why we still can't get it right for survivors, some of whom collapsed in the heat Thursday waiting for debit cards FEMA promised and then didn't deliver?

And the president is upset that his critics aren't holding their tongues? No one is calling for a multi-count indictment for involuntary manslaughter, Mr. President. They just expect you, our self-proclaimed war president, to be a leader, not a buck-passer.

Or at least some do. A USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll this week found that 42 percent of Amercicans in this country believe the president did a bad or terrible job of responding to the hurricane. I can only wonder what's up with the other 58 percent.

This is a man whose modus operandi for five years has been to reward the rich and dismantle support systems for everyone else. He's the man who appointed the failed head of the International Arabian Horse Association to head the agency most vital to national recovery from a catastrophe. And after that man, Michael Brown, told the press he had no clue that perhaps 20,000 people were trapped at the New Orleans Convention Center three days after the storm, an assertion that defies comprehension or credibility, President Bush flew to the decimated Gulf to tell him, "Brownie, you're doin' a heck of a job."

Blame game?

Then there was the performance of the president himself. As Hurricane Katrina zeroed in on New Orleans, he stayed on vacation in Crawford, Texas. When it crashed ashore with 20-foot- plus storm surges, flattening whole communities, he headed to the West Coast to drum up more support for his disastrous war in Iraq. When the levees broke and the water began to rise in New Orleans, he gave a speech -- comparing himself to a great Democratic president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, during World War II. When, two days after the storm's devastation he finally decided he should go back to Washington, he looked down from the heights of Air Force One rather than stopping on the ground. And when it was time to duck and cover, he began with the statement that no one expected New Orleans' levees to break, a bald-faced lie.

That was the run-up to the President's Friday tour of the damage and his ignorant, ill-timed and outrageous comment praising Michael Brown. And since then? Has the president made amends by opening his home in Crawford to a family in need of shelter? Has this compassionate conservative set an example by writing a sizable relief check on national TV? Has he spent a single day feeding the sick, the homeless, the numb as they try to make sense of shattered lives? No, no, and no.

But he did trot out his press secretary to spin the "blame game" defense. White House spokesman Scott McClellan used "blame game" 15 times in the course of two press conferences, according to news reports. And while he was shaking his finger at critics, mom, former First Lady Barbara Bush, seemed to be chiding the survivors themselves.This Monday at Houston's Astrodome, she announced, according to USA Today, that some evacuees there "were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them."

Oh really.

The newspaper kindly dismissed the comment as an example of a "Yankee reserve" that sometimes restrained the president as well. But it sounded a lot more like bigotry to me, or at least ignorance, which some might consider the same thing.

In the end, of course, it is the president's own behavior that counts. For a guy who spends a lot of time swaggering and sneering, he has yet to learn a president's job is to lead. Leadership means getting in front of a situation, not figuring out how to distract people from the damage once it's done.

And so, Mr. President, I'd say this: If anyone is playing games, it's you. But the public is catching on. This time, as you once again wrap yourself in an oversized American flag, more of us see that from behind it you are spitting at the people it represents.

Too many questions

2005-09-01T18:00:00.000-07:00

09/01/05

My television screen filled with deeply disturbing images Thursday night.

At the New Orleans Convention Center, a woman died in her wheelchair waiting to be rescued. Thousands of people remain there, waiting in fear. Most don’t have food. They don’t have water. They’re being preyed upon by packs of hoodlums roaming the streets. A CNN reporter documented all this by mid-afternoon.

But five hours later, at 8:30 p.m., no one had come to the rescue. No one. Instead, police told the reporter, Chris Lawrence, that it was too dangerous for him to stay on the ground.

Still, CNN’s Paula Zahn managed to interview a woman at the Convention Center by phone. The woman told the network that six corpses lay around her. All the people had died that day. The living are starving, dehydrated, suffering, she said. Yet she told Zahn that no police were patrolling the building. No National Guard had arrived. No Army. No Marines. No food or water had been dropped. No buses or trucks sent in. Why?

Five days have passed since Katrina devastated New Orleans. Many citizen volunteers, Coast Guard rescue teams, local police have performed heroically in the chaos. But where is the coordination, the organization, the resources? Who is in charge on the ground? It took two days for President Bush to leave his vacation in Crawford, Texas. It took a third before he spoke to the nation. He visited some of the stricken area today, but not New Orleans. No. He was scheduled to see that from the air. Does he have a tin ear or does he simply not care?

How can a nation that has spent hundreds of billions of dollars invading Iraq and stationing 138,000 soldiers, Marines and guardsmen there fail so miserably in responding rapidly to a disaster within its borders? Could it be because two-fifths of the Louisiana National Guard is in Iraq? How can we fail so completely to airlift in food and water and to drop enough troops to make sure that food and water is not stolen from the old, the young, the poor and the disabled, suffering and dying outside the New Orleans Convention Center?

It is one thing for people to die in the savagery of a vicious storm or in the silence of their flooded homes. It is another for them to die a slow death four and five days after the storm has passed when they're in plain sight for the TV cameras.

And many, perhaps most, never should have been there. Hurricane Katrina was no secret. It headed toward shore as a catastrophic Category 5 storm and New Orlean’s mayor issued a mandatory evacuation order. But why then didn’t the city and state and federal government back up that order by sending in buses and Army trucks and trains to take people, free of charge, to safety before the storm hit? Everyone knew New Orleans lies below sea level. Everyone knew something horrible was about to unfold. It was just a matter of degree. And if some of the 200,000 estimated to have stayed behind did so out of love of their homes, foolishness, or simple ignorance, plenty didn't leave because they just couldn't. They had no car. They had no money. They had no help.

Would it have been more expensive to get them out beforehand than it is now? Of course not. And, dare I ask, would we still be watching this heart-wrenching story at the Convention Center unfold on television if these people were white and well off instead of black and poor?

I doubt it.

Decades of denial

2005-08-31T05:35:00.000-07:00

08/30/05

The juxtaposition of images was unsettling.

On Sunday, as weather satellites showed the massive hurricane bearing down on New Orleans and as the director of the National Hurricane Center warned of the potential for catastrophic damage, President Bush vacationed in Crawford. Two days later, as televised aerial images showed the flattened wasteland of Gulfport, Miss., a rising lake around New Orleans homes, and daring helicopter rescues of survivors, the president ventured out to give a speech - not about what may prove to be America's worst natural disaster but about Iraq, comparing his resolve there to that of FDR in World War II.

W. seemed out of sync and out of touch. Yet there was an ironic symmetry to these images, some of what may be America's worst natural disaster and others of the president seeking a new rationale for one of the country's worst self-inflicted disasters. Both scenes seemed fused to decades of failed energy policies, policies for which there's more than enough blame to spread across both political parties.

Consider the President's Tuesday speech. In it, he opened a new front in his battle to shore up support for America's presence in Iraq: It is necessary, he said, to protect that nation's vast oil fields.

That same day, in a forceful column in The Boston Globe, author Ross Gelbspan wrote that Katrina embodies America's failure to slow global warming by curbing our insatiable appetite for burning oil and coal. It's a note he'd sounded passionately before in his 1998 book, "The Heat is On."

"In November 1995, 2,500 leading climate scientists announced that the planet is warming because all the emissions from coal and oil burning are trapping in more of the sun's heat than is normal for our climate," Gelbspan wrote then. "...The catalog of anticipated effects ...reads like a bibical apocalypse. Scientists say these consequences will include not only more extreme temperatures, with hotter heat and colder cold, but also ... extraordinarily destructive hurricanes...."

Despite such warnings, this country has done little to combat the so-called Greenhouse Effect or to set a rational course of energy conservation and conversion.

It was a quarter century ago, on July 15, 1979, that then President Jimmy Carter referred to America's need to confront and solve its energy problems as "the moral equivalent of war."

"Why have we not been able to get together as a nation to resolve our serious energy problem?" he asked, calling for a crash program to develop alternative fuel and to conserve. If it had been enacted, Carter's vision might have curtailed America's growing addiction to Mideast oil -- such as that in the fields of Iraq. And it also would have cut the waste gases building up in the environment, speeding global warming. Maybe, just maybe, a less destructive hurricane would have roared up the Gulf.

But history records that Jimmy Carter lost the presidential election resoundingly in 1980 and Americans, embracing Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America," lost any will to sacrifice and conserve.

Cars today guzzle just as much gas per mile as they did then. (The abysmal miles per gallon rate of SUV's isn't even counted in these figures; they're considered trucks.) And this year, after years of stalemate and with significant bipartisan support, Congress passed an energy bill that gives little more than lip service to conservation or renewable energy.

Nor can we, as America's citizens, complain about our elected officials. For it is we who have flocked to buy those SUV's and hired contractors to build bigger houses to boot, homes that demand more air conditioning and heat -- and use more energy sources that strain supply and contribute more to global warming.

"The energy crisis is real. It is worldwide. It is a clear and present danger to our nation," President Carter said back then. Twenty-six years later, we're still fiddling while New Orleans sinks and gas prices rise.

The immediate cost is evident at my neighborhood service station: Regular gasoline there cost $3.29 a gallon yesterday, roughly 15 cents for each local mile driven.

The longer-term cost will be greater. Scientists already are debating whether we've waited too long to reverse the process of global warming. But surely intelligent policy could slow it down.

No one can say with certainty that a given storm, Katrina, resulted from global warming. But we can say with certainty that insurance companies have had to shell out billions more in catastrophic coverage over the last decade than previous decades. We can say with certainty that this summer has seen a remarkable surge in early-season hurricanes and tropical storms. We can say with certainty that mean temperatures in much of the world are on the rise. And we can say with certainty that American politicians, the public and the press have yet to make global warming or energy independence priority issues.

The time to do so is long overdue.

A glimpse of the heartland

2005-08-23T13:09:00.000-07:00

08/23/05

AMARILLO, Texas – They’re not taking chances with A-rabs or anyone else here in the heart of the Texas Panhandle, where much of the nation’s beef is bred and the next generation of military helicopters will soon be built.

It may take just minutes to get through the airport security line because there really isn’t much of one. But be forewarned. If you try to drive through to “arriving flights,” two members of the airport’s security force will politely ask you to stop at a checkpoint and pop the trunk. They didn’t actually look inside our bags but you never know when someone will try to sneak through with a box marked “explosives” or “bomb here.” Vigilance, I'm sure they'd explain, is what makes the homeland secure.

We’d come to this land of big sky, deep canyons and cumulus clouds from heaven so that we could join our younger daughter in a remarkable reunion with her birth family. For Kathy and I, educators, Eastern liberals and city folk (though we met 37 years ago in the Colorado Rockies), it also was a chance to tap into the pulse of Red State America, where God and country rank 1 and 2 just ahead of ribs and big-bed pick-ups.

It didn’t take long. Our white Ford Escort from Avis, quite possibly the smallest car in this city of about 200,000, came equipped with a yellow ribbon on the window, an American flag and a “support our troops” sticker. It turned out to be standard operating equipment for the rental car company fleet. We soon learned Texans really do wear cowboy boots and white cowboy hats (I swear). They drive really big cars and eat really big meals (one local restaurants gives away 72-ounce steak dinners free to anyone who can eat one in a single sitting). And they do say “ya’ll,” as in “how’re ya’ll doin’ today” or “ya’ll come back soon now, ya hear.” The twang is contagious, even for a New York boy turned New Englander.

But this isn’t the kind of setting I’d readily find myself engaging in a soulful dialogue on the ethics of war with the burly guy up at the bar. Uh-uh. Unless, that is, I had a hankering to sweep the peanut shells on the floor with my right nostril.

It’s easy to be a liberal in New England. Or in New York. Or San Francisco. Or Chicago.

It takes courage to speak out against the war in the Great Plains or the Prairie or the Lone Star State. Real courage. And that’s just one more reason to tip our hats to Cindy Sheehan, the mom who pitched her tent in Crawford in an attempt to force the president to explain and defend his war.

But I suspect in truth that the people in Red States aren’t all that red and the people in Blue States aren’t all that blue. Instead people tend to lower their voices a bit when they sense their opinions run against the grain of the perceived prevailing social fabric.

It was on the third and last day of our visit, after we’d talked about family and writing, child-rearing and the journeys that add up to a life, that my daughter’s 93-year-old great grandmother and I oh-so-carefully touched on the topic of politics. She’d just read a book about Robert Kennedy’s assassination. I told her I had met him once and much admired him.

“And what do you think of our president now?” she asked.

“I don’t much care for him or his war,” I confided.

And she smiled. “I’m so glad,” she said. “I don’t either. And you don’t meet many folks around here you can say that to.”

We parted with a warm hug.

Oil, blood and patriotism

2005-08-17T13:24:00.000-07:00

For the most part, the people sacrificing for this war are the troops and their
families, and very few of them are coming from the privileged economic classes.
-- Bob Herbert, New York Times

08/17/05

LEXINGTON, Mass. -- One of my neighbors apppears to take his responsibility of raising a family in this affluent birthplace of the American revolution awfully seriously. He has draped an oversized American flag over his front door. It hangs there day and night, in sunshine and in rain, about 15 feet from the SUV parked in the driveway.

I've been tempted to ask him about his definition of patriotism; to ask him why, if he believes so much in America, he drives a car that guzzles gas, helps push its price sky high, and makes all of us that much more dependent on foreign oil. I want to know how many of his relatives have fought and died in Iraq. And I'd like to remind him that the American flag is supposed to be folded at night and taken down in the rain.

My Toyota Camry likely gets twice the mileage of his car. Yet he's the one with the yellow ribbon on his car's window. The Times' Bob Herbert understands. "The loudest hawks are the least likely to send their sons or daughers off to Iraq," he writes. They're also, according to my strictly unscientific survey, the most likely to drive oversized cars and live in oversized houses.

Just what allows these folks to smugly claim the moral high ground? At the outset of this awful war, they mocked those who suggested oil might be behind the invasion. They're still mocking. But then why are we there? Does anyone really believe that this was a war to stop the proliferation of WMD? There were none. Does anyone watching the daily carnage truly believe we're on the cusp of bringing democracy and freedom to the Middle East? Or that Iraq today is a markedly better place ot live than under the oppressive rule of Saddam Hussein?

I doubt it.

Dirt does not power cars. Oil does. That's why few politicians, diplomats or armchair generals said boo about the systematic slaughter of tens of thousands in Sudan and Rwanda. That's why, this week, as more of our boys (and girls) are blown to bits on patrol, the Kurds, Shia and Sunni will keep fighting over a Constitution devoted as much to dividing Iraqi oil revenues as in creating democracy. That's why we'll still be in Iraq weeks and months after Cindy Sheehan ends her determined vigil by the Crawford, Texas, roadside, waiting in vain for an arrogant president to say, "I'm sorry."

Let them eat cake

2005-08-09T04:23:00.000-07:00

08/07/05

Poor George Bush. With just 38 percent of Americans supporting his war in Iraq, according to one poll, and a special prosecutor sniffing around awfully close to Boy Genius (or is it Turd Blossom?) Karl Rove, the last thing he needs is another festering problem. But he's got one -- and W. hasn't a clue how to deal with her.

In case you've been on vacation, let me introduce Cindy Sheehan. Her son was killed in Iraq last year. And when, two months later, the president met with her and other bereaved military families, she didn't much like the fact that he hadn't bothered to learn her son's name and walked around calling her "mom." As far as I can tell from reading press reports, those are two of the reasons she's decided to camp out on a hot, dustry road near Crawford, Texas, this summer. That and the fact she considers his war in Iraq a senseless waste of young lives.

Not only has Cindy Sheehan decided to leave her Vacaville, Calif., home to take a Crawford camping trip, but she says she's not moving until she can talk to the president -- even if it means staying put clear through W.'s five-week vacation. Now I haven't met Cindy Sheehan. But her picture tells me enough to give the president this one small piece of unsolicited advice: Get your ass out there, George. Do it now. Because if you don't, this story -- which has bubbled in just a few days from inside news pages to the outraged outcries of national columnists -- will just keep growing.

Some stories are defining moments. The smaller they are, the more easily they capture the public's imagination. I believe this is one that fits that bill. We have a president whose people are so into control that during his re-election campaign they'd only let Republicans -- no uncommitted voters, thank you -- attend his rallies. We have a president so stubborn that he never backs down and never says he's sorry: John Bolton's recess appointment is just the latest example. And we have a president so sure he's right that he never lets facts get in the way. That's right, we have King George with a drawl and swagger. Or should I say King Louis (you know, the one who hung out with Marie Antoinette of "let them eat cake" fame).

In the end it is this man, George W. Bush, who will make Cindy Sheehan's vigil so effective. This stubborn man and his bloody war that just keeps getting worse.

George W. Bush should have left his Crawford ranch the day Cindy Sheehan arrived. He should have shaken her hand, shared her sorrow, listened to her criticism and told her he'd take it under advisement. He might even have turned the tables and used the moment to announce another meaningless shuffling of troops. But that's not George W. Bush. The longer Cindy Sheehan stays out on the dusty road near Crawford, the more vehemently he will ignore her. It's the only way he does business, smile on his lips and middle-finger raised. Even at a grieving mom.

What's new is that the American public increasingly is coming to understand that this is the wrong way for a president to behave. W. still is considered a strong leader, according to the latest polls. But he's also considered an arrogant leader. Cindy Sheehan's vigil will shine a hot spotlight on the arrogance -- until and unless the president takes a few minutes to talk to her.

And I'm betting that'll never happen.

Dancing with whales

2005-07-25T12:13:00.000-07:00

DANCING WITH WHALES

By Jerry Lanson

TADOUSSAC, Canada -- Genevieve Lecours, our tanned and well-muscled guide, looked like she'd be more comfortable mushing sled dogs through the Northwest Territory than she was herding a dozen tourists in kayaks through the ripples where the St. Lawrence and Saguenay rivers meet, her eyes scanning the horizon for whales.

"While we're waiting, look around," she told us as we bobbed in the harbor's mouth, pausing for stragglers to catch up and, in my case, struggling to keep my kayak steady. "You might see a beluga go under you, and I'm not kidding."

My feet, rammed beneath the kayak's canvas in a contorted position, had gone to sleep. My mind imagined Moby Dick rising beneath me and dragging me to the depths. All too aware of Lecours’ three safety rules (“Rule 1: don’t panic, Rule 2, don’t panic. You can guess Rule 3”), I kept my kayak inches behind hers.

And then the whales burst through the water, not beneath us but clear as could be, well within range of the naked eye. A white beluga mother and her darker children frolicked across the horizon, arching above the waves and diving rhythmically a half dozen times before vanishing. There was nothing menacing about them. Suddenly, from the silence of the Saguenay, a 15,000-pound minke whale punctured the surface just 30 feet away and hung suspended, almost posing for pictures before diving deep in search of dinner. What a rush. But was it real?

Such are the adventures of whale-watching in these waters about 150 miles northeast of Quebec city, in fertile feeding grounds where beluga outnumber the French-speaking, year-round residents of the rocky shoreline village by a ratio of 4 to 3. It’s a form of entertainment that often is measured in moments of heart-thumping mania after long minutes of eye strain. But who can pass up the chance to almost hug nature’s biggest beast?

And so, each summer, they come by the boatload. Some of the tens of thousands who flock here choose to watch for any of 13 St. Lawrence species from the decks of 600-person, 60-ton boats -- boats whose weight approaches that of the blues and fins that venture up the river from the sea. On board, tourists crane their necks and train telephoto lenses and binoculars every which way as guides shout "6 o'clock, 2 o'clock, 12 o'clock" and captains spin their boats for a better look. One thing is sure: They'd better look quickly.

"Dad, forget it, your camera isn't that fast," one teen daughter said, mocking her father as he tried to capture a fin whale's back with the 2005 equivalent of the old Brownie camera. Even the fastest photographers can barely frame the spray from a blowhole, a hint of fin, the curve of a whale's back, before the St. Lawrence swallows the mammoth ghosts as they dive into the deep troughs of this glacially carved region, invisible once again.

Other tourists paddle. In the calm mouth of the harbor, on the cusp of one beautiful July evening's sunset, belugas, seals and even the minke whale floated past our silent kayaks like neighbors sharing a summer swim.

In all, 49 whale-watching boats are licensed in the village of Tadoussac, from rubber rafts that hold 10 or fewer to the ocean-worthy vessel we also rode. My guess is none measure up to the self-paddling adventure of the kayak, which costs less, too; $35 Canadian (roughly $29 American) for two hours versus $50 Canadian or more to let someone do the driving for you.

Either way, whales you'll see, an adventurous compliment to a vacation framed perhaps by a few days in the cosmopolitan city of Montreal and a few more enjoying the Old World elegance and haute cuisine of Quebec City. According to Patrice Corbeil, director of the Tadoussac research center that studies the great creatures and works with the tourist industry to protect them, some 1,200 beluga whales alone live along the St. Lawrence coastline within a 10-minute dive or two of the village, feeding, along with a smattering of massive blue and fin and smaller humpbacks and minke, on a rich menu of plankton, krill and fish that swirl in the tidal eddies where the two rivers join.

It was the Canadian folksinger Raffi who brought the story of "baby beluga" to generations of kids. But it’s clear their magic works on parents, too. For though the coastline offers its share of kayaking, beach combing and hiking in the rounded mounds that protect it (the name Tadoussac comes from a Native American tribe's word for breast), it is whales who sustain this village that once was Canada’s first fur-trading outpost.

Back then, in 1600, staying alive was the primary activity; only 5 of 16 original "settlers" survived the winter and it would be more than two centuries before anyone tried to stay year round again. Even today, there's not all that much to the village, a few dozen homes and tourist shops, a maritime museum, an Anglican church dating back to the mid-19th century, an educational/interpretive center dedicated to the whales, and the commanding, 500-foot long, red-roofed Hotel Tadoussac, which dominates the sandy beach along the horseshoe-shaped tidal harbor and offers nearly a third of the area's 520 tourist beds.

First built in 1868 and rebuilt in 1942 after the ravages of fire, the hotel -- and beach it looks out on -- seems frozen in the '50s, when elegant, ocean-going ships transported tourists from Montreal and Quebec to the village well before whale watching grew popular. It was on one of those ships, at age 7, that I first arrived, a trip captured on a dog-eared, fading photograph of my father, standing on a diving board with the hotel's expansive lawns spread out behind him.

Now as then, below the bluff on which the hotel sits, kids splash gleefully in tidal pools. Above, visitors of their grandparents' generation sit beside beach umbrellas on white, Cape Cod chairs, sunning in the breezy, soft, 70ish weather that bakes natives to a leathery tan. A shuffleboard and tennis court complete the ‘50s ambiance.

Inside the 70-by-70-foot lobby, the wooden chairs, stone fireplaces and chandeliers are the same as those captured in framed black-and-white photos taken shortly after the hotel reopened, though couches and a thick blue carpet have softened the room.

I can’t help but wonder if the half-finished jigsaw puzzle spread on a lobby table has been there since my last visit. And if the songs Jean Gagnon plays on the bar’s piano are really Piaf and Sinatra, or just the sounds of childhood memories. At dinner, I imagine my father eating the bountiful buffet back then, pacing himself through plates heaped with shrimp and herring, salmon and rare roast beef, brie and chevret, as he taught us boys to do whenever the family destination was an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord.

Hotel Tadoussac’s contemporary buffet is spectacular, especially at the rather modest price of $30 a person ($25 U.S.), from salad to sorbet. It also comes packaged with room and an equally plentiful breakfast buffet for $220 a couple (about $180 U.S.).

What has changed in Tadoussac is the explosion in whale-watching. When Patrice Corbeil first came in the mid-1980s to start his marine mammal research center named GREMM, he could count all the whale-watching boats on a few fingers. With a friend, he began, on weekends, to study the whales of the region. (“I had been studying birds,” he says wryly, “but I was tired of all the mosquitoes in the woods.”)

Today 45 people work for Corbeil and his busy nonprofit research center. Among their tasks is tagging the whales, tracking their migratory patterns, measuring the impact of tourist boats on them, and helping to write regulations to minimize the tourist industry’s impact. The scientists have even named the most frequent visitors to the Saguenay’s mouth.

In 1991, GREMM opened an interpretive center for the public that today draws more than 38,000 visitors a year, most in July and August. And an impassioned collection of tourists they are. On board the big boats, ooo’s, ahh’s and the occasional scream come with the territory. “There are whales out there with names and no parents,” one woman blurted out.

As mystical as the momentary encounters with these leviathans can be, I’m not sure I qualify as a whale groupie. But even the most circumspect can find plenty that’s fun and interesting in GREMM’s interpretive center. For an entrance fee of $6.25, you can track the daily movements of the St. Lawrence whales (it’s also online at www.whales-net.org); view a remarkable 18-minute film on the river’s whales called "Encounters with Whales of the St. Lawrence," and find the answer to such need-to-know questions as "how big is the penis of a fin whale." (You'll find out by tugging on a black pulley and stepping backwards -- about 9 feet.)

You can also learn about the strictly wholesale habits of these gargantuan creatures. The fin whale, for example, eats nearly 3 tons of food a day. It doesn't have teeth but instead relies on up to 800 baleen, or “dental,” plates, each of which is anywhere from several inches to a several feet long. These filter the day's nutrients from the salt water. And when the fin dives, it can stay underwater for up to 25 minutes. Even more remarkable is that the fin whale, which we saw, isn't the biggest whale sighted in the St. Lawrence. That honor goes to the blue whale, which, appropriately, eats another ton or two of food each day.

If all this piques your curiosity, perhaps it is the time to steal a page, or twist a title, from Kevin Costner and go dancing with whales. In Tadoussac, everyone says, it's not a question of if you'll see them but where and how many. And besides, thanks to Patrice Corbeil and GREMM, they even have names.

Everybody's Aunt Peg

2005-07-06T06:13:00.000-07:00

07/24/05

She's my second cousin by marriage or maybe my first by marriage, once-removed.
No matter. For as long as I can remember she's just been Aunt Peg. Everybody should have one.
She turned 95 this March and now lives in a nursing home in Marblehead, Mass. But that's only temporary -- during her recovery. You know, from her hip replacement surgery. Her second in two years. And she is recovering, making new friends in a new place along the way.

"How are you, deah," she greeted Kathy and me on July 4, a hint of her native New Rochelle, N.Y., still breaking through. It was time for music, singing, laughing and memories.
Around Aunt Peg, it always is. She played the violin every day into her 90s. And though her short term memory is largely shot -- "do you sing, too," she kept asking my brother Dennis -- she can still sing the words and tunes of most old-time favorites. The day after her surgery, she began knitting a beautiful blue wool pullover.

Life hasn't always been easy for Aunt Peg. She lost her husband 30 years ago and a son to cancer in his 50s. You'd never know it from her smile. It rarely deserts her. Her "Carlie" was a man of wit and letters, a man who took his young children to Ireland to try his hand at writing. He had his demons, too, including a penchant for the nip, but that's long forgotten in Peg's memories. She loves the story of the first time they met, when he heard her perform and drove her home in his father's Cadillac. He wasn't much of a dancer then, she confides, but he got better; she suspects he took lessons between their dates.

Peg's reach goes deep through the generations. Last time I visited, one of her grandsons, Andy, played the piano for two hours straight. (Music flows through the family's veins; Peg's brother was a professional trumpet player and she was no slouch on the violin herself.) A granddaughter, Emily, also in her mid-20s, visited three times the week of the 4th alone, coming all the way from Cambridge. But then someone stops by every day; daughter Margaret, who lives a mile away, often multiple times.

For all, these are journeys of love, not guilt. Peg is happy to enjoy the gathering; she needn't be its center of attention. On holidays, more often as not, these gatherings grow larger. My brother's family shows up and and mine. Sundry friends, and the high school and college classmates of Peg's grandchildren, drop over and share time with her before leaving. To them, too, she's Grandma Peg or Aunt Peg or just plain Peggy. She wouldn't have it any other way.

Stop by on one of these holidays, at Margaret's or sister Stephanie's in Carlisle, and you'll likely find Peg, like any Italian mother, in the kitchen, sampling the pasta, helping to throw together a salad, sharing a story. Until a few years back, she'd have had a scotch nearby. Now a rationed glass of wine will do, another of those silly concessions to age.

But some constants haven't changed. Even in the post-operative nursing home, when the music starts, Peg's face comes to life. Her eyes sparkle. Her fingers play their own harmony on an imaginary keyboard.

Soon, she hopes, she'll go back to the Salem assisted living center she has called home the last few years. I'll bet she gets there. And when we all gather around the piano sometime this fall, Peg as likely as not, will carefully put aside her walker, tap her toe and improvise a little dance to test her new hip. It'll be quite a party.

When summer suspends time

2005-07-02T15:14:00.000-07:00

07/02/05

Today's weather report: Two steps from heaven. It is one of those days in which the Sun warms the air enough to sweat, but just a little. In which a light breeze ruffles the maple. In which a bird's song carries and a sweatshirt on the line dries in less than an hour.

I drifted off after a Corona at lunch, my feet propped on the picnic table. I drifted off again in the hammock at 5:30 after turning a few pages of a book. Today Washington is mobilized and exorcized over the search for a new Supreme Court justice. It is a big deal. But I've got other things on my mind; I am immobilized by summer, bewitched by the patterns and play of light on the bike path, busy with more mundane tasks. We cut down four of five saplings before the line along our property becomes a tree farm. I mowed the lawn. OK, I mowed half the lawn. We biked to Bedford and dawdled through back streets we haven't biked on before. And then there was that beer and a chance to catch up on a school year of nights shortened by too many papers to grade.

I'd like to tell you more but we just put up the hammock this afternoon. The coals are on for hot dogs and hamburgers. Kathy's making corn on the cob. And I shouldn't be wasting a minute more on the Internet. That's for damn sure.

The right's push to rein in the press

2005-06-26T17:22:00.000-07:00

06/27/05

I doubt many informed Americans -- independents and moderate Republicans as well as Democrats -- would mistake Chuck Hagel for a liberal. The Nebraska Republican, a possible presidential candidate, has backed the United Nations nomination of John Bolton and steered clear of the dozen so-called Democratic and Republican moderates in the Senate who forged a compromise to duck the "nuclear option" threatened by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to keep Democrats from filibustering judicial nominees.

If you asked Sen. Hagel, I'll bet he'd label himself a conservative. But Hagel, a veteran, doesn't march in lockstep with his party or its president. He's more than once criticized presidential policies that have turned Iraq into a sinkhole of savagery for American troops and a fiscal and morale drain with no exit strategy. For that criticism, The New York Times reported, Fred Mann awarded Chuck Hagel an "L" for liberal. That's right. Not "M" for moderate or "I" for independent. "L" for liberal.

Now you may well wonder who Fred Mann is. He's not a household name. He is a government "consultant" paid $14,170 by the Kenneth Tomlinson, chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, to spy on the guests of Bill Moyers' "Now" and classify them as liberal or conservative. Tomlinson would tell you this is part of his plan to make public television more "fair" and "balanced." You may be familiar with that term. Rupert Murdoch has made many millions using it as the logo for his right-wing propaganda machine pawned off as news: the Fox Network.

Then again, you may not care. Certainly Mann's second-rate spying seems a harmless and rather piddling practice at first disclosure. His check was hardly enough to pay for a modest congressional junket to South Korea or Northern Ireland. But keep in mind that Mr. Tomlinson is the man who this week appointed a former co-chairman of the Republican National Committee as president of the corporation, whose umbrella covers PBS and National Public Radio. Keep in mind the rash of revelations earlier this year of so-called reporters on the payroll of various public agencies of the government. Keep in mind the power of so-called independent bloggers who with remarkable coordination pushed Eason Jordan to resign as top news executive of CNN and Dan Rather to hasten his resignation as anchor for CBS News. Yes, keep those things in mind and the outline of something more insidious begins to emerge.

Where one news spy made news, others could well be in the shadows. Where a handful of paid journalists for traditional media outlets caused a stir, others could well be operating in the relative obscurity of the blogosphere, ready to wave their flag as citizen-journalists rather than propagandists for the White House or one of its political arms.

Having taken control of Congress and the White House, America's right wing knows it need only control the courts and the media to win the quadrafecta: Control of the US government's decision-making apparatus and much of what is said about it. Though that's an ominous thought, I'll grant that even avid conspiracy-theorists on the left probably would concede it won't be easy to pull off in this country. But then, I never thought I'd be reading popular opinion polls that suggest a majority of Americans aren't terribly troubled by American troops and interrogators torturing suspected -- note the operative word is "suspected" -- terrorists.
A public's rights, I'm suggesting, are only as good as public's concern that they being upheld.

There are some small signs of late that the public -- that indefinable mass -- is getting a bit more restless and the press a tad more courageous. Dick Cheney has been roasted for saying the Iraq war is in its "final throes." It looks like John Bolton will need to sneak in the back door to take over the post of United Nations ambassador. The president's popularity is near its nadir and support for his social security plan is lower. And the forever polite and apologetic Democrats even showed the nerve to call for Karl Rove's resignation. (Which, of course, they didn't get.) These are but a few of the signs that America's drift toward autocracy may be stalling.

But push back by press and public could prompt the president's men to push their agenda that much harder. In the arena of news, that would mean efforts to slow independent public broadcasting by trying to control it from within and to intimidate traditional media by what I suspect are paid plants on talk radio and in the blogosphere. The question is, will the news media continue to cover these pressure on themselves as they build? Or will they duck?

Writing about the situation in public broadcasting, New York Times Sunday columnist Frank Rich writes: "The intent is not to kill off PBS and NPR but to castrate them by quietly annexing their news and public affairs operations to the larger state propaganda machine that the Bush White House has been steadily constructing at taxpayers' expense."

I hope people outside and inside government are watching -- and as Rich suggests, singing.
"What's most likely to save the independent voice of public broadcasting from these thugs," he writes, "is a rising chorus of Deep Throats."

And what's likely to counter the growing and well-orchestrated chorus of right-wing talk show hosts and bloggers is investigative reporting that checks out who they are, where they're getting their talking points, and whether and by whom they are being paid.

Memories of my father

2005-06-20T12:09:00.000-07:00

06/19/05

Memories of my father have grown hazy with the passage of time.

On Memorial Day 1980 Kathy and I came home from a picnic with my brother and his wife to hear on the answering machine that my father had been rushed 50 miles to the hospital in Hanover, N.H., victim of a massive aneurysm. Two weeks later, on Father's Day, he died in the intensive care unit. He was 70 years old.

Still, even now, 25 years later, a few vivid images remain, either real or reinforced by the telling. The weekend before dad's aorta burst, my parents had taken us to a Jacques Brel retrospective in Brattleboro, Vt. Gunther Lanson rarely enjoyed life in silence, and as the performers sang and danced to some of the favorite tunes of his past, he twisted in his chair to look at me, his green eyes sparkling, his face alive in a boyish smile that belied his years. He said something like, "isn't it terrific," a little bit too loud, to which I responded, "yeah, shhh." At 31, I hadn't fully outgrown dad's propensity to embarrass me. His sheer enthusiasm for life could overwhelm.

Dad was a short, round man, Santa without a beard, a red face younger than his years and a fringe of snow white hair around a bald dome of a head. But his size said nothing about his stature. In ways he was larger than life. He wouldn't so much shake hands when we'd drive to his "hill," the 14 acres of Vermont meadow he and my mom had bought in retirement, as he'd throw out his right arm and lunge at you in a shake that was more of a shout of welcome.

He was funny, ferocious (when he "blew," as he'd put it), outrageous, energetic and all-embracing. Long before his abrupt death, "Gunther stories" were legend in our small extended family and among our friends. There was the time on suburban Long Island when he ran out the front door with nothing on because he'd forgotten to tell my mother something before she drove to school.The wall in Mexico City, where he relieved himself as thousands streamed out of a bullfight we'd just witnessed. The Vermont snowbank into which he'd skid time and time again at the bottom of his hill, usually passing on the blame to his neurotic mutt "Mini," his roar-- "Mini, you stupid bitch" -- echoing up to the house, where inside we'd howl in laughter.

Gunther lived in perpetual motion. In retirement, he'd race around northern New England selling paddle tennis courts, drive here to deliver furniture and there to pick someone up at an airport. In earlier years, we'd pile into the car on weekends and drive to friends and relatives or to his mother and her generation of fellow refugees from Nazi Germany. At the old people's houses, we’d sit in powder-scented rooms with heavy-set women who wore glittering broaches and hats and, inevitably, served us cookies and cake.

When he wasn't moving, Gunther made lists, endless lists on yellow legal pads, though I'm not sure he ever read them. His work and career fell short of his dreams: A U.S. vet and refugee in his mid-30s by the end of World War II, he never made it past middle management in his uncle's lighting company. But when people needed him, he delivered, even if it meant taking risks and bending rules.

There was my brother's friend, David, the valedictorian of Carle Place, L.I., High School. Apolitical, he did nothing to avoid the draft while finishing a Fulbright after college. The Army shipped him to Texas and trained him, a linguist, to be an interrogator of the Viet Cong. The nightmares and sleep walking began when he heard tales of VC being dropped from helicopters if they didn't talk. When his shipping orders to Vietnam arrived, he deserted. My father arranged his passage to Sweden.

There was another friend of my brother Dennis from the Peace Corps. The daughter of a devout Catholic family, she got pregnant out of wedlock and before Roe v. Wade. My father helped her arrange a trip to Puerto Rico for an abortion.

And there was the week, that legendary week he called the most important of his life, when Gunther, a Berlin-born enlisted man and staff sergeant in a U.S. Army propaganda unit, joined in the liberation of Bavaria at the end of World War II and helped reunite his first cousins -- Jews by Hitler's definition -- by hiding two of the daughters in the trunk of an Army vehicle and driving them through U.S. checkpoints to their stately home on the banks of Lake Starnberg. Through miracle and mystery -- Dennis and I have long tried to decipher how -- father, mother and three sisters, their home commandeered by the Nazi mayor of the village, had survived the entire war in Germany, escaping the cattle cars that shipped Jews to near certain death in the extermination camps.

I thought of this and more today, Father's Day, as I sat through a special service at my cousin's Unitarian-Universalist Church. Some parishioners talked about their father's. I thought about mine. About one of my earliest memories, a train trip from New York to Philadelphia to watch the beloved Dodgers, who the previous year had deserted Brooklyn to move to LA. About the night, when I was 17 or so, that dad, in a fury, took an open-handed swing at me -- and I caught him as his knee buckled and asked, "Are you OK?" About his and my trips each Christmas to Yorkville, the now-vanished German section of New York City, where we'd buy chocolate and sausage and stinky cheese and eat wienershnitzel in a restaurant where the waiters wore white gloves and a violinist in tails played waltzes.

At 56, I am just a year shy of my father's age the day his knee buckled and I caught him on the way down. He always swore it was the day he realized I was becoming a man. My own daughters at 24 and 20, are older than I was. And I'm not in the business of taking swings. But I still sometimes vent at them, if somewhat less explosively than Gunther did that day. And I wonder and worry about my girls as I imagine he did about me well into my 20s. Do they appreciate at all the work and time Kathy and I devoted to their well-being and education? Do they remember, at all, the adventures we've taken together, to Europe, cross-country by train across America, through the Rockies and up and down the California coast? Will the day arrive when -- no matter where they live geographically -- they will again come home, when they'll share things with me besides their pique at my questions, when they'll trust that my interest and concern is in something other than controlling their lives? Do they love us?

With a few years to spare, dad lived long enough to know the answer in my case was a resounding, "Yes." And, other than in my darkest moments, I know it is for my daughters as well. But still I have much to learn. Perhaps on this Father's Day, a quarter century after my father and I hugged for the last time, I can draw a lesson from his imperfect parenting – the kind we all offer our children despite our best intentions.

Years after dad died, in a folder in a file cabinet in his oversized desk, we found a bunch of letters I had written to him from Colorado in my early 20s. Dad had circled all the misspellings and grammatical errors in red. So much for my high-priced education. But he never sent the letters back with his corrections. Either common sense or my mother prevailed on him to let me learn on my own.

New York street scenes

2005-06-15T05:08:00.000-07:00

06/15/05

I exit Pennsylvania Station and head north on 7^thAvenue when a smiling Newt Gingrich, wearing a jacket and open necked shirt, walks past. At least it sure looks like Newt. I swear. A block north, a man stands silently on the corner, the middle-finger of each hand pointed upward at the approaching crowd. Newt's smile; a man flipping off the Big Apple. Could there be some cosmic convergence happening here?

Five days on New York's streets in a late spring heat wave assaults anyone's senses. I grew up in this city's burbs. And while I'm reminded why I don't live here anymore, I'm also reminded that it's still home, a place as exciting as it is overwhelming, a place a lot friendlier than most people give it credit for. A study in contradictions.

The next day, with an afternoon to kill, I walk the 30 or 40 blocks from Washington Square Park in the Village to Battery Park on Manhattan's southern tip. My mission: to make eye contact with some in the sea of people flowing past. Fahgettaboutit. Bodies bump and saunter past, cell phone stylin' (you can't be anybody in the Apple these days without letting the world hear your one-way saga over cell).

Oblivious as they seem, New Yorkers keep antennae extended. On Centre Street, near City Hall, a plastic bag of cheap pens I bought spills open. "It's all right," I start to say but two men approaching already are kneeling in sync to pick them up and return them. "Thanks," I say, but they're gone. No one has broken stride. I stand for five minutes on the sidewalk scribbling in a notebook. No one could care less. It's the beauty of New York -- invisibility in the midst of millions.

I listen as I look down. The words are Spanish and Portuguese, Haitian patois and Russian. Finally, a snatch of English ... "feels good, huh" ... reminds me what country I'm in. (New York City translates information into 170 languages, Mayor Bloomberg tells those gathered at a national ethnic media conference two days later. It has 200 ethnic newspapers. It's not just one city, he might have added. It's the world.)

And then there are those who are silent. I stop for an ice cream outside historic Trinity Church.
"A creamsickle," I say. The vendor points to the right picture on his cart. "How much," I ask. He holds up two fingers. Works for me. Cell phones, thank goodness, aren't allowed inside Trinity. So the tall gal in the one-piece, form-fitting, zebra-skin jump suit has stepped into the cemetery alongside to place her call. Talk about people turning over in their graves.

I reach a destination of sorts: the National Museum of the American Indian in the old Customs Building alongside Battery Park. The security guard wears wrap around shades and talks on his phone in Russian as he hands me a plastic holder to throw my wallet and cell phone into. Multitasking. One of the last Indian tribes to surrender was The Nez Perce. We could use its leader, Chief Joseph, today. Maybe in the White House. Or at least running Homeland Security. "Let me be a free man," he told Congress. "Free to travel. Free to stop ... Free to work. Free to choose my teachers. Free to follow the religion of my fathers. Free to think and talk and act for myself."

Step outside, Joseph. This is New York.

I walk back past the hole in the ground, stretching two square blocks across from the Darth Vader-like Millenium Hilton. A scattering of tourists, probably from places like Des Moines and Dubuque judging from the polyester, click shutters. I don't know what's stranger, the long metal fence where the World Trade Towers once stood or the matter of factness of it all nearly four years after that day when the planes flew in. A few pictures hang on the fence. So does a list of names, "The heroes of September 11, 2001." That's it.

On Canal and 6th Avenue, a guy on a delivery bike almost runs me over on the sidewalk.

"Go ahead," I tell him.

"No, no. It's you sir. It's you. I shouldn't even be over here."

Hear that Newt? A New Yorker. Get on your train and get out of town. And take the guy flipping the Apple with you. Deep down this is just one big global block party. A string of neighborhoods. The eye-contact thing? Dunno. Let's just chalk it up to shyness.

The press: Stuck in a universe of spin

2005-05-26T04:50:00.000-07:00

06/04/05

The challenge for traditional journalism is whether it can reassert its position as the provider of something distinctive and valuable ..... Somehow journalism needs to prove that it is acting on behalf of the public, if it is to save itself.
-- Report: State of the News Media, 2005

It was the end of a restless night. In my dream, I was at last in the study of a prominent journalist with whom I'd worked for weeks to set up an interview. Now he stood before me, a well-schooled, well-dressed, urbane man in his sixties. But when he spoke, only gibberish came out. He smiled, ruefully. But not a single comprehensible word emerged from the nonsense. I'd read his books, looked forward to his insights. But he was trapped inside a jumbled brain, an apparent victim of stroke.

My alarm buzzed and I awoke struggling to shake the cobwebs and face another gray morning. Still the dream didn't leave me easily. Could it be, I wondered, that this was a metaphor for American journalism in 2005 --a once-distinguished figure stripped of its voice, an oracle whose message has become so garbled, so distorted as to be meaningless?

Battered by the orchestrated attacks of ideological bloggers, carved up by corporate budget cutters, tripped too often by its own haste to be first, and abandoned by new generations of technology-laden multi-taskers, the news media seem increasingly to be howling hopelessly into the wind of a gathering storm. Either their message is quickly swallowed up in the swoosh of endless spin or they themselves are mistaking the energy needed to be heard over it for something substantive being said.

Listen to the language of the recent filibuster debate. It's as if the news media, on cue, accepted the talking points of the public relations practitioners. First, when the language was used by Democrats and Republicans alike, the news media wrote about the so-called "nuclear option," whereby the Democrats would paralyze the Senate if the Republicans acted unilaterally to eliminate filibusters. But Republicans decided they didn't like the term, that it cast them in a bad light. So they began talking about the "Constitutional option" and -- more than anything else -- "an up or down vote" on judges. I always thought that a vote was a vote. But sure enough, one cannot pick up a newspaper today or turn on the television without hearing references to "up and down" votes -- for John Bolton, for judges, for turning June 12 into national hedgehog day. You name it. It won't go away.

On to my second point. Listen again to the report on the State of the Media 2005, published by the Project for Excellence in Journalism at Columbia University:

Today, a host of new forms of communication offer a way for newsmakers to reach the public. There are talk-show hosts, cable interview shows, corporate Web sites, government Web sites, Web sites that purport to be citizen blogs but are really something else, and more.
... All this makes it easier for those who would manipulate public opinion - government, interest groups and corporations - to deliver unchecked messages, through independent outlets or their own faux-news Web sites, video and text news releases and paid commentators.

Journalists, struggling to compete in this environment, reflexively turn up the volume. They adapt the tone of the megaphone, too often mixing the journalism of verification with that of assertion, screaming at each other in food-fight roundtable "discussions" where scoring points counts much more than making points, further eroding public trust that polls suggest, in any case, might better be characterized as public suspicion.

What's gone wrong? I opened two Sunday papers yesterday and read little that held my interest. And this, a week after Amnesty International called the Guantanamo prison camp "the gulag of our time." Isn't that an invitation to analyze the facts Amnesty analyzed, to press members of Congress on whether and why (or why not) hearings are in order, to do more than quote the president saying, Amnesty's assertion was "an absurd allegation?"

I think it is. But that kind of reporting takes hard work, independence and investment. It's so much easier to scream "yes" or "no" and to mimic the language of Washington's spin doctors. It's so much easier. But then, how much longer will a disenchanted public pay for what's merely easier?

Sunshine amid the long days of a damp, gray May

2005-05-25T06:05:00.000-07:00

05/25/05

If you live anywhere in New England, I don't have to tell you this has been one dismal month -- cold, rainy and dark. I usually consider May to be my favorite month of the year. It's when the flowers bloom, green bursts everywhere and the songbirds return. This year a little worm is chopping up the leaves of our big front-yard maple. The wind turns my umbrella inside out. It's just plain dismal, day after day.

Given a global and national climate nearly as dark, I've been looking for inspiration, something to get me moving each day, to keep me from pulling the covers over my head and staying in bed.

I've found it in the National Basketball Association playoffs in a guy named Steve Nash.

Nash is an unassuming Canadian who plays basketball fall through spring and works for charity year round. He isn't any basketball player. He's a great basketball player. He was the Most Valuable Player of the NBA this year. But unlike most other professional athletes today, he doesn't push and shove or boast or thrust out his chest. He doesn't scowl or strut for the cameras. Instead, on camera, he's the guy who can be seen patting a teammate on the back after he's made a stupid play or turned the ball over. He runs like the wind but he's also a vision of calm on the court.

Nash set a remarkable record last night. He became the first player in NBA history -- surpassing the likes of Michael Jordan and Oscar Robertson -- to score more than 25 points and dish off more than 10 assists in four consecutive playoff basketball games. But it's not Nash's statistics that interest me. It's the way he plays. He never, as announcers note, "picks up his dribble." So Nash, who is probably 6-foot-3 or so but looks at most 5-foot-10 amid all the tall trees around him, races into a crowd under the basket, somehow comes out the other side with three guys chasing him and then spots a teammate cutting to the basket who suddenly finds the ball in his hands three feet from the rim. It's a thing of beauty.

Or there's Nash flitting within inches of a 7-footer and then suddenly stopping, boucing backwards and arching a high shot over the defender's outstretched arms as he falls to the ground. Swish.

Steve Nash is the quintessential team player and teammate. After he joined the Phoenix Suns this year, the team won more than twice as many games as the year before. Twice as many. Amazing. When he is on the bench his team stalls in confusion. And so he sits little.

It looks as though the wonderful run of Steve Nash and his Phoenix Suns will end soon. They're down 2-0 to the deeper and more physical San Antonio Spurs in the Western Division Finals and now the series moves to San Antonio. It's a shame. Nash's young backcourt mate suffered a disabling injury to his eye at the start of the second round of this four-round playoffs. The Phoenix bench is too "thin" to take up the slack.

But whatever happens to Steve Nash and his Phoenix Suns in the next couple of games, I salute him. He's rekindled my joy in professional basketball as has no player in many years. Not since Bernard King averaged about 40 points for the New York Knicks some 20 years ago have I been so captivated by one player's performance. And King had an edge; I'm a Knicks fan.

Steve Nash plays basketball with joy, grace, speed and anything but a sense of self-importance. He's once again making the sport fun to watch. Deep into the Spring that wasn't. Do you think the Sun will come back out for summer?

With God on our side

2005-05-15T05:59:00.000-07:00

05/15/05

America's surge toward religious McCarthyism could well wash away its biggest obstacle this week as Senate Republicans prepare to cast aside more than 200 years of procedural precedent by banning judicial filibusters. If they succeed, the price will be the system of checks and balances on which democracy delicately rests.

The Senate is poised to act because that is precisely what the Religious Right wants. Further concessions proposed by the Democrats, who in the past have blocked fewer than 5 percent of Bush's nominees, the lowest percentage in four administrations, couldn't slow the Republican assault on Senate rules. This ruling party, driven by the religious zealotry of its base, wants absolute control of every branch of government.

That's why the vote to keep the filibuster compares with the Nixon impeachment hearings as the biggest tests of U.S. democracy in at least the last half century. The outcome will depend on a half-dozen thus far uncommitted Republicans. And in an age when party line loyalty typically trumps public interest, I can't say I'm confident of a vote of conscience.

If Republicans succeed in stripping the right to filibuster from Senate rules, it's a safe bet that a parade of judicial nominees intent on eroding separation of church and state, banning abortion, curtailing the First Amendment, battering gay rights, and expanding the Patriot Act will soon march through the Senate to lifetime appointments. That is the real and radical agenda of a White House and its Christian Coaltion drivers, who ostensibly want to stop "activist" judges but actually want to end judicial independence in interpreting Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms.

Other signs of an emerging religious struggle already abound.

The New York Times reported this week that a chaplain at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs was given orders to ship out to Japan after accusing her superiors "of using their positions to promote evangelical Christianity among the cadets." The chaplain, Capt. Melinda Morton, says her transfer was no accident; it came after she resisted pressure to denounce an outside report by a Yale Divinity School team that, according to The Times, found some chaplains at the academy "were insensitive to the religious diversity of the cadets."

Eighty years after the Scopes Trial dramatically established the validity of teaching Darwinian evolution in schools, the religious right is counter-attacking again. Districts across the country are increasingly enmeshed in debate over whether a new form of "science," called "intelligent design," should be mandated as well. Supporters of intelligent design insist it isn't creationism and isn't anti-science. But it is both. The web site of The Christian Post defines it this way: "Intelligent design is the theory that the complexity and organization of life are evidence of the living things having been designed, calling on an intelligent creator or designer that may be responsible for their complexity."

In response to a questions from ABC commentator George Stephanopoulos two weeks ago, preacher Pat Robertson said that he believes "activist judges" (read anti-faith judges, according to the Chrisitian Right) pose a more serious threat to American Democracy than Al Qaeda -- you know, the folks who flew planes into the World Trade Center.

The American Civil Liberties Union this week sued the federal government, arguing, according to The Boston Globe, that it violated the separation of church and state by funneling more than $1 million to a faith-based abstinence program. In its newsletter, the program, the Silver Ring Thing, told young people "a personal relationship with Jesus Christ (is) the best way to live a sexually pure life."

Organized religion of any stripe has never been a dominant force in my life. But I've begun paying a lot more attention to it as this country fractures into two camps: Those who would use religion to bring people together and those who would use it to tear them apart.

Whether dropping in at a Sunday sermon, serving a meal to the homeless or sitting in the spell of a gospel concert, I've tried to spend my spiritual time among those who heal and build.
But 35 years ago, on a rain-soaked, two-lane road south of Knoxville, Tenn., I got a taste of what can happen when one man's godliness is misconstrued as The Answer for all.

With a college friend, I was hitchhiking from the Great Smoky Mountains to Nashville to visit a couple who had served as the informal ministry at a Colorado lodge at which I'd worked. Our first ride came from fellow in jeans and a checked, flannel shirt. He said he was a plumber, and he didn't wait long before he turned to me in the front seat, held me with a level gaze and asked: "Have you boys been saved?"

"Excuse me, sir?" I asked.

"Have you boys been saved? Have you taken Jesus into your heart?"

"Well, no sir," I mumbled.

He kept driving with his lefthand. But with his right he drew an imaginary horizontal line across the dashboard. "I've done some bad things in my life," he said. "I cheated on my wife and drank until she left me. But a few years ago I took Jesus into my heart, and it has made all the difference."

He paused.

"Boys," he said. patting his imaginary line. "I could kill you right now, and I'd go to Heaven and you'd go to Hell. Think about that."

Believe me, we did -- all 40 miles of that ride. And we thought about more.

To the young divinity student we were heading to visit in Nashville, religion and spirituality were a means of bringing people of multiple denominations together, of sharing good work and searching for higher meaning. His wife, an art student, spent much of the summer I worked with them stringing bead necklaces to give to friends. But to this plumber on the drive from the Smokies to Knoxville that morning, religion was a line in the sand. You either were with him or ... watch out.

In today's U.S. Senate, as lawmakers prepare to wipe out rules others have relied on for good or bad to protect minority rights, there are a number of signs that the plumber's way is in ascendancy -- and the rest of us had better watch out.

Silence from the land of violence

2005-05-10T06:51:00.000-07:00

05/10/05

Circulation is bleeding buckets. Pundits again are wringing their hands and predicting the death of newspapers as we know them. The printed word, they say, is dying with its readership. Young people just don't care.

The argument isn't new, but the evidence of recent downward circulation trends gives it momentum. What's lacking is intelligent analysis or an intelligent response. Publishers stumble over themselves to dumb down their products, to provide news in four and five paragraph chunks, with a premium on runaway brides, celebrity trials, and soft and lazy political puffery.

Ethics? It has taken a back seat. The New York Times Co., through its subsidiary, The Boston Globe, buys Metro, a free throwaway daily whose top management makes crass racist jokes. Like other traditionalists, the old-news publishers are desparate to be connected to anyone who might have the key to making money off the Boomer's children. These news executives flail around in desparation, ignoring the power and passion of what's really going on in the world in favor, too often, of pabulum.

Responsibility to readers? It's party time. As newsrooms salivate on Page 1 over Laura Bush's performance at the annual Washington correspondents' dinner, there something close to a news blackout in the land of perpetual violence: Iraq. Heard the phrase, "Fiddling while Rome burns?" It's happening. They are happening simultaneously -- the rapid decline of news circulation and the unending bloodshed overseas that just barely sneaks out in below-the-fold and largely bloodless body counts deep inside the news (Page 22 in my Boston Globe today). Four hundred dead in a couple of weeks. Nine Americans killed last weekend. Do they have names? Did anyone ever take their pictures? And do their deaths have any purpose?

I read in The New York Times Week-in-Review that we may be headed toward the Perfect Economic Storm, when a variety of forces leads to the collapse of our economy. Has anyone stopped to think that spending $100-plus billion a year on Iraq -- much of which no one can account for -- might contribute in some way to both the gargantuan deficit, to inflation and to other factors that could lead our economy to its knees? Certainly not the U.S. Senate. It voted unanimously for the latest $80-plus billion installment.

The new Times opinion page columnist, John Tierney, suggests that we cover the violence of war less -- and hints that perhaps someone just might censor the press if it doesn't restrain itself. "I'm not advocating official censorship," he writes. " But there's no reason the news media can't reconsider their own fondness for covering suicide bombings. A little restraint would give the public a more realistic view of the world's dangers."

That, Mr. Tierney, would mean the dangers in your world, right? I'm guessing you don't have any relatives in the military -- our all-volunteer military. I'm guessing none of your Iraqi relatives are being blown to bits, either. And I'm guessing it's annoying to read about these nasty stories when there's so much niceness among the beautiful people you rub elbows with in New York each day.

Consider this possibility, Mr. Tierney. Perhaps the mainstream press is in decline because of columns like yours. Because the press increasingly mirrors a different aspect of the nation's gathering bankruptcy -- its moral emptiness. News organizations dance with the First Lady and distance themselves from harsh realities. The Bushies said it, plain as day, during the presidential campaign. "We create our own reality," one operative told Ron Susskind in an interview for the New York Times magazine.

Indeed they do. A bizarre reality at that, dutifully reported by the news media, but too often without a sense of contextual irony. There's that new form of "science" created to challenge Darwinism in Kansas schools. Using it, creationists seem poised to win the rematch of the Scopes trial more than a century after Clarence Darrow established the validity of science in education.

There's George Bush and Vladimir Putin, partners in democracy and driving lessons, waving at me, smiling, from the front-seat of a car on the front-page of my Boston Globe. They're tooling around Moscow together in the ultimate photo opportunity, now being pawned off on me as news.

There's the sychronized drumbeat from the president and his attorney general calling for "up-or-down" votes on all judicial nominees. Their words, and their intent, make it sound positively undemocratic to deny lifetime court appointments to the most neanderthal of their selections. Their cause is helped by a press that once again forgets to mention that 96 percent of Bush's nominees to the courts have been approved, a higher percentage than any of his predecessors, or that the Republicans blocked dozens of court nominees during the Clinton Administration. Such real news -- we used to call it context -- would get in the way of the rising Republican groundswell to trample to last remnants of minority rights in the Congress. It might slow the momentum of Republican spinmeisters creating their own reality.

And then there's that gusher of a story about the new Laura Bush, carefully scripted on Washington's biggest stage -- a dinner for the journalism insiders themselves. How warm and fuzzy.

If the rest of us read enough articles like this, maybe no one will notice as the next 90 or so American forces and 900 Iraqi civilians are blown to bits. Or maybe the press can take Tierney's advice and just play down this nasty war until we no longer have to suffer through it. It is just so distasteful. But then again, maybe as the press does so more people will stop reading newspapers altogether -- and a new, more informative form of news can begin to emerge.

The ultimate in outsourcing

2005-05-01T15:45:00.000-07:00

05/01/05

When a colleague of mine at Boston's Emerson College needed help hanging a picture in his office earlier this year, he discovered he had to call someone in Phoenix, Ariz., to put through his requisition order. And when I called up my Internet provider to find out why service had gone dead, I found myself talking to someone in Texas. So it makes perfectly good sense that the United States is outsourcing a rather sensitive order of business even farther away these days:
overseas to that little-known torture paradise of Uzbekistan. Who better to call when you need a little boiled oil to get a suspected terrorist to talk? How better to build a community of nations than through equal-opportunity human rights violations?

Consider President Bush's dilemma. Deep down he knows his Coalition of the Willing never amounted to much more than BAA (Britain, America and Australia). Even the flower decorations are disintegrating. The Italians and Poles are pulling out their forces by year's end. The Spanish are already gone. Can the Falkland Islands be far behind? Or did they commit any troops?

I can feel the president's pain. What's a guy to do to achieve his clear goal of reaching out to the world in this, his second term. He keeps trying. He's appointed Paul Wolfowitz to head the World Bank, a sure sign that all nations voicing demands for economic freedom will start on a level playing field -- and with just about everything else leveled for that matter. He's appointed John Bolton as his representative to the United States, another man who speaks eloquently of the need for leveling (in his case, the leveling of most stories of the United Nations building).
He's even sent Condi to France.

Of course, I can feel the terror suspects pain even more: trust me, it hurts when torturers extract fingernails and toenails with pliers, just one of the dandy tricks the Uzbekis have been accused of. But aren't a few dozen extracted toenails a small price to pay for a global community of torture that leaves no nation behind?

Since the World Bank deals with economic development and since Wolfie and the president are such pals, I wanted to leave both with a modest proposal. Rather than leaving our Uzbeki jailer friends with piecemeal work -- an arm boiled off here, genitalia wilted from electroshock there -- perhaps we should support an economic development grant to make those efforts systematic.

But that would be illegal and immoral, wouldn't it? Oh dear.

The rock 'em, sock 'em news

2005-04-24T07:13:00.000-07:00

o4/24/05

My Boston Globe covered some compelling stories this morning. I learned millions of federal government records have disappeared from public sight. Many have been stamped with such designations as "for official use only" by low-level clerks or, in the case of the Homeland Security Department, by any of the 180,000 people who work there. If you're interested, you can't get a directory of who works at the Pentagon any more. Nor can you find out if your house is downwind from a dangerous chemical plant. You can't even find out how many and what kind of documents have disappeared into a black hole of new classifications such "sensitive but unclassified" and "not for public dissemination."

It was a chilling news report. But it didn't claim the lead news position in my paper.

Neither did a powerful piece out of Iraq. It reported that insurgents are launching fewer but larger-scale assaults. This, reports The Globe, "has prompted some commanders to reexamine their believe that the insurgency (is) on the wane."

No, the lead story -- the one editors considered the biggest news of the day in my morning Boston Globe was this: Beer sales are up 20 percent at Fenway Park .... Got it.

Now I've been a city editor. And I can envision the conversation of front-page decision-makers.
The beer story is: (1) local news (2) timely (a drunk Red Sox fan took a swipe at a Yankee outfielder last week) (3) tied loosely to a team the city's citizenry reveres even more than the new Pope.

But beer sales?

And then it all made sense. On the same front page The Globe ran a story about the spread of crystal meth abuse. Booze. Drugs. War. Secrecy. It was a front page that collectively captured America, 2005: Some real news for those who still read and a cross-section of reality about those who'd rather do anything but.

In fact, perhaps The Globe should have captured the day's news under a single headline:
"Bye-bye war, hello wooziness, who cares ... freedom's a mess, I think I'ma gonna cry-y."

So pour me a 16-ouncer. By next week, I could be coming at you with a new feel-good reality, something like: "It's nuclear -- and awfully nice. Why getting rid of Senate filibusters gets down with God."

Go Sox.

Standing at a crossroads in Springtime

2005-04-10T07:57:00.000-07:00

04/10/05

The mercury finally crept past 60 degrees this weekend, and the popping of crocus buds, the crush of colorfully clad cyclists, and the company of neighbors sweeping mounds of snow-truck sand onto the sidewalk all heralded the unofficial arrival of Spring.

If only these sunny days would stay, but the mercury will head south tomorrow and a cold rain could fall by mid-week. This isn’t uniformly bad, I tell myself unconvincingly, because it will give me more undivided time to research fever charts other than the rise and fall of Springtime temperatures. And there are plenty worth tracking. There’s the steady climb of gas prices, which hit a New England record this week and are expected to approach $3 by the height of summer. There’s the stagnant stock market, waiting to see whether President Bush’s proposed steroid shot of individual retirement accounts gets any traction in Congress. And there’s the latest AP-Ipsos poll of presidential popularity, showing the ratings of the president dropping fast and those of the U.S. Congress dropping faster.

Though gas prices and presidential popularity are headed different ways, these charts, of course, are related. The pundits say George W. Bush is suffering because the public doesn’t like the price at the pump and remains suspicious that his efforts to “rescue” Social Security are actually not much more than a payoff for his friends on Wall Street.

I personally can celebrate just about any reason the public is losing faith in George W. Bush. Where have Americans been? From energy policy to education, the war against AIDS to the war in Iraq, gaps in health care to gaps in homeland security, his record falls far short of his rhetoric. And when it comes to talking about freedom while practicing torture, the divide between espoused principles and actual practice makes George Orwell’s “1984” seem muted in its prophecies.

Still, it would be nice if we, as a nation, got exorcised on occasion about something other than our own wallets. Gas prices are high in part because Americans have blithely bombed around in gas-guzzling SUV’s as the tank of world supplies headed toward empty. Stocks are flat because they can’t just keep climbing and climbing and climbing in a universe of borrow and spend, spend and borrow.

I'm not defending his Royal W., just noting that he should be losing popularity for other reasons. One good one is the way in which he revels in a culture of death and twists it into a campaign for a culture of life.

In this Sunday’s New York Times, columnist Frank Rich puts it this way: “Yes, these politicians oppose abortion, but the number of abortions has in fact been going down steadily in America under both Republican and Democratic presidents since 1990 … The same cannot be said of American infant fatalities, AIDS cases and war casualties – all up in the George W. Bush years.”

Also up – way up – is the quotient of righteous religious wrath, exercised by the zealots who wanted to use Jeb Bush’s state police to spring Terri Schiavo from a hospice center, those who don’t hesitate to threaten and impeach any judges who would offer a contrary interpretation of the Constitution, those who believe the final battle, Armageddon, approaches and will gladly crush any sinner not making the journey with them.

These people are out there, and in growing numbers. In a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on the eve of his retirement, Bill Moyers, the thoughtful, spiritual, and liberal journalist and former presidential adviser, put their numbers at 15 percent of the American population. And their clout is much larger still. It is this zealous right to a large extent that the political pundits are talking about when they use expressions such as “shoring up the president’s base.” And it is they, their dogmatic and uncompromising beliefs, their insistence that the rest of us either tow the line or risk their assaults, that should lead the list of reasons for the president’s declining popularity.

As a “Rolling Stone” headline puts it: “The far right of the evangelical movement has a plan to impose biblical law on every aspect of American society – and the White House is listening.”

How closely the president listens to this group, and its own right wing extreme, known as the Dominionists, will depend, I suspect, on the rest of us. If the American public, in its actions and words, remains the silent majority, satisfied with a seemingly sincere and smiling president as long as he lowers prices at the pump, the squeak of the Dominionists grinding wheel will grow louder. If the Democrats remain passive and meek, the push of Republicans to institutionalize the minority party’s political irrelevance will succeed, stripping from senators the right to filibuster and opening a floodgate through which the activist right will pour. Watch out.

Writes “Rolling Stone,” “Dominionists are pressing an agenda that Makes Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America look like the Communist Manifesto. They want to rewrite schoolbooks to reflect a Christian version of American history, pack the nation’s courts with judges who follow Old Testament law, post the Ten Commandments in every courthouse and make it a felony for gay men to have sex and women to have abortions… Their ultimate goal is to plant the seeds of a ‘faith-based’ government that will endure far longer than the Bush’s presidency.”

Could it happen in America? The point is, it is happening.

Fighting and covering the war that wasn’t

2005-04-03T10:35:00.000-07:00

04/03/05

Even with the thoughts, prayers and investment of the American public behind you, it’s got to be hard to fight a war, or to cover it, when enemy and ally are largely indistinguishable and suicide bombs are a major method of attack. It's got to be harder still when those risking their lives every day are doing so for a public largely oblivious to what’s going on.

The reason for the public's ignorance is simple: News from Iraq has largely disappeared, especially on the so-called "all news" cable stations so many Americans rely on as their primary, if not sole, source of news. It's easy to blame an Administration intent on keeping public attention elsewhere. But government wouldn't succeed without the complicity of television news exeuctives eager to boost ratings rather than spread information, more comfortable filing reports on the president's grand language of freedom and democracy than on showing or measuring the violence that continues to cripple Iraq.

Could it be that in this world of media consolidation, corporate owners would rather not make waves with a de-regulation friendly White House? I, for one, don't doubt it.

"The media, in the modern era, are indisputably an instrument of war," begins an article in this spring's issue of "Parameters," a quarterly publication of the U.S. Army War College. "... Today's military commanders stand to gain more than ever before from controlling the media and shaping their output."

The author, BBC news producer Kenneth Payne, might have added that in today's news environment it doesn't take much effort to control that output. The ingredients of control in Iraq go something like this: Declare the outbreak of democracy, keep casualties as bloodless numbers, scare away most reporters (the Iraqi insurgents take of that), and figure the press and public soon will turn to simpler versions of reality TV to grab their attention. Who needs censorship or even concentrated propaganda when Laci and Michael are around?

Last week I got a glimpse of the ground war in Iraq. Unfortunately, it wasn’t on TV. Kevin Sites, the NBC reporter and videographer whose story about a Marine killing an injured insurgent in Fallujah kicked up its own firestorm, visited Emerson College and showed students both the raw and edited footage of his story. He led an interesting discussion about the footage NBC left out of the aired report – pictures of the soldier pointing his gun from close quarters and the bullets kicking into the prostrate insurgent, who had been wounded in fighting the day before. Afterwards, however, what interested one student who emailed me was not the ethics of what aired, but the visual reality of the war itself. “Now I see what sensory war reporting is all about,” he said. Curious that it took a guest speaker rather than the nightly news.

Unlike coverage during the Vietnam War, he – and we -- are rarely seeing the reality of war. Recently, as it turns out, we’re practically not seeing the war at all.

Two days after Sites’ visit, student teams reported in class about how the war is playing – on cable television, in the elite press, in the alternative press, in blogs from Iraq, and so forth. The three students following CNN, MSNBC and Fox news, respectively – the three 24/7 cable news networks – offered the same lamentable assessment.

The war, they said, has disappeared from the airwaves. No packages. No footage. Virtually no coverage other than a very occasional 10 or 15 second “news reader.”

Newspapers are doing only slightly better. At the bottom of Page 8 in my Sunday New York Times today, I found a story telling me that 20 U.S. troops had been wounded in a major assault on Abu Ghraib prison. Had I not looked for the story – my course, after all, is titled “Journalism in Wartime” – I could easily have missed it. An update on the news wires later today said the U.S. military had increased the number of wounded American defenders to 44. That’s a lot of American men and women for a footnote on Page 8.

Perhaps the story will work its way onto tonight's news broadcasts and tomorrow's Page 1. But I’ll wager if it does, in most news outlets it will be wrapped into a positive piece on the election, finally, of a Sunni speaker to the new Iraq assembly. The message: If our boys were hurt, it continues to be for a good cause.

But on Page 4 of my Boston Globe today, framing a huge green-and-white ad for Macy’s, I discovered a different assessment of Iraq: that things aren’t going all that swimmingly.

“For the first time, US officials have backed off from their optimistic assessment after the Jan. 30 elections,” The Globe reports. “They are now predicting a ‘bumpy road,’ with political parties breaking up into ethnic and sectarian factions.”

Both the fact, and the implications of that bumpy road likely will continue to be lost on the American public being spared the realities of Iraq. Lost, that is, unless and until things turn so bad the media get a sharp wake-up call. Ultimately, I don't believe hiding the truth can help forge better policy. And that's the weakness of the government and the news media acting as though the war has just gone away.

News can never be purely objective. But most reporters (at least those not claiming to work for a “fair and balanced” network) try to do their best. As another student told Emerson’s college newspaper, he couldn’t tell by listening to Kevin Sites whether Sites is for or against the war. He clearly respected the Marines with whom he traveled. But he also respects his audience and believes that when we fight wars American citizens deserve to see what actually happens.

The answer is that people get killed. War is not antiseptic. Nor has this one ended. So why was it front-page news this week in a New England's newspaper when a group of fake vigilantes decided to patrol the Mexican border to guard against illegal immigrants but not front-page news when real soldiers in a real war fought a pitched battle in Baghdad? If you unearth the answer, please let me know.

Just when it seemed things couldn't get worse

2005-03-29T20:24:00.000-08:00

03/29/05

There has been little national exposure for a Miami Herald report that Jeb Bush sent state law enforcement agents to seize Terri Schiavo from the hospice - a plan called off when local police said they would enforce the judge's order that she remain there.
-- Paul Krugman, New York Times

That would be George W.'s brother, governor of Florida -- and, as likely as not, the next Republican presidential candidate. Breathe deeply. We came close to initiating the actions of a police state over the life of a woman who has spent 15 years in a vegetative state and whose husband has won years of legal battles granting her the right to die.

The governor did this after the highest court in the land, the Supreme Court, refused to intervene. He did this despite the fact that an overwhelming majority of Americans consider this a family issue, one thousands if not millions have planned for with Living Wills (including, according to one report, Laura and George W. Bush).

What comes next, Paul Krugman is right to ask. Intimidation? Political assassination? Religious McCarthyism? Or is that already here, full blown?

It's hard for me to recognize the country I live in. The President, the man who governed Texas as it led the nation in executing inmates, the man who couldn't be bothered to leave his vacation compound to speak to the world and the families of tsunami victims, the man who led us to war under false premises in Iraq, flew from Texas to Washington, D.C., to sign legislation to make the life of Terri Schiavo a federal case and a federal cause.

For awhile, the whole story seemed too weird for me to take in. I confess. I spent three days hoping the Terri Schiavo story would go away. No chance. Instead it got more front-page ink than the election in Iraq, more than the battle over Social Security, more even than Michael Jackson's trial. The Republicans wanted it that way, reportedly sending a memo saying it was a good story to shore up the party's base (although right-wing bloggers now are questioning the authenticity of this memo). And so, as the Democrats stayed somewhere in their underground bunkers, once again abdicating any sense of true leadership, the Republican right trotted out its crazies in full force, got a 10-year-old arrested trying to break into Terri Schiavo's room to "give her water," forced her husband's brother to hide in the face of death threats and, apparently, convinced the governor of Florida to ask state law enforcement agents to ignore the courts and break the law.

Think about it -- think about it closely. At a time when Republicans are on the cusp of scrapping the filibuster in the Senate and are working hard to infiltrate, distort and discredit a fact-based, skeptical press, this is truly scary news. Who needs conspiracy theories when reality abounds?

Far too quiet on the homefront

2005-03-20T11:19:00.000-08:00

I wrote this commentary for the Friday, March 25 edition of The Christian Science Monitor

It was the first day of spring, the second anniversary of the Iraq war, the fourth day of the NCAA tournament. At the liberal church I was attending near Boston this Palm Sunday, the minister mentioned the tough winter that had dumped 108 inches of snow on the area. He said not a word about the 1,524 American soldiers killed in Iraq, at last count.

As I listened, a guest participant in the choir, he talked of the hope and rebirth that comes with spring and of the pleasure of watching college playoff basketball, with its teamwork, fraternity, and enthusiasm. He never did mention the war that slogs on thousands of miles away.

He wasn't the only one who seemed forgetful this anniversary weekend. Antiwar marches in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston drew thousands, but the crowds were far smaller than a year ago. Many news organizations neither bothered to announce these events in advance nor covered them in anything but the most perfunctory manner.

I can't tell whether America is in denial or despair over events in Iraq, but I suspect it's some of each. The denial comes amid a flurry of flag-waving that's followed Iraqi elections and the Bush administration's insistence that peace is breaking out all over because of its own aggressive actions. Conventional wisdom this month is that the president is right. Conventional wisdom has turned an already meek press corps into church mice. But conventional wisdom in this war has been wrong many times before.

The despair, I suspect, keeps many people who are bitterly opposed to this war at home - and deflates turnout at those underpublicized and undercovered antiwar rallies.

Americans, it seems, would just as soon ignore the fact that 150,000 of our troops remain stationed in Iraq; that tens of thousands of Iraqi men, women, and children have died in the crossfire; that some inadvertently have been gunned down at checkpoints where American troops - fearful, with good reason, of suicide attacks - sometimes shoot first and ask questions later; that the tens of billions of dollars we're investing there each year could handily cover health insurance for the millions of uninsured American children. And that even so, corruption in Iraq is rampant, unemployment stands near 50 percent, electricity is off more than on, and nearly two years after the end of "major combat" reporters are still writing about the dangerous drive from the Baghdad airport to the Green Zone a few miles away.

If the US government has figured out an exit plan, it's not telling us what it is. No. The message is strictly hail to the chief and let freedom ring.

War is always more palatable when we don't let its reality get in the way. The myth of war stirs pride; the ground-level reality, horror. Distraction may be the path of least resistance. So it's root for spring and the home team. Turn on the TV and watch the battle of college hoops. It's safe. It's prescribed - 40 minutes plus interminable ads that stretch the event to two hours. It's fun. And, except for the occasional elbow to nose, there's no blood.

But then, plenty of Americans seem to think the same holds true in Iraq.

The day after the Palm Sunday service, I told my cousin, who had invited me to the church, of my surprise that the minister hadn't mentioned the war. She said he and many in the congregation in the past have been outspoken in their opposition to the war and that, at times, their views had caused division in the congregation. Perhaps, she speculated, he had decided for the time being to pull back, to heal.

If that's the case, in one church near Boston and in pulpits across this country, it would be a terrible shame. Because peace in Iraq won't grow out of weariness or polite silence at home.
At some point, Americans will need to reengage in this conflict (and conflict it clearly remains, if one reads the battle-and-bombing stories often buried inside the daily news). If they don't, Iraq, like an earlier war in Southeast Asia, will just keep dragging on.

Visions of the Golden State

2005-03-10T09:56:00.000-08:00

03/10/05

My friend Mary and I are sitting on the sparkling green lawn of Alice's Restaurant in La Honda, a place bikers still roar up to on Harley hogs, lots of leather and denim, their heads -- bald or balding now -- swathed in bandanas. The noise of the engines settles quickly, giving way to quiet conversation and the sounds of the countryside.

This is California, where the sun on an early spring afternoon is soft and golden and where each sound rings clear in the dry air. Today the animated chatter of birds dominates. It's 65 degrees. Redwoods reach skyward. The smells of spring, sweet and healing, fill the air. After three months of New England winter, this is paradise.

"Beautiful day," I say to the waitress on the way out.

"Totally California," she answers.

Yup. Totally.

For me, the Golden State has always held magic. I lived here for seven years while working as an editor for The San Jose Mercury News. But discovery still marks each visit, even to places I've been before. Each time I arrive, I feel like an adventurer, seeing a foreign country for the first time. And for a transplanted Bostonian, foreign the West Coast truly is.

I recall reading a column years back by a woman who called herself a "bicoastal personality." It fit. My roots are sunk deep in Eastern soil. I was born in New York City and grew up near the Atlantic coast. I appreciate the brusk directness and intellectual parrying of the best Eastern conversations. I love buildings made of brick and stone, share an appetite to argue sports and politics, value (though too seldom partake in) the breadth and depth of the arts. What's left of my small family lives here.

But nothing touches a Caliornia sunset, viewed from the rocky Pacific coastline, the sun at once flattening, expanding and turning orange as a stray pelican flaps across the frame. Nothing relaxes like spring skiing in the Sierra -- empty slopes, breathtaking views of rugged rock and snow ridges, so much sun that sweaters and long sleeves soon strip away, replaced with a thick coat of blockout and a cold beer. And nothing enchants like the view from San Francisco's Coit Tower, of the city of hills, light and shade to the left, and of the fog rolling over the Golden Gate bridge straight ahead.

If it is California's physical beauty that never ceases to astound, it is its culture that intrigues. I love the easy humor and sense of unhurriedness that survives in a place, contrary to East Coast illusions, that's every bit as driven as much as the biggest billable-hours Wall Street law firm. It's true. California can seem a strange and soulless society. When we lived in Silicon Valley, we knew a young family with two or three high-powered sports cars parked on their lawn, an intricate computer set up in the center of their living room, and not a book, picture or personal memento in sight. There, they weren't all that unusual, young professionals on the move and on the make.

But to them, as others, my wife and I were just Kathy and Jerry. There was none of the probing for pedigree -- family, school, profession -- that starts too many East Coast encounters, the conversation within a conversation to determine whether you're worth talking to at all. In the often curious contradiction that is California, what you see is what you get -- even if what you see is bleached, botoxed and otherwise enhanced.

Yes, this is the land of Perpetual Youth. It can get old as one gets older (and we all do). But I believe in the spirit of Peter Pan, even if my joints don't always agree. I believe in laughter. And I believe the world weighs awfully heavily if that's all we let it do. In California, that just doesn't happen. Eventually, the sunshine burns off the fog, over the sea and in the spirit, too. Perhaps that's why I can't stay away terribly long.

Mary and I stop at another "only in California" destination. An hour from the bustle of the crowded 101 corridor (it was in California that highways first became a life form, as in The 101), over the rugged foothills separating people from the protected and still pristine coast, across from a herd of grazing cows on the emerald hillsides that by late May will turn to straw, sits a tile-roofed, high-ceilinged place named The San Gregorio General Store. You can't buy beans and franks here. But though it was started by a former Stanford University philosophy professor, there's nothing pretentious about it either. Oh, you can buy the complete works of California authors like Wallace Stegner and John Steinbeck. There's a section devoted to feminist literature. And they sell some nice silk scarves. But the book collection also includes "Fart Proudly: Writings of Ben Franklin You Never Read in School," an aisle over from the scarves you can buy a hefty iron skillet, and, across from the feminist literature section, the bartender mixes one mean Bloody Mary.

The store is a single big room with something for just about everyone, an apt metaphor for the state in which it's set. Outside my friend Mary strikes up a conversation with an old woman who looks more weathered than the beat up store roof. When her husband died some years back, she sold her farm down the road. Now she lives in a gray wooden house that I gather used to be a blacksmith's shop.

And what, Mary asked, had brought her over to San Gregorio?

"Why my boyfriend," she says, teeth flashing in a girlish grin. So she's pushing 75. It's California.

A nasty twist on personal banking

2005-02-27T03:58:00.000-08:00

02/27/05

A trace of the old company store is making a comeback in the United States. It’s called your neighborhood bank.

Company stores kept many Americans in a perpetual state of debt by letting employees run a tab when they bought anything from food to farm equipment. By the time payday rolled around, most employees had next to nothing left and their debt mounted.

Banks, you might be thinking, are places people go to save money. But let me tell you a story.

Our daughter Meghan has her first bank account at the Lexington branch of Citizens Bank, an institution that prides itself for its access (branches in supermarkets) and its friendly service. Like many other banks today, however, Citizens Bank has at least one service that’s anything but friendly. Its cash machines will let you draw money even if it puts your account in the red -- and then slap you with a substantial fine for overdrawing. A manager there told me that this is so customers don’t get caught on the road without a dime or a way to get home. It’s also, he conceded, a way to make money.

Specifically, for each $20 a customer overdraws an account – that’s the maximum amount an ATM spits out if the account goes in the red – customers are charged for an overdraft. They aren’t told this in advance. It just happens.

So in the last month, Meghan has been charged about $70; that’s 8 percent of her take-home pay. It also is at interest rates that can only be called usurious. Last week, for example, Meghan was charged $29 for overdrawing her account by $56. We haven’t figured out yet how she overdrew that much. We can figure out, however, that though her account was in the red for less than a week the interest on the error was more than 50 percent of the overdraft. Since this was the third such charge to her account this month – again, each overdraft draws its own penalty – we talked to the bank. Only then did we discover (a) that the bank makes it plenty easy to overdraw your account from a cash machine and (b) that it charges exorbitant penalties each time you do it (earlier charges were $25 so it may just have gone up).

I know that this policy has become commonplace at least in New England because my local paper, The Boston Globe, wrote about it on the front page. So Meg isn’t changing banks; as I said, it’s a friendly place. Instead, she discovered a safeguard no one was advertising. All customers has to do is request that they not to be allowed to overdraw their account without warning – to turn down the dubious privilege of rapidly putting themselves into debt at the corner ATM.

The bank officer first offered Meghan an alternate. For $20 a year she could instead pay for overdraft protection – with any outstanding balance paid back at an interest rate of 18 percent a year. That’s a much lower interest rate, mind you, than the instantaneous fines slapped on for overdrawing an account. But compared to the bank's standard interest rates paid to customers for savings –less than one and a half percent – it’s still an awful lot to pay the company for a cup of sugar.

The man of another lifetime

2005-02-21T05:27:00.000-08:00

02/21/05

I never met Hunter Thompson. Read just two or three of his books. But his death, by suicide, hits closer to home than any of the others this year that measure the quickening pace of salt draining through my own life's hour glass -- Johnny Carson, Ray Charles, John Raitt, Sandra Dee.

Thompson could split your sides by spitting in the eye of The Man, whomever that might be on a given day. He was the gonzo journalist who'd outrace a phalanx of cop cars in Las Vegas and then be waiting for them at the side of the road, beer in hand. The Gonzo man -- tuned in, pushed the pedal to the floor, and turned his readers on. He could write as fast and rhythmically as the speed and alcohol coarsing through his body. He was a thumb in the eye of corporate journalism, corporate politics (is there any other kind?), anyone who took themselves too seriously. He was Ken Kesey's McMurphy roving free outside the wards of the "Cuckoo's Nest," making life miserable for all the world's Nurse Ratcheds.

I don't know if I would have liked Hunter Thompson. But I loved his medium and, more often than not, his message. So if you're not familiar with his stuff, check out "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." Fasten your seat belt. Get ready for a wild ride.

So much fishwrap

2005-02-18T10:47:00.000-08:00

02/18/05

I miss Howell Raines. Even if he deserves his less than flattering reputation as an egomaniacal
SOB, when he was the editor of The New York Times the paper had more edge, more verve
and more news. Today is just one more example of how the truly grotesque story of
sanctioned -- or at the least winked at -- torture by US troops no longer qualifies as big news
in the big elite media.

It's obscene -- you know, the torture and the lack of coverage.

My Boston Globe did offer the story an itty-bitty toehold of Page 1. It went like this:

WASHINGTON -- A former Iraqi detainee told Army investigators that a US soldier forced him to sign a statement that he had not been abused even though American interrogators in September 2004 had dislocated his arms, beaten his leg with a bat, crushed his nose, and put an unloaded gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, according to newly released internal military documents.

In addition, a sergeant at a military camp in southern Afghanistan told an Army investigator in July 2004 that his unit erased a series of digital photographs showing guards beating detainees and aiming guns at hooded prisoners. The sergeant said the pictures were deleted after photos from the Abu Ghraib prison appeared in the media, out of the unit's fear that the pictures could spark a second wave of the scandal.

The disclosures provide the first evidence that both in the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters of war, soldiers involved in alleged abuse incidents may have sought to suppress evidence of their actions ....

And where did The New York Times play this story, released to the news media by the American Civil Liberties Union, which is pulling these documents from the government piece by piece through Freedom of Information Act requests? In the lower right hand corner of Page A8, where people always look for major news. (see my blog, "The headlines you probably missed," on Feb. 6).

Howell, where are you?

--------------------------------------------------------------

When Eason Jordan resigned last week as head of CNN's news, the debate centered exclusively on whether the right wing blogs had done him in for a mistake from which he quickly backpeddled. It seems that Jordan, fresh from a visit to Iraq, told those an off-the-record World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that journalists in Iraq were being hunted.

David Gergen, who has served presidents on both sides of the aisle, had this to say on PBS:
"He left a very clear impression that journalists on both sides were being targeted, that Iraqi insurgents were targeting American journalists and in a limited number of cases he thought ... he left the impression there had been targeting by American troops of journalists, perhaps al-Jazeera or others."

Now Jordan is gone. He ostensibly resigned not to embarrass CNN, which says it applied no pressure. But in all that's been written about whether his words warranted his resignation, no one has touched on a much more fundamental point: Are American troops targeting foreign
news reporters or aren't they? I'm not rumor-mongering here. I'd just like to know. It is well
known that an American tank blew away part of a Baghdad hotel in the final days of the war,
killing at least one journalist who worked there. It was a hotel, writes Anne Garrels of NPR in her book "Naked in Baghdad," that was well-known for housing journalists. And over all, according to a recent PBS "Frontline" magazine segment, nearly three dozen Iraqi journalists have died during the fighting, many from American bullets.

One would think the top news executive of a major news organization wouldn't float the idea of Americans targeting journalists with no evidence. If he did, he deserved to resign (or be fired). But if there's evidence, let's hear it. The implications would be horrific. Some retired military brass have decried the torture at Abu Ghraib for pragmatic reasons: If we torture people than people will torture our troops. The same goes for targeting journalists. If we shoot at journalists our enemies will start picking off our reporters. And only the craziest journalists will attempt to cover wars. Or is that what this administration wants?

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

My favorite paragraph from a journalism column this week comes from Mike Carlton in an article titled "The Empire of Vulgarity" published in the Sydney Morning Herald

"George Bush's second inaugural extravaganza was every bit as repugnant as I had expected, a vulgar orgy of teiumphalism unmatched since Napoleon crowned himself emperor in 1804. The little Corsican corporal had a few decent victories to his escutcheon ... Not so this strutting Texan mountebank, with his chimpanzee smirk and his born-again banalities delivered in that constipated syntax that sounds the way cold cheeseburgers look, and his grinning plastic wife, and his scheming junta of neo-con spivs, shamans, flatterers and armchair warmongers, and his sinuous evasions and his brazen lies, and his sleight of hand theft from the American poor, and his rape of the environment, and his lethal conviction that the world must submit to his Pax Americana or be bombed into charcoal."

What say? I don't think he likes our president.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Not to be smug and say, "I told you so." But I did.

On Jan. 8, when I wrote about Armstrong Williams' fattened bank account for writing government propaganda in the guise of journalism, I warned that there would be more.
Now Frank Rich of The New York Times once again has come to the rescue. He writes that Jeff Gannon, the presidential press conference interloper whose real name is James D. Guckert, whose employer is a Republican mouthpiece web site, and whose real income reportedly is as an "X-rated, $200-per-hour escort," is actually the sixth fraudulent propagandist-posing-as-journalist to show up "on the payroll of either the Bush administration or a barely arms-length ally."

Pleeeaase. Will some major new organization with the funds to sustain this file a series of Freedom of Information Act requests to sort out what journalistic "consultants" remain on the Bush Administration payrolls. Just how riddled is American journalism with these fraudulent propagandists? And where is Bill O'Reilly when you need a good even-handed expose?

Blogging in the cyber-wilderness

2005-02-18T10:44:00.000-08:00

NOTE: I wrote this column on blogging for the Christian Science Monitor. It appeared today, Feb. 18.

from the February 18, 2005 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0218/p09s02-coop.html

Our waste howling 'cyberness'
By Jerry Lanson
LEXINGTON, MASS. - Blogging, I've discovered, is about as stimulating as singing to my refrigerator. The echo of my words dissolves quickly into silence.

It may be that these words simply bore anyone dropping by. But I suspect the lack of traffic to my new blog has more to do with the fact that there are now millions of bloggers out there, pouring their hearts out ... for the most part to themselves. And as they - no, we - spend more hours in front of computers, we take one more step in estranging ourselves from what's left of local community.

Often I long for an earlier America, one I've seen more of in historical photos than experienced in real life. It's an America of concrete stoops and front porches, of town and city life where people not only know neighbors by name, but take the time to talk with them.
My own family moved to the suburbs when I was 5. In the mid-'50s on Long Island, we kids were allowed to roam and more often than not, a game of tag or stickball went on in the middle of the street. Fights occasionally broke out, and sometimes nasty ethnic slurs got thrown around. Life was far from perfect. But it had a pulse. Today, in my tony suburb of Lexington, Mass., few kids play in the street. Many more are programmed for organized sports, organized music lessons, organized study. If life is one long climb toward success, it's also more isolated and fragmented.

And that's true for their parents too. Today's houses are a lot bigger. But I suspect plenty of people get lost in all that extra elbow room, rushing to their computer in the hope of connecting with anyone.

I, for one, am not convinced that the computer will ever be a terribly useful tool for real, personal connections. When an MIT professor created something called e-neighbors in my community a couple of years ago, it was an experiment to see how a neighborhood, joined by computer, would interact. I excitedly wrote to those signed on that I love to play poker, bridge, and just about any other card game. No one responded. Perhaps others in the neighborhood have become fast friends. But from what I can tell, the whole network has provided just one contribution - a place to get tips on how to find a plumber, a carpenter, a lawn mower, a tree surgeon. Fill in the blank.

Meanwhile, I still long for a regular card game, a lively cafe, a place where individual expression is heard and seen in the flesh, not tapped onto a screen and sent into cyberspace where it awaits someone else wandering around in the wilderness. I don't believe the Internet - though it can introduce people - ever offers true camaraderie. But I doubt that contemporary neighborhoods do, either. People don't give each other a chance.

After a recent snow, I walked my golden retriever, Casey, and passed between two neighbors shoveling. On my right was an elderly man, approaching 80. He clearly labored as he shoveled his walk. Across the street, a young father, in his 30s, was putting the finishing touches on his perfect snow-blower cleared walkway, which arced around the front and side of his property. If he noticed the old fellow 25 feet away, he never acknowledged him. He clearly hadn't offered to lend a hand.

As I came back around the block, I exchanged greetings with the older man.
"Take your time," I advised him. "Don't overdo it."

"You're right about that," he responded.

The other man had left his snowblower standing by his front path and gone inside.

A wrestler gets back off the mat

2005-02-17T18:41:00.000-08:00

02/12/05

When National Public Radio's ombudsman visited my class at Emerson College this week to talk about his work, I asked him why the news media have so often been so timid in questioning this White House and its policies.

Jeffrey Dvorkin is a thoughtful journalist and former news executive. And after receiving 80,000 emails from listeners in the last year, he clearly has a good sense of the mood of America. Still, I found his answer disconcerting: that since Sept. 11 the "loyal opposition" in this country -- that would be the Democratic Party -- had largely been missing in action.

It's not good form to pick fights with a class guest, so I bit my tongue instead of blurting out, "Why the heck does a free press need someone else to make noise before it has the courage to do so itself?" I don't much care for a journalistic climate in which objectivity is defined as "balanced" coverage rather than fact-based, truthful coverage -- wherever those facts may lead.

But that's not Jeffrey's fault; his analysis is on the mark. At a time when tough reportorial stances are met with cries of bias or worse, neither reporters nor the news organizations that pay them are sticking their necks out very far. More often than not, they're waiting for someone in politics to do so first.

I believe, at last, that the time has come. There already have been stirrings, Jeffrey said.
He pointed to the outspoken opposition of Sen. Barbara Boxer to Condoleezza Rice's nomination as Secretary of State.

Now those stirrings may become a full-throated scream -- as in the Dean Scream. I rather hope so. Howard Dean, newly elected as the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, bears no resemblance to the radical politician he's been painted by Republicans. He's not really particularly liberal. A fiscal conservative and budget balancer as governor of Vermont, he supports, among other things, capital punishment.

But he also knows how to speak in straight sentences, how to provoke, how to inspire and how to take a stand. I like those qualities, and I think plenty of other Americans like them, too, in Red States as well as Blue. In some ways, I see Dean as the John McCain of the Democratic Party, a guy who excites people regardless of whether they always agree with him because he seems to have real convictions, and he speaks plain English.

So in the midst of a campaign of lies and scare tactics about the bankrupt Social Security system and George Bush's plan to fix it, in the midst of the fictional dawning of Democracy in Iraq, in the midst of yet more news about torture -- this time torture outsourced, along with suspected terrorists, to dungeons of horror overseas, I grasp at Dean's election as one headline that gives me hope.

It's needed. If Democrats don't stop mumbling into their soup pretty soon, the party won't win an election for dog catcher. But Howard Dean just may bring the party back to life and, for a change, make Republicans watch their backs.

You see, Howard Dean grew up a wrestler. It's a gritty, sweaty sport in which one minute your face is scrunched into a mat and one move later you're on top. It takes guts and endurance -- the same guts and endurance Dean has shown in the last year, outliving his own obituary, penned by the press on the morning after the Iowa cacuses.

That's why I'm betting that loyal opposition my friend Jeffrey talked about is about to get a lot louder.

The headlines you probably missed

2005-02-06T08:13:00.000-08:00

02/06/05

Republicans capitalized on one of those priceless made-for-television moments this week when they raised purple ink-stained fingers at the President's State-of-the-Union address to show solidarity with the voters in Iraq. Yes, it was a feel-good week in the U-S-A. Unless, that is, you followed the news closely.

I say closely because Iraq has quickly dropped off most front pages and the top of most newscasts. Curious. Because little, if anything, has changed. Deep inside my Boston Globe this morning (lower Page 11) I found this Associated Press story.

"A string of insurgent attacks across Iraq yesterday killed at least 33 Iraqis and three members of the US military, in one of the bloodiest days since the country's election a week ago." Interesting language ... "one of the bloodiest days." There have, after all, been just seven.

Above this story, also on Page 11, ran the headline, "Many votes cast along ethnic, religious lines ... Polarization of Iraqis feared." Translation: Civil war may not be far away as voters turn toward parties representing reliigious/nationalistic interests. Or, to add a bit of interpretation, we are celebrating an election in Iraq that will bring to power parties aligned with the very government in Iran about which rumblings of "pre-emptive strike" -- the next war -- are beginning to emerge. My Globe packages such stories under the boldfaced headline, "Iraq in Transition." And here I thought it was a war!

Whatever you call it, I couldn't find a single article on Iraq on Sunday's front page. There, the only thing approaching war news was blowout coverage of the Super Bowl, which is one battle during which most of us can root unabashedly for both sides. We're all Americans, right?

As Frank Rich of The New York Times predicted the day of the Iraqi election, the administration has once again succeeded in declaring that it has seen "the light at the end of the tunnel" in Iraq, a light those of us who lived through the Vietnam era know perpetually recedes like a mirage in the desert. For now, at least, the war -- make that "Iraq in Transition" -- has largely vanished, pushed aside by the President's valiant efforts to save the dying Social Security system, protect American kids from an innocuous lesbian cartoon couple, and cut the budget on the back of public assistance appropriations that in reality won't buy a cup of coffee in the context of his $80 billion request to wage peace in Iraq.

I wonder if this charade of daily news judgment has anything to do with the decline in trust or audience in traditional news media.

Let me assure you that I'm not among the deserters. Rather than turning my back on the news, I've simply turned the page. I realize that this administration has bullied much news of interest off the cover -- you know, the page where the most important stories are supposed to be showcased. So I start my morning reading inside, looking for articles or tidbits in columns or reviews that can clue me in to what is really going on.

Last week my treasure hunt inside the paper unearthed a report, on page A-something of my New York Times of yet another round of systematic torture by U.S. troops in Iraq rooted out by an American Civil Liberties Union Freedom of Information request. (Ho-hum. How many days until the Super Bowl?)

And yesterday I stumbled across a piece of news I flat-out missed in Thursday's New York Times. (Apparently some Times reporters missed it too because I keep reading about a 60 percent turnout during the Iraqi elections). Columnist Greg Mitchell, whose work I found on the Poynter Institute website at poynter.org, noted how quickly news organizations had embraced as truth the assertion that 8 million Iraqis had voted and pointed out that The Times, among others, had begun to question this assertion.

Writes Mitchell: "In a rare reference to an actual vote tabulation, The New York Times on Thursday reports that in the 'diverse' city of Mosul ... the overall turnout seems slightly above 10 percent, or 'somewhat more than 50,000 of Mosul's 500,000 estimated eligible voters.'

He noted, of course, that this is a Sunni city, where turnout was lowest, but also pointed out that the media had inflated voter turnout in early reports from war zones in other countries.

I don't mean to be elitist, but if you and I missed The Times skepticism, how many Americans do you think were watching by the time a few reporters began digging for the truth?

Occasionally, of course, personal experience intrudes on the judgments of those bringing us the news; sometimes it even arrives at our breakfast table before the gatekeepers interpretation of events. This week, my wife Kathy got a call from her mother, who, along with her father, is a lifelong Republican. They live in a small city in Texas, where my father-in-law has withered to a shell of his once-strapping self, a victim of Alzheimer's disease. He is a Navy veteran, World War II era, so when the time came for him to be institutionalized, he moved in October to the Alzheimer's unit of a nearby Veterans Administration hospital. Now, the psychiatrist told my mother in law, they are kicking him out. The family has two months to find a nursing home, and the money to pay for it.

The psychiatrist cautiously told Kathy why, too: The 10,000 injured U.S. soldiers in Iraq are overwhelming the Veterans' Administration, asked to operate its hospitals without additional resources (that $80 billion apparently doesn't have those injured defending our country in mind). The agency's solution has been to begin systematically moving out veterans from other eras whose injuries cannot be directly linked to their service. An acquaintance, a doctor of a Boston-area VA hospital confirms that the same is happening across the system. Patients who can't prove their injuries or disabilities are linked directly to service are getting pink slips, which doesn't look good for Alzheimer's patients, even in a country with collective amnesia when it comes to waging wars.

I'm hoping this story will make the news soon, too, that in a few days, I can open my Globe or Times to find a Veterans Administration expose -- somewhere next to the department store ads on Page 14.

Losing weight, losing my mind

2005-01-28T03:30:00.000-08:00

Jan. 29, 2005

I've been eating an awful lot of spinach lately. That, or pecking on low-fat cheese sticks and, from time to time, my left arm. This is not a result of a newly developed obsessive compulsive disorder. I'm just awfully hungry.

Dieting has a way of doing that. Day 1 you tell yourself, "This is going to be easy. It just takes discipline." Day 2 your stomach starts to suck inward; it feels sort of like curdled milk looks. By Day 3 you gaze wistfully at every bite, caressing it with your eyes, willing it to last, wishing it would leave you feeling just a bit satisfied. (Perhaps you remember the old ballad, "I dreamed of pasta with its light brown sauce?")

Between meals, a radish never looked so seductive. And that's 20 minutes after clearing the dishes.

My current eating regimen is the South Beach diet, an eminently sensible approach developed by a heart specialist. It includes three meals a day and snacks between breakfast and lunch and again between lunch and dinner. The food is healthy -- vegetables by the bushel, fish and meat in whatever quantities keep you from going insane, salads galore. After a week I've lost 14 pounds, nearly halfway to my goal of 30. And I'm losing my mind.

For those of you who diet, I know you hear the same little voice: "There's got to be a better way." Even if I make it, I fear that the day I tip the scale at 190 pounds, my target weight, I'll lose myself in a vat of hot fudge sundae. Or down a dozen baked potatoes with butter and sour cream. Heck, fruit salad sounds awfully enticing right now. Or a piece of bread. Or a cracker with cheese. They're all forbidden.

"Don't you love all the fresh ingredients?" asks Kathy, head chef, cheerleader, my partner and taskmaster for 33 years.

No dear, fresh cilantro doesn't give me the chills.

Dieting must be done one day at a time. The first day we were in our conversational French class at Alliance Francais, the French Cultural Institute of Boston. Our teacher, a quintessential Parisienne from her carefree scarves to her brightly colored heels wrinkled her eyes just a bit before catching herself. "Diet?" she asked. "And why would you do that?" I'm too polite to probe, but I get the impression dieting in France carries the class of, say, drinking Coca-Cola with coq au vin. It's not the height of style. But just how do the French manage to eat great food, drink great wine and remain "les tombeurs" (the heartthrobs) of the civilized world?

One day at a time. Exercising helps. So, if you are a compulsive muncher like me, does locking the refrigerator and cabinets. This year I joined a gym closer to home. I'm going tomorrow, I promise. After two years of losing weight in spring and summer and gaining in fall and early winter, I'm determined to stay lean year round. And I'm doing this for a higher calling -- my longevity, not my waistline. At least I think so. For the past two years, my general practitioner has told me my cholesterol is fine but my triglycerides are high. This is what he told me about triglycerides: Absolutely nothing. He did, however, get me out of the office in four minutes.

Thankfully, the Internet provided what modern medical practice can't be bothered with -- a translation. Triglycerides, as far as I can figure, can sneak up on you. They've been linked with a higher rate of strokes, and I'm pretty brain dead already. So when I discovered the South Beach diet could lower triglycerides, I knew I could embark on it with virtue, not vanity..

Then a member of that troublesome French class put a boulder in the middle of my high road. Somewhere on the Internet, she discovered this bit of wisdom about health and dieting:

1. The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.
2. The Mexicans eat a lot of fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.
3. The Chinese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.
4. The Italians drink excessive amounts of red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than
Americans.
5. The Germans drink a lot of beer and eat lots of sausage and fats and suffer fewer heart
attacks than Americans.

CONCUSION: Eat and drink what you like. Speaking English is apparently what kills you.

Thankfully, we all know the Internet's facts are suspect. And radishes can be ravishing.

When winter lets us pause

2005-01-24T08:02:00.000-08:00

Jan. 22, 2005

The wind howled outside, pressing urgently against the living room windows. The blizzard drove temperatures to single digits, dropped visibility to near zero, carved ghostlike snowdrifts on the bushes and cars outside. And we relaxed, snuggled with a glass of wine by the fire, content to know that there was no place to go and that, with 2 feet or more on the way, life would be slow to resume its frenetic pace.

Winter can grind. Cracked hands, wet feet, slush to plow through, inches to shovel, aching back, runny nose. Yet it also offers one of life's delicious pleasures: the unannounced day off, a day to read or strum the guitar, to write a sonnet (if a sonnet-writer you are) or tread silently and bouyantly on snow shoes over the whitened landscape. Not that I did any of these. But opening an eye at 7, I rolled over and slept in. It sure felt good.

Freedom: Another word for someone else to fool

2005-01-20T18:09:00.000-08:00

Jan. 20, 2005

George Bush spoke of freedom today -- 27 times in one speech by National Public Radio's count. As police pepper-sprayed demonstrators, his rhetoric soared. Who noticed the contradiction? This administration has turned the practice of saying one thing and doing another into an unparalleled art form.

Life is increasingly surreal in America. While corporate executives, who bought their way into the inauguration, danced the Texas two-step, Boston police and FBI were scrambling two steps behind a reputed gang of Chinese chemists heading to our fine city to allegedly explode a dirty bomb. Let's hope it is just one more color-coded frenzy. (Where are you Tom Ridge when we need you?) While the President's rhetoric boomed over the historic buildings of Washington, the author of his policy on how to ignore the Geneva Conventions when committing torture awaited the end game of his confirmation as Attorney General.

America is on a roll, embracing increasingly repressive regimes from Saudi Arabia to Russia,
Uzbekistan to Egypt. There are no bad guys in these countries; they are our guys. And it looks like we'll need plenty of them. Seymour Hersh writes in The New Yorker that the Bush Administration is cooking up the next war in Iran. By that time our troops may need to take up metallurgy because all of the "hillbilly armor" dug out of landfills to bolster their fighting vehicles will be spent, along with our troops. Which leaves me worried. Will our covert operations be spread so thin that we won't have enough Deep Black bullies to torture the next haul of possible/maybe terrorists?

Buried deep inside The New York Times this week was a picture of a Iraqi child, perhaps 3 or 4, blood and tears streaming down her face. Her parents had just been gunned down at a U.S. military checkpoint because they did not stop their car fast enough. It was a stunning photo, if you were lucky enough to find it. The news business, it seems, doesn't want to make too much of the down side of war: The fact that innocents account for many of its victims.

"It is hard, maybe impossible, to fight a war if the cause is viewed as bankrupt," writes former New York Times foreign correspondent Chris Hedges in his edgy and powerful book, "War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning." "The sanctity of the cause is crucial to the war effort. The state spends tremendous time protecting, explaining and promoting the cause. And some of the most important cheerleaders of the cause are the reporters."

Beyond the fanfare of today's pageantry, freedom does have real meaning. But only when those who actually have it, reporters for example, use it.

When travel suspends time

2005-01-16T16:30:00.000-08:00

This piece ran in the Feb. 7 Christian Science Monitor. This is the original version as submitted to the paper. It didn't appear on this blog until Feb. 7.

Jan. 16, 2005

In the heart of Boston's South Station, you'll find an open air bookstore called "Barbara's Bestsellers." There, you can buy anything from the much-discussed "Against all Enemies" by Richard A. Clarke to such literary works as V.S. Naipaul's "Magic Seeds."

Across the room at the newspaper stand, the relatively highbrow Wall Street Journal is advertised in gilded letters. This says something to me: Reading America still rides the rails. Maybe that's why trains are going out of business. Because like train travel, reading America is well past its prime.

No matter to me. I'll be one of those on the last train to pull out of the station. Where else but on Amtrak does a voice come over the loudspeaker and announce, "Please throw out all your paper plates and bottles in the receptacles at the end of each car. We'd like to help, but they fired all
the janitors."

Where else does the cafe car man correctly pick out the woman giving him instructions as a teacher and then tell her, "Ma'am, I know you teachers like to help us all live life right but I've been doing this job for 30 years. Thir-ty years. I was a platoon leader in the Army. And you
know what. I believe I can do things right all by myself."

Where else do you see a stylish woman decked head to toe in expensive leather and a
full-length Pendleton coat sitting across the aisle from a guy with a two-day growth and a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes?

Amtrak's trains are always ready to surprise. They'll be on time one day and four hours late the next. You'll fall asleep one hour to the steady rolling of the car over the clickety-clack rails and awaken sometime later to see a swan floating pristinely by on a pond near the Long Island Sound.

It's more than a way to get from here to there. It's a way to journey from now to then, too -- a place and time to dream. My memories drift to a street in New York, where I'm headed for the first time in about a year. Each Christmas as a boy, I'd go to that street -- East 86th -- with my father, a street in the heart of the old Yorkville area that died with the old Germans
who'd fill its bakeries and delicatessens in the '40s, '50s, '60s and '70s, ordering "cafe und kuchen," schnaps and the rich dark chocolate sold by three generations of candy makers at the Elk Candy Co., the magical store with the 4-foot gingerbread house in the window, inviting December shoppers in.

It's there no longer. Nor is the schmaltzy violinist, with black tails and white gloves, who would entertain the diners at Cafe Geiger, where my Dad, in his glory, would spread his white napkin and eat beef tartar -- raw hamburger with capers and a raw egg on top -- to make the day's purchase of calories galore complete.

The train rolls along and I dream not just of times past but times that never did happen, the roads not taken of my life. But there's a gentleness to the rails that takes the sting out of "what if," that simply let's the mind wander and wonder why not. I believe a book title is taking shape as my brain rocks to the train's rhythm. "Sidetracked: A Journey Across America by
Rail." I like it. Now all I have to do is figure out the story.

A contrast in ethics

2005-01-10T09:39:00.000-08:00

Jan. 10, 2005

The contrast takes my breath away.

One headline tells the sad story of CBS News. The co-president of Viacom, its parent company, today fired the longtime CBS producer who prepared Dan Rather's flawed special report during the election campaign on President Bush's National Guard record. And the Viacom executive called for the resignation of all three CBS News executives who had overseen the segment, right up to the division's senior vice-president.

Like it or not, Viacom clearly took tough action. It didn't stop with a single scapegoat even though no one in this case was accused of making up sources or intentionally distorting the news. But an independent investigation did find CBS' once-vaunted news division was incredibly sloppy in rushing to air an erroneous report about Bush's already disputed record of service. Its special report severely undermined the network's credibility and allowed the Bush campaign to deflect criticism away from itself and onto CBS news during the closing weeks of the campaign.

Now for the other headline, the one you likely didn't ever read. "White House has nothing to say about the actions of Armstrong Williams." You likely didn't read this because few in the news media bothered to report it. You recall the story of Williams. He was paid $241,000 by the U.S. Department of Education to promote the Bush Administration's "No Child Left Behind" law. The problem is Williams was posing the whole time as a journalist, a syndicated columnist, a position from which he's been fired as well. What hasn't happened is any kind of reprecussions at the Department of Education. The White House has said nothing. It hasn't issued an apology for acting as if journalism in this country is routinely for sale. No one has been sacked. If anyone has been disciplined, the administration isn't saying.

The day before the CBS bloodbath, the network's chief Washington correspondent, Bob Schieffer, had this to say about the Williams incident: "Trying to corrupt the news media with bribes is wrong. If the Department of Education people haven't figured that out, then the president should educate them. A good lesson plan might include firing those responsible. Then he should promise the rest of us it will never happen again."

Sort of like CBS did. But Schieffer really should know better. Far as I can tell, the White House hasn't fired, demoted or arrested anyone for torture but for a few grunts too stupid to realize they'd been turned into animals by their actions and shouldn't record them for posterity in pictures. The president continues to laud Donald Rumsfeld as a great public servant although he's ultimately in charge of not only the torture apparatus but the entire failed war in Iraq. And he's bestowed a huge honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, on George Tenet, the former CIA chief whose agency's flawed intelligence got us into this mess in the first place.

No Bob, I wouldn't expect an apology from the White House. My guess is it's too busy concocting its next propaganda campaign and assailing the news media for their lack of ethics.

Buying off the news media

2005-01-08T13:28:00.000-08:00

Jan. 8, 2005

He is a one-time aide to Clarence Thomas, who himself has reported accepting more than $40,000 in gifts while meting out supposedly impartial justice on the nation's highest court. So perhaps it should come as no surprise that when the Department of Education sought a little free publicity from the media it turned to Armstrong Williams. That's right, the U.S. Department of Education bought the rights for good news, paying this ostensibly fair-minded columnist $241,000 -- real money -- to make No Child Left Behind look real good.

Don't you love the ethics of the righteous Republicans leading this nation. Just where do their family values begin? With the Republicans in Congress taking steps to ensure there won't be any more ethics investigations of sitting members? With the presumptive new Attorney General dodging Senate Judiciary Committee questions about his past endorsement of torture with the dexerity of a nimble-footed running back dodging tacklers in the open field? With government-produced propaganda videos that Republicans seem to be shipping with increasing frequency to the news media? Or with the more overt payola directed at Williams?

"We believe that the act of bribing journalists to bias their news in favor of government policies undermines the integrity of our democracy," Democratic senators Reid, Lautenberg and Kennedy wrote to the president. Seems plain as day to me.

What's more, I'll wager that if there's one bought-off journalist who has been caught, others likely are still in the business of promoting the administration's agenda. I only hope someone will continue to look for them. Still, it seems odd that anyone would bother to buy reporters off these days. Because, with some notable exceptions in the elite press, most journalists have become as much lapdogs of the Bush agenda as the Democrats in Congress. Not that Democrats or reporters are standing and cheering. But in most journalistic and political quarters the silence is deafening -- on torture by American military and spy agencies, on repeated ethical transgressions, on the erosion of civil liberties, and on an overall agenda of debt and war that leaves us far more vulnerable to terror than ever.

Journalism's job is not to represent any political party or any political ideology. But aggressive news organization's used to stay with a substantial story of government transgression until something was resolved, until something changed. I'll guarantee you that when they started covering Watergate, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were not popular in much of the media (and most definitely not in the White House). But neither they nor The Post let go. I've yet to see the same tenacity applied to this administration on anything.

Bravo to columnists like Dowd and Ivins, Krugman and Herbert, among others, for trying. But though their musings, unlike mine, are read by a real and sizable audience, it's an audience that these days appears to have no recourse. I could scream. But let me instead be a good solutions-oriented citizen. Consider. Ending any continuing payoffs to journalists might be a small first step in making a dent in that gargantuan budget deficit. A step with bipartisan support at that.

'We are all torturers now'

2005-01-06T06:05:00.000-08:00

By using torture, we Americans transform ourselves into the very caricature our enemies have sought to make us ... For America, torture is self-defeating; for a strong country, it is in the end a strategy of weakness. After Mr. Gonzales is confirmed, the road back -- to justice, order and propriety -- will be very long. Torture will belong to us all.

-- Mark Danner
New York Times opinion piece, "We Are All Torturers Now"

Jan. 6 , 2005

Finally someone has told it like it is. The word is torture. And by shrugging, and endorsing as Attorney General the author of America's "torture but not really" policy, the U.S. Senate and, by extension those who elected it, are all guilty. A harsh judgment you say. But is it really?

Listen up Democrats. Your candidate, John Kerry, said this about Abu Ghraib and torture on the campaign trail: Absolutely nothing. Once more. Absolutely nothing. Nor did you complain. And today, with the Alberto Gonzales hearings on tap, what are liberal blogs filled with? Quixotic efforts to get Barbara Boxer to challenge the election results on the Senate floor. Wrong concern, partisan conspiracy theory, hopeless quest.

Some serious people are very worried about Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General. Start with a dozen high-ranking former military officers who took the unprecedented step of voicing these concerns publicly. They understand that when we torture others, our troops are assured the same treatment. More than 200 religious leaders sent a letter. They understand that morality is not wrapped in a flag but defined by a country's actions. Maybe it's time for the left to understand that as well. This is not a partisan issue. It is an issue of our country's founding principles. Torture has no place in America. As it becomes more deeply imbedded, we stand on the ede of a path that has led others to self-delusion and, ultimately, dictatorship. This is the issue around which Americans must take a stand, not replaying the November election.

The illusion of security

2005-01-05T04:58:00.000-08:00

Jan. 5, 2004

The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee begins its confirmation hearing tomorrow for Alberto Gonzales, whom President Bush has appointed the new top law enforcement official of the United States. Even before the first question is asked, Gonzales' confirmation as Attorney General is being considered a foregone conclusion. The obvious question is, "Why?"

As President Bush's personal counsel, it is Gonzales who oversaw a series of memos that attempted to inoculate this administration from having to follow Geneva Conventions barring torture (yes, torture ... let's stop dancing around the word as the media have). On Jan. 25, 2002, The New York Times reports, he sent the president a letter laying out how the war on terror "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners." And as another set of hearing begins this month -- the courts-martial of four enlisted men and women charged in the atrocities of Abu Ghraib prison -- it seems increasingly absurd to throw the book at them while ignoring the actions of a man who played a central role in providing the rationale for misdeeds like theirs.

But such is America today. We live in a world of fear. And too many of us -- a majority judging from the election -- are willing to dismantle the civil liberties on which this nation was founded to construct an illusion of security. Look at recent polls. Just a month or so after the election, the Washington Post published a poll showing the U.S. public didn't like where the president was leading us in Iraq, on Social Security, on education and on health care. And he's the man the public elected. Why? The Post offered a big hint.: 60 percent still like the president's leadership in the unending war on terrorism.

This is the same reason, undoubtedly, why Americans today sit back while the government soberly discusses how and where to hold suspected terrorists, potentially for life, without trial, without counsel, without any vestige of due process. The excuse: The same has been done with other prisoners in other wars. Only this is a war without end. I won't bore you with the litany of reasons why George W. Bush hasn't done a good job of fighting the war against terror -- from diverting our energies and resources away from Osama bin Laden to cutting back aid to cities that can help bolster security on the home front. No, instead, I'd like to remind you of something we really all should know. Life ends. It's unpredictable. Stuff happens. We need to learn to deal with it.

Take this last week. At least 150,000 people, many on vacation at some of the world's most beautiful beaches were killed by a tsunami, an act of nature. Thousands of Americans are still unaccounted for. My cousin Steve was on some of those beaches in India during much of December. He returned home on Dec. 23. Much of life is that way, a matter of chance. This fall, my department lost a student. She was killed, shot through the eye by a "less-than-lethal" pellet from a police revolver for doing nothing more than standing with the cheering crowds after the Boston Red Sox beat the New York Yankees in Game 7 of their championship series.

Life and death. In many respects, if not most, we can't control our path short of barricading ourselves in a closet -- until we die of light deprivation and boredom. We can, however, control life's quality, as individuals and as a society. We can be a civil society, a society of law, a society of giving, a society that exercises its strength by setting standards rather than stooping to exercise its power just as viciously as those we righteously oppose. But that can't begin to happen, and that won't begin to happen, until someone -- religious leaders, Democrats, the news media, moderate Republicans, the Supreme Court -- shows the guts to speak out, consistently and unwaveringly. So far, that has not happened.

Among those who clearly understands the dangers is Chris Hedges, the former New York Times war correspondent who touches on the distorting effects of the war on terrorism in his book, "War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning." He writes: "As the battle against terrorism continues, as terrorist attacks intrude on our lives, as we feel less and less secure, the acceptance of all methods to lash out at real and perceived enemies will distort and deform our democracy."

It already is.

And that's the way it is ...

2005-01-02T16:01:00.000-08:00

Jan. 2, 2005

On most days, I consider Frank Rich required reading. His column in today's New York Times is no exception. "So the soldiers soldier on, and we party on," he writes. "...We have our tax cuts, and a president who promises to make them permanent. Such is the disconnect between the country and the war that there is no national outrage when the president awards the Medal of Freedom to the clowns who undermined the troops by bungling intelligence (George Tenet) and Iraqi support (Paul Bremer)."

As is the way in my house, I'd heard half the column before I managed to pick it up. My wife Kathy read it to me while I tried to focus on Page 1. "Frank Rich is talking about how everyone is so mealy-mouthed," she said. "Nobody stands for anything anymore."

And might that include the vaunted free press? I caught the tail end of Tim Russert's interview with Colin Powell on this morning's Meet the Press. Powell didn't care to say a word, thank you, about reports that the United States is planning to hold prisoners in Guantanemo Bay for life -- that's right, life -- without any trial. His non-answer seemed OK with Russert. Why should the Secretary of State have an opinion on the desecration of American law and the Constitution? TV is an entertainment medium, right? Minutes later, Russert's star-studded, four-person media panel started its year in review by agreeing to the man and woman (it has one) that all the grousing about America's slow reaction to the tsunami just didn't make sense. Case closed. Boob box banned.

Which is why Frank Rich gives me just a glimmer of hope. He may be back in the Arts & Leisure section of The Times again, but his message is political and, in a sort of New York cultured way, in your face. On the flap over America's unprotected troops in Iraq, he writes: "When Mr. Rumsfeld told Specialist Thomas Wilson in Kuwait that the only reason the troops lacked armor was 'a matter of production and capability' he was lying." Thank you, Mr. Rich, for a bit of truth.

I wish there were more like him. Remember Abu Ghraib? Early on, Seymour Hersh made a compelling case in the New Yorker that the torture there was part of a Deep Black operation approved to the highest levels of the Department of Defense. Subsequent articles in the New York Times and Washington Post connected the dots of abusive interrogation policies all the way to the White House. I leaned forward and waited. I still am, but I'm slouching now. The President blamed all those yucky photos on a few bad apples. The media, with cable television taking the lead, dutifully took note. The Republican-led Congress held a few pro-forma hearings. And Democratic nominee John Kerry -- handed one big opportunity to build a campaign around American values of honesty, democracy and fairness said ... absolutely nothing about Abu Ghraib in his campaign.

A few reporters still are nibbling around the edges. But do editors and other media decision-makers care? I found this story in my Boston Globe today on Page 14, prime real estate right next to an ad for The MBA Program at Simmons School of Management. It was a shortened version of the story Russert got no answer to from Colin Powell. The lead went like this:

WASHINGTON -- Administration officials are preparing long-range plans for indefinitely imprisoning suspected terrorists whom they do not want to set free or turn over to courts in the United States or other countries, according to intelligence, defense and diplomatic officials.

Page 14. Below the fold. To which I can only say -- !*$#@!!!!!. Does anyone out there have a pulse anymore? Because if the government can decide to hold anyone it likes for as long as it likes without representation, without trial and without any rights -- and nobody says peep, we are all screwed.

Golf anyone?

Musing on America 2005

2005-01-01T11:49:00.000-08:00

Jan. 1, 2005

The President announced today that American flags should be lowered to half-staff. I'm glad we have a decisive leader. One whose staff seems to be following the daily news and then scrambling to play catch-up. Sort of. Throughout Europe, New Year's eve celebrations were cancelled or curtailed. The world is hurting. My guess is that by the time all the news filters in, something approaching a quarter million people will have died in the tsunami that struck Indonesia and Sri Lanka and India and Somalia and Thailand. That great leveler that also left shattered families in Sweden and Italy, Denmark and Norway, Germany and Belgium. And yes, even a few in the US of A. So W. has been playing catch-up. First he promised $15 million. (Hey, it's half of what the inauguration will cost, not chicken feed considering W. and the boys from Texas believe in the power of big parties.) When the world squawked, W. stuck to his guns. Talking to the press in Crawford, he raised the ante to $35 million. Yesterday that number jumped tenfold to $350 million. W. is getting it. Slowly, mind you. But the man is compassionate. He will confirm that. And he will tell you that America is the most generous nation on Earth. ("We create our own reality," one GOP operative told The New York Times magazine sometime before the election. And for now, anyway, America is buying it.) Maybe, too, someone has let W. know that Indonesia is the largest Muslim country in the world. Aren't those the guys we want to win over to our side?

Please excuse my cynicism. Today is Jan. 1, the start of a New Year and, soon, a new administration, merely a more Neocon model of the old, will take over. Last night at Boston's First Night, I saw some Democrats running around with a sandwich board demanding a recount in Ohio. But beyond the quixotic, this election is long over. Which means that 2005 will be the year that America ....... Um. Beats me. My Tarot card reader has moved Arizona. But this blog will comment on the year as it evolves, nonetheless. It'll range from thoughts on the guy on my street who wouldn't share his snowblower with an aging neighbor shoveling his walk to thoughts on the politicians and media circus leading and commenting on leadership in Washington. As a perennial hypochondriac, I may occasionally throw in thoughts about corns or the endless battle of the aging against nose hair, so please forgive me in advance.

It seems a good year to get back to writing regularly (if only for myself). Call it the year of the 5s. I'm 55 myself, a Long Island boy who has wandered through at least 45 states, although I confess my image of some doesn't go too far beyond pumping gas. I've worked as a bell hop and desk clerk in the Rockies, lived a few years in Colorado, taught in small town central New York. To be honest, however, I'm one of those left and right coast guys -- seven years as an editor in California, 11 in and near New York City as a reporter and then professor, another seven in Boston, where I now teach journalism at Emerson College. If that doesn't add up to 55, well, just call me a slow starter. Back to the five thing. It is the fifth year of the 21st century, the 25th anniversary of my father's death and the fifth of my mother's. Which all means exactly nothing other than that everyone likes to scratch a message in the sand sometimes.

This blog will be my scratching. Just as I struggle to lose weight again by exercising my decaying muscles at the gym, I'm going to try to exercise my mental writing muscles here. So if you stumble in, drop by from time to time. Send me a post. And let me know what you think.