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US employers like Coca-Cola are implicated in Colombia's brutality.

At 5 o'clock in the
morning, the radio alarm begins to blare the news. The United States
is threatening to pull out of the World Conference Against Racism if
the conversation includes tensions between Israel and the
Palestinians. What a nightmare, I think as I sit up in bed. How can
the most powerful and diverse country on earth refuse to go to the
first global discussion of race? No one expected easy accord about
what's racial and what's not, but to refuse to attend the discussion
at all?

Perhaps I am unduly depressed because I am in a
small motel somewhere in...South Dakota, is it? Or maybe San Diego? I
made the terrible mistake of watching Planet of the Apes the
night before, in this dim room whose walls are flocked in orange fuzz
with silver trim. It is the end of a long week of speaking to
organizations that have called me in because someone has done
something like hang a big noose over a black person's work space, and
they would like me--me!--to get everyone speaking
again.

The last five days have involved flying into
Pittsburgh or Salt Lake City or Tampa in order to take a shuttle to
terminal Z, where militia members in camouflage or square dance teams
in pouffy skirts or troupes of young missionaries take flights to and
from small towns all over America in very small planes. I have been
lining up behind them, boarding ancient Cessna prop planes seating
ten--give or take carry-on weapons caches, guitars, extra Bibles and
box of diversity pamphlets--and bounce low to the ground all the way
to Saginaw or Elko or Huntsville or Dayton.

I get out of
bed and look for coffee on the room service menu. There is no room
service menu. There is no room service.

The gentleman who
comes to greet me on behalf of the Better Business Through
Multicultural Harmony Committee is from Bahrain and hails me like a
long-lost sister. I can assure you from personal experience how
dramatically America's demographics are changing; the smaller and
more off the beaten track the American town, the more likely the
confused little minority community will include representatives
recently arrived from Bangladesh or Sudan or Cambodia or
Cameroon.

The gentleman from Bahrain settles me into a
large, all-American car and whisks me off into the cornfields and
more cornfields. An hour later we hit a strip mall, turn left, a mile
and a half of soybeans--et voilà! East-West Central
Southern Industries (name changed to protect the innocent). The
conference room at whose door he deposits me has coffee! muffins! and
is really pretty pleasant, even given my yuppie
pretensions.

The problem I have been asked to tackle is a
new but essentially old-fashioned one. Someone with too much free
time has created a list of all the employees, put it online and
created the kind of cyberspatial graffiti that one hoped one never
had to think about after tenth grade, when notebooks were passed
around with a name on each page, and cruel anonymous comments were
scrawled beneath. This particular list ranks everyone by sexiness,
intelligence, dress and, perhaps most destructively, smell. The
comments are racialized, sexually crude, almost pathologically
immature but as hard to dismiss as a punch in the stomach. It is a
bully's shopping list of strategies to humiliate, and it has created
the intended havoc, spilling into the small town beyond. "Affirmative
action bitch. Wears Payless shoes," is a typically bitter little
entry.

It takes me all morning just to sort out who has
injured whom. Virtually everyone in the company has hurled enough
epithets to make everyone else on the planet hate them forever. I
decide to speak to just a few people, those in the best position to
try to make some systemic improvements.

The gentleman from
Bahrain volunteers to organize a dinner. He makes a few phone calls
on my behalf, and soon we are off to a Vietnamese restaurant in the
mall, where we meet with an odd assortment of community organizers
and spokesmen. The cast of characters includes a local black minister
who (like a weird inverted image of George W. Bush's saying that the
Nation of Islam was one of the world's great religions) is worried
that his new Islamic Moroccan neighbors are followers of Louis
Farrakhan. There's a white police officer who is sincerely trying to
smooth the waters while dropping phrases like "outside agitators" and
"stingy as a Jew." There's a Nigerian man with five sons who is
worried about his children being called "gang members" every time
they walk to school together. There's a Native-American man who shows
up to protest that no one remembered to invite him.

There's
the head of a local evangelical group trying to raise money to buy
Sudanese slaves in order to set them free. There's a representative
of a human rights agency who says that buying slaves is not a
political solution but rather encourages traders to raise the price.
"It's part of a larger global sex market," he says. "And it operates
right here in America--you don't have to travel to Eastern Europe or
Africa. Would you consider going to some big-time pimps, buying a few
sex slaves, setting them free on a street corner and really think
you'd accomplished much of anything in the way of eliminating the
business?"

There is a genial Republican Party leader who
wants me to meet a Mozambican woman who has been studying at the
local university and who is miserably homesick. "We haven't done our
job if she wants to go back to a country like that," he says, and
introduces me as "an example of what can be achieved in the US." She
is a charming person, with a degree from the Sorbonne. "Mozambique is
my home," she sighs wearily. "Americans know nothing of
Mozambique."

And there's a recently arrived Palestinian
refugee and a Jewish teacher whose family migrated to this town
seventy years ago. They are neighbors, and express overlapping
concerns about events in the Middle East. "We might not get along at
all if we were there. But here we are friends. Here," they add, "it
is everybody else." As we gaze around the room, it does seem as if
these two are the only ones on fully cordial terms.

"But,"
they conclude after a moment's reflection, "at least they all showed
up."

It should surprise no one that the European revolutionaries are not inspired by the American dream. Nobody, after all, expected the fighters for national liberation in the post-Napoleonic era to cherish the memory of Metternich, and the United States is now a much mightier pillar of the new Holy Alliance for the preservation of the status quo. It intervenes, directly or by proxy, wherever the social order is threatened, from Taiwan to Greece to Guatemala. Whenever they are under attack, profit and privilege can rely on the forces of "freedom." In Vietnam the American bombers spell out for the local population the bloody message "Better dead than red." The Green Berets are ready to jump in order to rescue the ruling oligarchies of the banana and other republics of Latin America (though the profits of US companies are now better insured by training local troops for the struggle against "subversion"). Like a black knight in nuclear armor the United States Navy patrols the seas, proclaiming that no more social revolutions will be allowed, that China's in 1949 was the last to be tolerated, while the Cuban affair was simply a misunderstanding. The Vietnamese resistance aroused enthusiasm far from Hanoi and Saigon because it challenged American presumption and proved that human courage still counted even in the world of nuclear balance. The Tet offensive in 1968 drove Western students to action because it revealed that the enemy was not invincible. Che Guevara, alive or dead, was hailed as a symbol of solidarity, of the international nature of the anti-imperialist struggle.

The salesmen of the American dream, and they are legion in Europe, prefer to bypass this role of international gendarme, or to justify it in terms of domestic achievement. They point to the democratic niceties, to the civil liberties the United States can still afford. They stress even more the economic achievement, the technological lead, the intellectual investment that vast accumulation has rendered possible, the level of research and management, the high productivity--in short, the superior wealth of the nation; and they turn to the young revolutionaries with the rhetorical question: Can you dismiss the American model in spite of all this? The answer is not in spite of it but because of it. The most frightening prospect, the American nightmare, is that with so much wealth man should not be able to build a different kind of society. In fact, the Europeans are merely echoing the indictment of America's New Left which, instead of being dazzled by the moon, points to the dark side of American society; its inequality and racism, its collective poverty and private plenty, its derelict health services, its belated discovery of pollution and urban chaos--and to the system responsible for it all.

To its admirers, the United States has discovered the secret of perpetual motion for capitalism. Advertising, as a new dynamic method of sales promotion, is a way of getting rid of industrial surpluses superior to that of coffee burning in agriculture. Above all, with military expenditures absorbing, even in official figures, about one-tenth of the national product, the state has a powerful lever to direct the rhythm of output. Advanced capitalism differs from its predecessor. The vagaries of the cycle are less pronounced, unemployment is relatively smaller, growth comparatively more regular. This is not the place to discuss whether this post-Keynesian equilibrium, resting on a militarization of the economy unprecedented in peacetime, is stable and lasting. The painful discovery of America's rulers is that even while the going is good, the system runs into new contradictions. American expansion meets resistance at home, as well as abroad. The outsiders rebel. The hitherto passive blacks refuse to continue being pariahs in the alleged land of plenty. The growing movement of protest among students and the radical part of the intelligentsia is a symptom of something deeper--the clash between the direction to which the expansion of productive forces is geared and the social needs of our age.

The "consumer society" is a misnomer suggesting that at least, as regards consumption, the average citizen is the uncrowned King. Though his material conditions have in many ways improved beyond recognition, modern man is still an alienated producer and a highly conditioned buyer of goods, a dissatisfied purchaser of leisure and pleasure with very little control over his environment. A producer society, guided by industrial and commercial profit, would be a much more accurate description. That problems such as pollution and urban decay are tackled only when they become unbearable is in the logic of things. Modern capitalism has changed enough in method and manner to face up to the unprofitable when it is under pressure. But it has preserved its essence. Profit remains its ultimate driving force, and it is intrinsically unable to confront the collective or individual problems of our society from any other angle. Consciously or unconsciously, this is what the protest is really about.

The similarity of some of its manifestations on both sides of the Atlantic is quite natural. The Englishman, the Frenchman or the German traveling in the United States is less struck by contrasts than by resemblances. He has the strange impression of making a journey through his own country's more or less distant future. For the most political among them, however impressed they may be by the technological progress, it is a journey to night's end. They know that this is their inevitable prospect unless Europe can forge a different kind of society. The bitter controversies between "Europeans" and "anti-Europeans" are really irrelevant in this context. The conflict that has begun cuts across continental as well as national frontiers. The European protesters who look ahead are joining hands with America's New Left. In Western Europe the real division is between those who seek socialism and those who opt for the American model. "Et tout le reste est littérature." It was no accident if during the French May crisis the United States authorities trembled for the fate of Gaullism. They sensed, quite rightly, that the forces then launching the assault against Gaullism are the same that are waging the struggle against Europe's American future.

The conflict is now intercontinental, and so is the solidarity. Revolutionary "grouplets" across Western Europe used to look exclusively to the Third World, to the Vietnamese or the Latin American guerrillas fighting against imperialism from without. They are now also looking to America's young radicals, who are beginning to carry on the same struggle from within. By the same token, they have discovered their own independent and intermediate role.

In mood at least, there are some parallels between the present period and the middle of the 19th century in Europe. Then, too, solidarity was the order of the day, and during the so-called "Spring of the People," fighters for national liberation journeyed from country to country battling "for your freedom and ours." Now, whatever policemen may think, direct intervention is still rare. The community of purpose and struggle is nevertheless growing. Europe's young students and workers salute their fellows across the Atlantic with the new message: "Against your present and our future."

West wind, east wind.... There is nothing new in the violent reaction of Europe's radicals against American interventionism nor in their hostile rejection of the American model. The real novelty is that the Soviet Union has practically vanished as a counter-attraction. During the French crisis there were many references to the Bolshevik October, but none, apart from contemptuous dissociation, to the bureaucratic rule of Stalin's heirs. This antagonism or indifference to the Soviet model--revisionist for some, Stalinist for others, irrelevant for most--characteristic of the May movement, was one of the reasons why orthodox Communists viewed it from the start with deep mistrust. Yet even the orthodox in the West are by now highly discreet about citing the Soviet Union as an example. They are particularly reticent about dwelling on the prospects of the Soviet bloc since the invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Spring in 1968 flourished in unison in Paris and Prague, but hopes faded separately. The French crisis was over, at least temporarily, by the time the Russian tanks rolled into Prague on August 21, and their invasion marked the beginning of the end of the unique experiment of Czech students and workers. The epilogue in Prague came after the French act, and thus could not affect it. But it has affected the European horizon. The Czech tragedy throws a new light on the problem of the dismantlement of Stalinism in Eastern Europe. It makes it necessary to reassess the hope of a Socialist revival within the Soviet bloc and, by the same token, the chances that inspiration in Europe may once again come from the East.

It is about two feet long, cylindrical and far denser than steel. When fired from a U.S. Army M1 Abrams tank, it is capable of drilling a hole through the strongest of tank armors. The makers of this tank-killing ammunition say it is the best in the world. But there is one problem with the Pentagon's super bullet: It is made of radioactive waste.

The first time the Army used this "depleted uranium" (D.U.) ammunition on a battlefield was during the Gulf War, in 1991. Yet despite Pentagon assurances that only a small number of U.S. troops were exposed to dangerous levels of D.U., a two-month investigation by The Nation has discovered that hundreds and perhaps thousands of U.S. veterans were unknowingly exposed to potentially hazardous levels of depleted uranium, or uranium-238, in the Persian Gulf. Some soldiers inhaled it when they pulled wounded comrades from tanks hit by D.U. "friendly fire" or when they clambered into destroyed Iraqi vehicles. Others picked up expended rounds as war trophies. Thousands of other Americans were near accidental explosions of D.U. munitions.

The Army never told combat engineer Dwayne Mowrer or his fellow soldiers in the First Infantry Division much about D.U. But the G.I.s learned how effective the radioactive rounds were as the "Big Red One" made its way up the carnage-ridden four-lane Kuwaiti road known as the "highway of death." Mowrer and his company saw the unique signature of a D.U. hit on nearly half the disabled Iraqi vehicles encountered. "It leaves a nice round hole, almost like someone had welded it out," Mowrer recalled.

What Mowrer and others didn't know was that D.U. is highly toxic and, according to the Encyclopedia of Occupational Health and Safety, can cause lung cancer, bone cancer and kidney disease. All they heard were rumors.

"Once in a while you'd hear some guy say 'Hey, I heard those things were radioactive,'" Mowrer said. "Of course, everybody else says, 'Yeah, right!' We really thought we were in the new enlightened Army. We thought all that Agent Orange stuff and human radiation experiments were a thing of the past."

So Mowrer and his comrades didn't worry when a forty-ton HEMTT transport vehicle packed with D.U. rounds accidentally exploded near their camp. "We heard this tremendous boom and saw this black cloud blowing our way," he said. "The cloud went right over us, blew right over our camp."

Before they left the gulf, Mowrer and other soldiers in the 651st Combat Support Attachment began experiencing strange flulike symptoms. He figured the symptoms would fade once he was back in the United States. They didn't. Mowrer's personal doctor and physicians at the local Veterans Administration could find nothing wrong with him. Meanwhile, his health worsened: fatigue, memory loss, bloody noses and diarrhea. Then the single parent of two began experiencing problems with motor skills, bloody stools, bleeding gums, rashes and strange bumps on his eyelids, nose and tongue. Mowrer thinks his problems can be traced to his exposure to D.U.

The Pentagon says problems like Mowrer's could not have been caused by D.U., a weapon that many Americans have heard mentioned, if at all, only in the movie Courage Under Fire, which was based on a real-life D.U. friendly-fire incident. The Defense Department insists that D.U. radiation is relatively harmless--only about 60 percent as radioactive as regular uranium. When properly encased, D.U. gives off so little radiation, the Pentagon says, that a soldier would have to sit surrounded by it for twenty hours to get the equivalent radiation of one chest X-ray. (According to scientists, a D.U. antitank round outside its metal casing can emit as much radiation in one hour as fifty chest X-rays.) Plus, the military brass argues that D.U. rounds so effectively destroyed Iraqi tanks that the weapons saved many more U.S. lives than radiation from them could possibly endanger.

But the Pentagon has a credibility gap. For years, it has denied that U.S. soldiers in the Persian Gulf were exposed to chemical weapons. In September Pentagon officials admitted that troops were exposed when they destroyed Iraqi stores of chemical weapons, as Congress held hearings on "Gulf War Syndrome." The Pentagon also argued, in its own defense, that exposure to chemical weapons could not fully explain the diverse range of illnesses that have plagued thousands of soldiers who served in the Persian Gulf. Exposure to D.U.--our own weaponry, in other words--could well be among the missing links.

Scientists point out that D.U. becomes much more dangerous when it burns. When fired, it combusts on impact. As much as 70 percent of the material is released as a radioactive and highly toxic dust that can be inhaled or ingested and then trapped in the lungs or kidneys. "This is when it becomes most dangerous," says Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. "It becomes a powder in the air that can irradiate you." Some scientists speculate that veterans' health problems stem from exposure to chemical agents combined with D.U., burning oil-field vapors and a new nerve-gas vaccine given to U.S. troops. "We know that depleted uranium is toxic and can cause diseases," said Dr. Howard Urnovitz, a microbiologist who has testified before the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses. "We also know these soldiers were exposed to large amounts of nerve-gas agents. What we don't know is how the combination of these toxic and radioactive materials affect the immune system."

Exactly how many U.S. soldiers were exposed to dangerous levels of D.U. during the Gulf War remains in dispute. Friendly-fire incidents left at least twenty-two veterans with D.U. shrapnel embedded in their bodies. The Veterans Administration is also monitoring the health of eleven more soldiers who were in tanks hit by D.U. but who were not hit by shrapnel, and twenty-five soldiers who helped prepare D.U.-contaminated tanks for shipment back to the United States without being told of the risk. The tanks were later buried in a radioactive waste disposal site run by the Energy Department.

No Protection

The Nation investigation has also discovered that the average infantry soldier is still receiving no training on how to protect against exposure to D.U., although such training was called for by an Army report on depleted uranium completed in June 1995. On the training lapses, the Pentagon does acknowledge past mistakes. Today the Army is providing new training in D.U. safety procedures for more soldiers, particularly members of armor, ordnance or medical teams that handle D.U. on a routine basis. "I feel confident that if an individual soldier has a need to know, they will be provided that training from the basic level on," Army Col. H.E. Wolfe told The Nation. But Wolfe confirmed that even now, not all infantry will get D.U. training.

Although the full hazards of these weapons are still not known, the law allows the President to waive restrictions on the sale of D.U. to foreign armies. Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that the Pentagon has already sold the radioactive ammunition to Thailand, Taiwan, Bahrain, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Greece, Korea, Turkey, Kuwait and other countries which the Pentagon will not disclose for national security reasons. The proliferation of D.U. ammunition around the world boosts the chances that U.S. soldiers will eventually be on the receiving end of the devastating weapon.

A broad coalition of veterans organizations, environmental groups and scientists hope that won't happen. On September 12, they met in NewYork to kick off a campaign calling for an international ban on D.U. weapons. Even the conservative-minded Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion recently passed resolutions calling on the Defense Department to reconsider its use of the controversial weapon.

"Clearly the Department of Defense hasn't thought through the use of D.U. on the battlefield and what kind of exposures they are subjecting our troops to," charged Matt Puglisi, the assistant director of veterans affairs and rehabilitation for the American Legion. "It is a very effective weapon, which is why the D.O.D. really doesn't want to see it re-examined. We only spent a couple of days [in winning the Gulf War]. But what if we had a fight that took years and years? We could have tens of thousands of vets with D.U. shrapnel in them."

The Gulf War Test

The U.S. Army began introducing D.U. ammo into its stockpiles in 1978, when the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in intense competition over which side would develop the most effective tank. Washington feared that the Soviets with their T-72 had jumped ahead in the development of armor that was nearly impenetrable by traditional weapons. It was thought that D.U. rounds could counter the improved Soviet armor. But not until Iraq's Soviet-supplied army invaded oil-rich Kuwait and President Bush sent an expeditionary force of 500,000 to dislodge it was there a chance to battle-test the D.U. rounds.

American M1 Abrams tanks and Bradley armored personnel carriers fired D.U. rounds; the A-10 Warthog aircraft, which provided close support for combat troops, fired twin 30-millimeter guns with small-caliber D.U. bullets. All told, in the 100 hours of the February ground war, U.S. tanks fired at least 14,000 large-caliber D.U. rounds, and U.S. planes some 940,000 smaller-caliber rounds. D.U. rounds left about 1,400 Iraqi tanks smoldering in the desert. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf recalled one commander saying his unit "went through a whole field of burning Iraqi tanks."

The D.U. weapons succeeded beyond the Pentagon's wildest dreams. But they received little public attention compared with the fanfare over other high-tech weapons: smart bombs, stealth fighters and Patriot missiles (which looked good, even if they didn't, as it turned out, work). D.U., perhaps the most effective new weapon of them all, was mentioned only in passing. "People have a fear of radioactivity and radioactive materials," explained Dan Fahey, a former Navy officer who served in the gulf. "The Army seems to think that if they are going to keep using D.U., the less they tell people about it the better."

As the U.S.-led coalition forces swept to victory, many celebrating G.I.s scrambled onto--or into--disabled Iraqi vehicles. "When you get a lot of soldiers out on a battlefield, they are going to be curious," observed Chris Kornkven, a staff sergeant with the 304th Combat Support Company. "The Gulf War was the first time we saw Soviet tanks. Many of us started climbing around these destroyed vehicles." Indeed, a study by the Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm Association found that out of 10,051 Gulf War veterans who have reported mysterious illnesses, 82 percent had entered captured enemy vehicles.

Other soldiers might have been exposed to harmful levels of D.U. as they rescued comrades from vehicles hit by friendly fire. A Gulf War photo book, Triumph in the Desert, contains one dramatic picture of soldiers pulling wounded Americans from the burning hull of an Abrams tank that had been hit by a D.U. round. Black smoke from the depleted-uranium explosion billows around the rescuers. Still other G.I.s picked up fragments of large-caliber D.U. rounds or unexploded small rounds and wore them as jewelry, hung around the soldiers' necks. "We didn't know any better," said Kornkven. "We didn't find out until long after we were home that there even was such a thing as D.U."

But the Americans facing perhaps the greatest risk from D.U. were those who had been hit by D.U. shrapnel, especially those still carrying radioactive fragments in their bodies. Robert Sanders, who drove a tank, was one apparent casualty. On the third day of the ground war, his tank was hit by a D.U. round fired from another U.S. tank. "I had stinging pain in my shoulder and a stinging pain in my face from shrapnel," Sanders said.

Military doctors removed the shrapnel. Several years later, however, Sanders heard that D.U. was radioactive and toxic, so he obtained his medical records. He found an interdepartmental fax saying doctors had removed bits of an "unknown metal" from his shoulder and that it was "probably D.U." Four years after he was wounded, Sanders took a urine test for depleted uranium, which revealed high levels of it in his system. The Pentagon had never made an effort to tell him of his likely exposure.

Even the end of the ground war on February 28, 1991, did not end the threat of exposure to U.S. soldiers. Government documents reveal that in one accident alone, at a camp at Doha, about twelve miles from Kuwait City, as many as 660 rounds weighing 7,062 pounds burned, releasing dark clouds of D.U. particles. Many of the 3,000 U.S. troops stationed at the base participated in cleanup operations without protective gear and without knowledge of the potential dangers.

The Aftermath

At war's end, U.S. forces left behind about 300 tons of expended D.U. ammunition in Kuwait and Iraq, a veritable radioactive waste dump that could haunt inhabitants of the region for years. In August 1995, Iraq presented a study to the United Nations demonstrating sharp increases in leukemia and other cancers as well as other unexplained diseases around the Basra region in the country's south. Iraqi scientists attributed some of the cancers to depleted uranium.

Some U.S. officials and scientists have questioned the Iraqi claims. But former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who has made two recent trips to Iraq, observes that "the health ministry and doctors particularly in Basra and the south are terribly concerned about a range of problems that were not experienced before: fetuses with tumors, high rates of leukemia." And a secret British Atomic Energy Authority report leaked to the London Independent in November 1991 warned that there was enough depleted uranium left behind in the Persian Gulf to account for "500,000 potential deaths" through increased cancer rates, although it noted that such a figure was an unlikely, worst-case scenario. That figure was based on an estimate that only forty tons of D.U. was left behind.

Another study, by Siegwart Gunther, president of the Austrian chapter of Yellow Cross International, reported that D.U. projectiles "were gathered by children and used as toys." The study noted that a little girl who collected twelve of the projectiles died of leukemia. Gunther collected some D.U. rounds in southern Iraq and took them to Germany for analysis. However, when Gunther entered Germany, the D.U. rounds were seized. The authorities claimed that just one projectile emitted more radiation in five hours than is allowed per year under German regulations.

Cleaning up the radioactive mess in the Persian Gulf would cost "billions," even if it were feasible, said Leonard Dietz, an atomic scientist who wrote a report on depleted uranium for the Energy Department. But the Pentagon maintained in a report that "no international law, treaty, regulation, or custom requires the U.S. to remediate Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm battlefields."

Those who suggest otherwise have found that they must fight the military industry as well as the Pentagon. In January 1993 Eric Hoskins, a public health specialist who surveyed Iraq as a member of a Harvard team, wrote an Op-Ed in The New York Times warning that D.U. may be causing health problems in Iraqi children. A few weeks later a harsh letter to the editor accused Hoskins of "making readers of limited scientific literacy the lawful prey of his hyperbole," which reaches the "bizarre conclusion that the environmental aftermath of the Persian Gulf war is not Iraq's fault, but ours!" The author, Russell Seitz, was identified as an associate with the "Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, Harvard University."

Though the letter appeared to be the work of a neutral scientist, the Olin Institute at Harvard was established by the John M. Olin Foundation, which grew out of the manufacturing fortune created by the Olin Corporation, currently the nation's only maker of D.U. antitank rounds. Seitz did not answer a request from The Nation seeking comment.

Despite the Pentagon's love affair with D.U., there is an alternative--tank ammunition made from tungsten. Matt Kagan, a former munitions analyst for Jane's Defence Weekly, said the latest developments in tungsten technology have made it "almost as effective as D.U." That assessment is shared by Bill Arkin, a columnist for The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists who has consulted on D.U. for Greenpeace and Human Rights Watch. "It comes down to this," Arkin said. "Is there a logical alternative that provides the same military capability and doesn't leave us with this legacy? The answer is yes, tungsten."

But tungsten is more expensive and must be imported, while the United States has more than 500,000 tons of depleted uranium, waste left behind by the production of nuclear weapons and by nuclear generators. Scientists have long looked for a way to re-use what otherwise must be stored at great expense in remote sites.

"It's just a cost issue," argued Arkin. "But nobody ever thought through what would happen when we shoot a lot of this stuff around the battlefield. It's not a question of whether a thousand soldiers were exposed or fifty soldiers were exposed. We were probably lucky in the Gulf War. What happens when we're fighting a war that makes the Gulf War look like small potatoes?"

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Describing Alison Lurie's fiction as a decades-long debate with James Merrill explains a lot about her and, by extension, American culture in general. This memoir, her second work of nonfiction, tells how they met in the mid-1950s, Lurie the bored, intelligent faculty wife of a dullish junior English professor
at Amherst, Merrill a visiting teacher of poetry writing. Lurie says that he paid to have her first book privately printed, a memoir of their friend V.R. Lang, which led to the publication of Lurie's first novel Love and Friendship. She acknowledges that her novel includes a character combining traits drawn from Merrill and from his companion David Jackson, though this character appears only in epistolary form, the gay author of witty letters about his visiting gig in a college town resembling Amherst--at least, as a satirist would see it.

Familiar Spirits doesn't recount the remainder of Lurie's career as a fiction writer, but I'll support my opening comment above by pointing out that her third novel, an exposé of the world of mediums and spiritualist mysticism, is dedicated to Merrill and Jackson. (Her second novel was a witty satire of life in Los Angeles in the early 1960s.) In Real People, her fourth, the writer heroine, during a residency at an artists' colony based on Yaddo, forgoes the company of a refined writer boyfriend for an affair with a crude but sexy sculptor, who advances his suit by suggesting that her previous attachment is a closeted homosexual. The Lurie-Merrill dialectic continues, under several guises, in later books, including a story collection titled Women and Ghosts. The book under review, as it pursues Lurie's serialized romance with Merrill, vacillates between praise and condemnation, the literary equivalent of a lover's quarrel, with the emphasis on "quarrel." You can't help asking why, if she came to dislike Merrill and what he stood for, she didn't simply stop seeing him. Instead, she seems to have resolutely kept after him--for example, buying a house in Key West the year after he began wintering there, a vantage point from which she could continue in her preferred role as disapproving spectator of aberrant behavior.

The son of the Charles Merrill who made one fortune by founding a brokerage house and another hefty one backing chain stores like Safeway, James Merrill violated one of the ironclad commandments for American artists: Thou shalt not be rich. Though Lurie doesn't seem to know about Safeway, she talks a lot about wealth and its impact on Merrill's life and work. It's clear that "Jimmy," as she calls him, liked this new woman friend; and, meanwhile, several benefits connected to his privileged situation trickled down to her--his literate conversation, inclusion in his cosmopolitan social life and funds disbursed for her debut book publication. Still, she resents his freedom from the typical cares of a middle-income household where, for example, the children's education has to be paid for. Here, even the childless can sympathize. In the authorial big leagues, are the touchdowns truly deserved when they aren't scored on a level playing field?

This is the moment for me to state that, without ever quite developing a warm friendship, I was closely associated with James Merrill for a decade and a half, so that my own observations overlap with some of Alison Lurie's. She was his friend nearly twenty years before I met him and for the last part of his life as well, a time when he and I were no longer speaking to each other. Even so, she doesn't seem to be aware that, during their long friendship, he held her somewhat at arm's length. Many of her assumptions about Merrill and Jackson are mistaken, from what I know--beginning with the notion that Jackson himself had a sizable private income. That is apparently what he told her; but (as the late David Kalstone explained to me many years ago) the funds came from Merrill, who settled a fortune on Jackson when they first became a couple. Doing so was probably a kind of test. Merrill was a romantic, but, like most rich people, he tended to mistrust the unmoneyed, and there were solid reasons for his caution. Lurie's unflattering book, which he would have loathed, is a case in point. Once provided for, Jackson (again, according to Kalstone) didn't bolt; but he was the first to step outside the relationship for extracurricular sex. Merrill didn't object to the new format; in fact, he quickly followed suit. We can take a Victorian attitude about their relational contract, but we should also admit that, on that hand, the couple was no different from many others, gay or straight, in artistic circles; think of Elizabeth Bowen and Alan Cameron or W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman.

Lurie can't be unaware of instances like these, and so you wonder why the term "promiscuity" is laid on so indiscriminately throughout the memoir. Boys in the band who read it will understand right away why Merrill might have considered it inadvisable to allow a roman à clef novelist (and now memoirist) like Lurie access to the whole, awful truth. Faced with her museum-quality obtuseness, they'll want to dig in the bottom drawer and pull out an old T-shirt with the motto, "It's a gay thing: You wouldn't understand."

While Lurie envies the carefree life her two friends led, she never pauses to reflect on the damage coming of age as a gay man in that period inflicted. Gay sex was a felony and, except among the enlightened, a sin or an illness. Most public venues were closed to artists who portrayed homosexuality as merely a routine variation of the human possible. Merrill fell back on classic, Wildean defenses: He satirized, and he adopted fictive masks. Although many readers were tickled by his comic irony, its pervasiveness in his work meant that he was relegated to the second rank, all the more since the poems were riddled with unpopular characteristics such as an interest in Europe and works of literature, art and music produced before last year. A frequent critical response to his poetry was that it was "elegant," "brittle," "mannered," all of these semi-polite synonyms for "queer." If you accept Philip Rahv's division of American writers into two groups, redskins (e.g., Whitman and Hemingway) and palefaces (e.g., Poe and Henry James), then you won't hesitate to put Merrill into the second. But maybe those categories are an oversimplification?

It's still too soon to make a balanced estimate of his lyric poetry, but I might as well cast my vote along with Lurie's negative one and say that his own monumental "epic" The Changing Light at Sandover is a failure. A failure with good lines and bits, but still... The central thesis of the Lurie memoir is that undertaking this project was an artistic error for Merrill and a personal calamity for David Jackson. After the opening chapters' praising portrait of Merrill, Lurie becomes hostile, as any reader of hers might have predicted, when she reacts to the publication of a work based on Merrill's literary love affair with the Ouija board. You're always supposed to allow authors their donnée, but it's hard not to lose interest immediately when you consider the premise of the work: That the best and brightest of the great dead, plus several archangels and a deity called "God B," settled on a middle-aged gay couple in Connecticut as the chosen conduit for an apocalyptic message they wanted channeled to humankind. The poem's weirder characters and episodes include a series of "mathematical formulae" that "look" like bats, one of them eventually turning into the spiritualist equivalent of a peacock. Named "Mirabell" by his new friends, this being is joined by "Uni," a unicorn lacking his kind's signature horn. At the trilogy's conclusion these two are joined at the hip to form a Pegasus-like creature that can fly and incidentally embody the upward surge of authentic inspiration.

These are typical events along the yellow brick road, and I sympathize with Lurie's distaste for a project removed that far from the consensus universe. Meanwhile, she strongly identifies with Jackson and believes that his own literary gifts (he had published a few works of short fiction) were siphoned off into Merrill's otherworldly epic. She guesses that it was really his hand that moved the pointer to compose the messages they received, and I think the guess is on target. Because the poem is really the product of joint authorship, she's upset that Jackson hasn't received due recognition for his part in it. But, now, wait: If she doesn't like the work, why does she want Jackson to get credit as one of its authors? Besides that, the fact is that Merrill revised almost all the Ouija messages they received to make from them a more coherent work. If the results are still bad, do we assign most of the responsibility to him or to Jackson?

At least most of the raw material they recorded has to be credited to his account, i.e., the misconstrued "science" and faux-mystic verbiage, along with the apology in favor of enlightened despots like Akhenaton and even dictator-murderers like Stalin and Hitler. That, plus the anti-Semitism, race condescension and sexist attitudes that crop up in it. When you add the bald PR campaign for gay male artistic superiority (from Plato to Virgil to Whitman to Proust) harped on by some of the spirit voices, it gets pretty ludicrous. Western Civ was a gay plot? Back to the drawing board, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Vermeer, Bach, Goethe, George Eliot, Kafka, Frank Lloyd Wright, Balanchine. Some of the latter are automatically relegated to second rank because poetry and music are accounted as intrinsically superior to visual art, architecture or dance, which depend more on the material world. Do you laugh or weep when critics widely respected hail this Emerald City cum Fascist re-education center as a masterpiece?

Lurie believes that Jackson's sense of failure when he compared a negligible personal achievement to Merrill's critical acclaim explains his sharp decline, a decline accelerated by all those hours expended in sawing away at the Board. The first assertion is plausible, the second, less so. But you can't discuss either Jackson's or Merrill's travails without factoring in alcohol, drugs, a relentless social and professional schedule, and the general problem of aging (particularly acute for gay men). Jackson was also a chain smoker and eventually developed emphysema, which, because of neural oxygen-deprivation, dulled his mental capacities. He is still alive today, though not lucid. With characteristic tact, Lurie describes him as a "ghost," a label supporting her thesis, but at the expense of an invalid she describes as one of her closest friends.

Daily immersion in the spirit world probably did take its toll; but I'd suggest that an even greater strain was a social habit current among Merrill's set: communicating by indirect means, hinting, double-entendre. I recall him quoting his mother, who warned him "never to let down the mask." His words and actions, most of the time, had double meanings, and that was true in spades for the poems. The Ouija epic should be understood not merely as an alphabet soup sent down to mortals from dreamlands somewhere over the rainbow but also as a commentary on his own milieu and on the situation of contemporary letters. Lurie seems to have grasped this, decoding the bio of the Ouija-world "patron" that Merrill and Jackson channeled for her as an allegorical (and none too flattering) thumbnail sketch of herself. Veiled critiques are hard to take; if you challenge them you risk being called paranoid. Lurie could always get up from the table and go back home, of course; but Jackson was already home, and it can't have been comfortable to communicate via masks year after year.

Still, even if Jackson lost vitality through exposure to the kryptonite of Merrill's personality and social manner, he could have decided to split at any moment. Since he didn't, he retains responsibility. Maybe he just needed a push? If we accept Lurie's implied assertion--that she herself has managed to escape the toils of artificiality to become a free and passionate human being--why didn't she urge Jackson to do the same? From a safe height she watched someone she says she cared about begin to drown, and she said nothing, or nothing directly. Her memoir tells us she dislikes Merrill's rarefied Olympian realm of divine beings and spirits, yet her snow-capped vantage point also turns out to be quite a cold mountain itself. In her long lover's quarrel with James Merrill, she is more a "paleface" than she allows, more caught up in his techniques of communication than she acknowledges. I'm guessing that she wants her memoir to comment by inference on the current literary situation just as much as on the life that Merrill and Jackson shared in their day. As such, the book can be read as a protest, no doubt well intentioned, against Merrill's posthumous influence; and who would deny that his habit of communicating through subtexts and literary "masks" is widespread? If Lurie's book is in fact meant as a protest, though, her quarrel with him, as with so many failed romances, is best described as another instance of irreconcilable similarities.

We welcome to The Nation's editorial board Tom Hayden and Lani Guinier. From his days as a seminal figure of the 1960s--an author of the Port Huron Statement, president of SDS, one of the Chicago 7 convicted (later acquitted) for inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention--Hayden has been an effective progressive voice. From 1982 to 2000 he served in the California legislature as a conscience on the left and a productive legislator. Term-limited out of the State Senate, he ran for LA City Council in the recent election, losing by 369 votes. A contributor to this magazine and author of ten books, Hayden edited the forthcoming The Zapatista Reader for Nation Books. Lani Guinier had an unwanted fifteen minutes of fame in 1993 when Bill Clinton withdrew her nomination as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights after she was vilified for her scholarly writings on voting. In 1998 she became the first black woman to be named a tenured professor at Harvard Law School. She is the author, most recently, of Lifting Every Voice: Turning a Civil Rights Setback Into a New Vision of Social Justice (Simon & Schuster).

FOLLOW-UP: Richard Pollak writes: There was much justified rejoicing in the environmental community in early August after the Bush EPA sided with its Clinton predecessors and ordered General Electric to dredge thousands of pounds of lethal PCBs from the Hudson River north of Albany, New York. The decision is undeniably a setback for GE, which had spent millions fighting the proposal with dubious scientific reports and a monthslong propaganda blitz in the media (see Richard Pollak, "Is GE Mightier Than the Hudson?" May 28). But dredging is at best many months, if not years, away, and any notion that it is a done deal is premature. Several other federal agencies and New York State are still assessing the draft order, which would set in motion the largest such environmental cleanup in the nation's history, at a cost to GE of some half-billion dollars. Already there's talk of scaling back the project if dredging technologies prove too disruptive to towns along the river. These are, for the most part, hard-core Republican communities with a deep distrust of the government; many residents welcomed GE's antidredging public relations campaign and now promise to put up a strong local fight against the EPA solution. This despite the fact that many of their neighbors, and wildlife, continue to suffer from a variety of disorders caused by the polychlorinated biphenyls that GE dumped into the river over three decades.

No one would have expected ultraconservative San Diego to be the cradle of a revolution against privatization. Nixon's "lucky city," it was one of the few places in California actually carried by George W. Bush. But as a result of the electricity deregulation plan passed by the state legislature in 1996, San Diego County became the first area in California to be completely deregulated--that is, subject to the "market" for both wholesale and retail rates.

The results were immediate, unexpected and, for many, devastating. Within thirty days, monthly electricity bills, both residential and business, doubled. In sixty days, they tripled. A commodity that produced steady profits when selling for 4 cents a kilowatt-hour zoomed to $4 a kilowatt-hour. Dozens of small businesses folded. Those on fixed incomes panicked. Fear, then outrage, engulfed the community. A true populist revolt erupted. Urban workers, suburban professionals and small-business people burned their utility bills at protest rallies. School boards and city councils voted not to pay their bills.

The state legislature responded to the San Diego revolution with a temporary cap on retail rates, but local progressive forces (led by the Coalition for Affordable Public Power) developed a long-range solution--the formation of a municipal utility district (MUD) to provide local control of the increasingly dysfunctional electricity market. Although some 2,000 communities across America today control their own electricity supply, and the City of Los Angeles generates and distributes electricity for its 3.8 million citizens, such a proposal could scarcely have been imagined in San Diego before the crisis. In fact, no new municipal utility has been formed in California for over half a century. Yet almost instantly San Diego was ready for such a "radical step." Three million people in the county "got it" all at once: This wasn't a free market at work but a manipulated market that threatened their future. This was not primarily a "supply and demand" crisis, nor one caused by wacko environmentalists, but one brought about by greedy marketers and wholesalers who withheld supply and took plants offline to drive up prices. Deregulation had put the whole economy at risk.

My conservative Republican neighbor, US Congressman Duncan Hunter, summed up San Diego's discovery: "It's as if the hospital administrator, five minutes before your scheduled life-or-death operation, suddenly tripled the cost of the oxygen. It's not scarcity, it's not cost of production, it's control of a vital necessity at the moment you need it." Hunter had seen his individualistic, entrepreneurial, small-business constituents brought to their knees by the price gouging. And virtually every other public official in the county--in both parties, at every level of government--came together to support my calls in Congress for a municipal utility district, a return to regulated rates and refunds of a year's criminal overcharges. Even the San Diego Union-Tribune, the staunchly conservative, pro-free market flagship newspaper of the Copley Press, consistently editorialized against the wholesale power industry, in support of price controls and more federal regulation. It too supported public power and criticized the Bush Administration on numerous occasions for its failure to respond to California's crisis.

Various cities in San Diego County have tentatively explored setting up their own municipal utilities. But there is general consensus that a countywide district would be most viable. And, under the real threat of a grassroots petition movement to put a MUD on the ballot, the five conservative Republicans on the County Board of Supervisors have pledged to secure state legislation to authorize the district. Once a formal MUD structure is in place, a variety of options are available, from community co-op power purchasing to full ownership of generation and distribution capacity. I have advocated MUD ownership of enough power (say, 1,000 megawatts out of the 3,000 we use daily) to give the community leverage over the market. We would not need--and thus would not face future political opposition to--a complete takeover of transmission and distribution lines. And the MUD would provide leadership for conservation and renewable energy development. We are now actively planning the San Diego Community Power Project, designed to be completely environmentally friendly and to offer electricity at the previous regulated rates. The public once would have winced at the $400 million price tag--but that's what we paid in overcharges in just two months last summer.

Many obstacles remain to securing local control. But the remarkable political consensus has held, and I believe that San Diego will soon be generating its own power. The national movement toward electricity deregulation has abruptly slowed in the wake of California's disaster. If San Diego can emerge from the crisis with a new vision for our energy future, the nation will have gained a truly progressive alternative.