August 20, 2001 | The Nation

In July, during the first US Senate hearing to examine the impact of the global gag rule on family planning services abroad, the Foreign Relations Committee heard the story of Min Min Lama, a teen

Read oral histories, see photos and examine archival material on Eddie Faye Gates's site

Read the final report issued recently by the Oklahoma Commission To Study the Oklahoma Race Riot of 1921.

Click here to view a collection of photographs taken during the Tulsa race riot in 1921.

SUGGESTED LINKS

HR 2459 on the House website
(search Bill Number for "HR 2459")

Bar chart on defense spending versus other kinds of spending

Representative Dennis Kucinich's Dept. of Peace site

Before the World Conference Against Racism at the end of August in Durban, South Africa, some 200 young men and women are expected to come together to draft a Youth Declaration and begin building

Under pressure from activists, the city agreed to assist its poorest residents.

An Italian answer to globalization.

Nine hundred days to go, and Democratic presidential hopefuls are jockeying for position.

Greens at the Crosswords

Micah Sifry's August 1, 2001 Nation

Defending DynCorp

Jason Vest's July 3 web-only article, Anne W. Patterson

Bulldog, Bulldog, Now Now Now

New Haven, Conn.

The one-sided nature of Kim Phillips-Fein's "Yale Bites Unions" [July 2] may be explained by the fact that she is a union organizer of graduate students at Columbia University, but that does not excuse her errors and misrepresentations. A few facts are in order: At Yale, those select few who enter the graduate school (10 percent of all who apply) are provided a minimum annual stipend of $13,700 for five years. Every PhD student also receives additional support that covers tuition for four years ($23,650 per year) and a comprehensive healthcare plan. Over five or six years of study, Yale invests more than $160,000 in each of these students.

During their years in the graduate program, students are expected to master the skills required to become leaders in an academic field, including subject expertise, research methods, writing and, yes, teaching. Future academic leaders must indeed spend a small part of their studies gaining classroom experience. At Yale, graduate students are typically expected to assist professors by teaching part time during two of their graduate student years. Two-thirds of graduate students at Yale are not doing any teaching at all in a typical semester.

As for Phillips-Fein's claim that the vast majority of students have a strong desire to unionize, that has not been demonstrated. The union that seeks to represent the students, an affiliate of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees, has not gone to the National Labor Relations Board to seek an election. There are vocal students on both sides of the issue, and it remains to be seen which point of view has more support. The union has pressed the university to recognize it as a bargaining agent for graduate students without an election. Without protections provided by a federally supervised election, students may be subject to intense pressure to sign authorization cards in on-the-spot, face-to-face encounters with organizers. Yale opposes recognition on the basis of a "card count," because it fails to protect the right of students to a secret ballot, and it fails to promote an open, honest discussion of the issues.

HELAINE S. KLASKY
Director, public affairs, Yale University

New Haven, Conn.

As a member of the Yale faculty, I consider Yale's treatment of unions beneath contempt. Over the past few years I have witnessed trash pile up in the streets while the administration wore the unions down. They were able to wear them down because there is only so long that janitorial and maintenance workers can remain out of work with families to feed. Do the members of Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO) really think that the issues they face are in any way similar to those faced by the members of unions 34, 35 and 1199?

As a former graduate student and postdoctoral associate I understand how hard and seemingly unfair it is to be a graduate student. However, my opposition to GESO is the only time in my life I have ever opposed the formation of a union. Graduate students are transient. Further, as college graduates they have many opportunities open to them. They are not faced with working long hours at low wages for the rest of their lives to support a family. The young man described as busying himself in the kitchen of a Yale professor is there by choice, and that description is a misrepresentation and an exaggeration of what goes on at Yale.

Grading papers is no fun, but it is not exploitation by any stretch of the imagination. The fact that this group of graduate students believes it is exploitation because the number of tenure track positions has fallen over the last ten to fifteen years is ridiculous. How many jobs let individuals reach a point in their career where they cannot be fired, regardless of performance? Isn't it tenure that permits the level of academic arrogance described at Yale by the author? No, even faculty such as myself who are strongly pro-union, have union members in our households and can readily see how members of locals 34 and 35 are treated miserably by Yale find little reason to support GESO. In fact, it seems to me that GESO is exploiting the energy of the leaders and members of 34 and 35, who have enough to do fighting Yale on their own.

The old rivalry between Yale and Harvard still exists and extends far beyond the Yale-Harvard football games. The stark contrast between these schools was evident, with Harvard students staging the longest sit-in in that school's history to demand living wages for its workers. Meanwhile Yale students work to protect themselves while claiming that their work will benefit all the unions at Yale.

NINA STACHENFELD

New York City

I write to protest Kim Phillips-Fein's egregious misportrayal of my old friend and professor, Paul Kennedy. It is just plain bizarre to see a scholar's unusual devotion to teaching, to history and to his students held up as part of an indictment of his views. And although the author was granted an interview with Kennedy, she made no attempt to allow him to express the rationale for the positions she treated so contemptuously.

It is my understanding that because of his commitment to his undergraduate students, Kennedy asked his TAs to sign a pledge that they would not, as part of a union protest, withhold undergraduates' grades. Why should undergrads, he asked, suffer for graduate student grievances? This position, while certainly arguable, is defensible and honorable, even to a former Yale grad student like myself who supports the cause of their unionization, as I do. To compare the pledge to "yellow dog" contracts of the past is ignorant and ahistorical--revealing much more about the author than the subject.

In addition to his unmatched reputation as a scholar and a mentor, Kennedy is well-known throughout the community for his commitment to serving the needy in New Haven soup kitchens, as well as his public and spirited opposition to the most egregious aspects of conservative rule during the past two decades. It was the publication of his masterwork, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (not "of Great Powers," as it was mistitled in the article), that marked the beginning of the end of the reign of Reaganism in public discourse. He deserves far better from The Nation.

ERIC ALTERMAN

Molivos, Lesbos, Greece

As a former Yale graduate (PhD, 1974), I am sickened reading your article about Yale's attempts to maintain its elite status at the expense of underpaid workers. In the early 1970s I worked with the Yale Women's Faculty, Graduate Student and Staff organization to bring HEW to Yale to investigate sex discrimination among faculty, staff and students. I also supported the effort to unionize Yale's vast secretarial staff. At that time the university president sent a letter to department chairs urging them to tell their secretaries that a vote for the union was unbecoming to their position. One would have hoped that times had changed at Yale.

CAROL P. CHRIST

PHILLIPS-FEIN REPLIES

New York City

Next time Helaine Klasky writes a letter, she might want to talk first to Yale Law School dean Anthony Kronman. Even this antiunion Yale administrator has admitted in the New York Times that grad students have "serious concerns": They "teach undergrads whom the faculty have neither the time nor inclination to teach, and then, after receiving their degrees, are cast off into an inhospitable job market."

Beyond that, Yale pays its "select few" salaries that are lower than Yale's own estimate of what it costs to live for twelve months in New Haven. Graduate students don't take classes in the third and fourth years of study, so it's not so generous for Yale to grant them free "tuition" for four years. Klasky is invoking an accounting fiction, not an argument. At the same time, as Yale administrators know, GESO fought for and won all the benefits that Klasky mentions. Yale would never have raised stipends and improved benefits without graduate students demanding change. When I was doing interviews for my article, administrator Thomas Appelquist--former dean of the graduate school--told me there was "no question" that pressure from GESO was responsible for improving the graduate school.

Klasky might also want to check with Yale's lawyers on the university's position on union elections, for what she says directly contradicts what it has been saying and doing for the past ten years. For years GESO asked Yale to hold an election. The university always refused. The League of Women Voters sponsored a union election in 1995. Yale paid no attention to the results. Richard Levin's administration has fought to reverse the NYU decision granting grad students rights under the Wagner Act, which would make it impossible for grad students anywhere to hold union elections. It's not surprising that these students are skeptical of Yale's newfound democratic sympathies.

In response to Nina Stachenfeld: This past spring, more than 1,100 members of locals 34 and 35 voted to support GESO in the upcoming round of contract negotiations. Given her professed respect for janitorial and maintenance workers "with families to feed," it's odd that she presumes to know better than they what's in their best interests. That kind of condescension is what all Yale's unions are fighting. On a deeper level, as Stachenfeld notes, we live in a society divided by class and privilege. It's sad that a faculty member at Yale should have nothing but criticism for people who are joining together across such boundaries. Her remarks, despite their patina of sympathy for the downtrodden, only reinforce these divisions.

In response to Eric Alterman: It's a curious union supporter who thinks it's "honorable" to deny union members employment unless they sign a pledge not to engage in union activity. Would Alterman support such a pledge for high school teachers? For Yale's janitors and clerical workers? Before whipping himself into a moral lather, Alterman should also check his facts. Kennedy's original e-mail said that he would refuse to teach his undergraduate lecture course if "any of the TAs were GESO members who might take industrial action" in a future dispute with Yale. Making nonunion status a condition of employment is the definition of a yellow-dog contract. When pressed by a student, he explained that what he meant was that while he did not mind having people from GESO as TAs, he sought "reassurance that my undergrads will never be disrupted by industrial action of the sort that so often accompanies wage/benefit negotiations." Until he received it, he would not offer the lecture course. Exactly how grad students could give Kennedy this open-ended reassurance, he did not specify.

Kennedy does care a lot about his students. At Yale, though, this particular ideal of the student-mentor relationship--where a professor is supportive, provided that the student knows his or her place--is precisely what has fueled the viciousness of the school's antiunion reaction.

KIM PHILLIPS-FEIN

What the inventive genius of mankind has bestowed upon us in the last hundred years could have made human life care free and happy if the development of the organizing power of man had been able to keep step with his technical advances. As it is, the hardly bought achievements of the machine age in the hands of our generation are as dangerous as a razor in the hands of a 3-year-old child. The possession of wonderful means of production has not brought freedom--only care and hunger.

Worst of all is the technical development which produces the means for the destruction of human life, and the dearly created products of labor. We older people lived through that shudderingly in the World War. But even more terrible than this destruction seems to me the unworthy servitude into which the individual is swept by war. Is it not terrible to be forced by the community to deeds which every individual feels to be most despicable crimes? Only a few have had the moral greatness to resist; they are in my eyes the true heroes of the World War.

There is one ray of hope. It seems to me that today the responsible leaders of the several peoples have, in the main, the honest will to abolish war. The opposition to this unquestionably necessary advance lies in the unhappy traditions of the people which are passed on like an inherited disease from generation to generation because of our faulty educational machines. Of course the main supports of this tradition are military training and the larger industries. Without disarmament there can be no lasting peace. On the contrary, the continuation of military armaments in their present extent will with certainty lead to new catastrophes.

Hence the Disarmament Conference in Geneva in February, 1932, will be decisive for the fate of the present generation and the one to come. If one thinks back to the pitiful results achieved by the international conferences thus far held, it must be clear that all thoughtful and responsible human beings must exercise all their powers again and again to inform public opinion of the vital importance of the conference of 1932. Only if the statesmen have, to urge them forward, the will to peace of a decisive majority in their respective countries, can they arrive at their important goal. For the creation of this public opinion in favor of disarmament every person living shares the responsibility, through every deed and every word.

The failure of the conference would be assured if the delegates were to arrive in Geneva with fixed instructions and aims, the achievement of which would at once become a matter of national prestige. This seems to be universally recognized, for the meetings of the statesmen of any two states, of which we have seen a number of late, have been utilized for discussions of the problem of disarmament in order to clear the ground for the conference. This procedure seems to me a very happy one, for two persons, or two groups, ordinarily conduct themselves most sensibly, most honorably, and with the greatest freedom from passion if no third person listens in, whom the others believe they must consider or conciliate in their speeches. We can only hope for a favorable outcome in this most vital conference if the meeting is prepared for exhaustively in this way by advance discussions in order that surprises shall be made impossible, and if, through honest good will, an atmosphere of mutual confidence and trust can be effectively created in advance.

Success in such great affairs is not a matter of cleverness, or even shrewdness, but instead a matter of honorable conduct and mutual confidence. You cannot substitute intellect for moral conduct in this matter--I should like to say, thank God that you cannot!

It is not the task of the individual who lives in this critical time merely to await results and to criticize. He must serve this great cause as well as he can. For the fate of all humanity will be that fate which it honestly earns and deserves.

This past March, the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) made history with a march on Mexico City from its jungle stronghold in the poor southern state of Chiapas, demanding acceptance of its peace plan, the San Andrés Accords [see Al Giordano, "Zapatistas on the March," April 9]. But within six weeks, the accords--constitutional amendments recognizing the autonomy of Mexico's indigenous peoples--were gutted by federal legislators, causing the rebels once again to break off dialogue. At the heart of the debate over the plan is the question of who will control the fate of the Chiapas rainforest, the Selva Lacandona--where real indigenous autonomy has been in place ever since the 1994 Zapatista uprising.

The UN-recognized Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve holds the Selva's last, threatened heart of virgin forest. Despite President Vicente Fox's pledges to withdraw troops from Zapatista territory, many military positions remain in the Selva. Barred by the cease-fire from attacking the Zapatistas, the troops are ostensibly policing Montes Azules against drug traffickers and protecting it from deforestation. But the Selva's Maya inhabitants, the Zapatista base communities, say that--in defiance of both UN guidelines and the San Andrés principles--Montes Azules is not being protected for the resident indigenous peoples but for transnational biotech corporations that hope to profit from the region's genetic wealth.

In 1998 the California firm Diversa signed a three-year "bio-prospecting" deal with the Mexican government. Diversa, which has a similar deal with the US government for Yellowstone National Park, is granted access to Mexico's biodiversity in exchange for $5,000 to train and equip personnel from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, who are to collect the samples; $50 per sample; and royalties of between 0.3 and 0.5 percent of net sales on products derived from them. In contrast, Yellowstone National Park got $15,000 of equipment, royalties of from 0.5 to 10 percent--and $100,000.

The terms of both deals had been secret. Environmental groups went to US federal court to try to get the Yellowstone terms released--but they were eventually reported in the Salt Lake Tribune. The terms of the Mexican deal were leaked to the daily La Jornada, which lambasted them as "bio-genetic plunder."

The University of Georgia, the Britain-based company Molecular Nature Ltd. and El Colegio de la Frontera Sur have launched a similar five-year project. This one, titled Drug Discovery and Biodiversity Among the Maya of Mexico, specifically targets Chiapas. Tapping the vast reservoir of Maya herblore, the program will receive $2.5 million from the International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups (ICBG), a consortium of US government agencies, including the National Science Foundation and the Department of Agriculture. The Chiapas Council of Traditional Indigenous Midwives and Healers (COMPITCH) is urging Indians not to cooperate with the researchers, charging that "the pact was developed without notifying or informing indigenous communities and organizations." The US program has developed its own partnership with local Indian communities, called ICBG-Maya. Director Brent Berlin of the University of Georgia told the Associated Press that the project has received the consent of nearly fifty communities and forged profit-sharing deals with them. But Berlin said he warned them that financial windfalls were a long shot.

Since 1993 the ICBG has awarded eleven bio-prospecting grants totaling $18.5 million worldwide. Commercial partners include GlaxoSmithKline, Dow Agroscience, American Cyanamid (recently acquired by BASF) and, until recently, Monsanto Searle. The revenues at stake contrast sharply with the agonizing poverty of Chiapas villages. A unique geyser-dwelling microbe collected from Yellowstone in 1966 was the source for enzymes widely used in DNA research and sold to Hoffman-LaRoche for $300 million. Rather than bring wealth to impoverished villages, new patents may impose economic burdens by requiring farmers to pay royalties to foreign corporations to grow their own indigenous maize. The Mexican government has expressed concern over DuPont's recent patenting of all corn varieties with certain oleic acid levels, including many originating in Mexico.

Beth Burrows of the Seattle-area-based Edmonds Institute, one of the litigants in the Yellowstone case, is still waiting for a court-ordered impact study on the bio-prospecting program there. Says Burrows: "To privatize living organisms, whether it is Mexican maize or Yellowstone microbes, may serve corporate interests, but it does not serve our social contract or our duties to steward the land and support farmers. Farmers all over the world save seeds and trade them with neighbors. But Monsanto has taken farmers to court for violating their property rights. Farmers have to go to the corporations like to masters on the manor."

This system is now supported by the "trade-related intellectual property rights" provisions--or TRIPs--of NAFTA and the WTO, instating international recognition of patents on life. In contrast, the United States still resists ratifying the Biodiversity Treaty, unveiled at the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, which would recognize indigenous peoples' intellectual property rights. Adds Burrows: "We're creating a social disruption which I'm not sure people are seeing."

Some people are seeing it. In April representatives from more than 100 Chiapas Indian communities held a Maize Meeting in the highlands city of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, vowing not to plant bio-tweaked corn. In mid-June COMPITCH held an international anti-bio-piracy Forum for Biological and Cultural Diversity, in San Cristóbal. And on June 24, when the Biotechnology Industry Organization met in San Diego, Diversa's hometown, activists held their own "BioJustice" counterconvention.

The San Andrés Accords would create a formidable obstacle to corporate designs on Mexico's Indian lands: uncooperative Indian communities with greater control over their turf. Which is why peace is likely to remain illusory in southern Mexico as long as the government remains beholden to corporate globalization. But the issues raised by the Zapatista autonomy demands have implications for indigenous peoples, farmers and environmentalists worldwide.

While violence generated by the radical "black bloc" dominated initial headlines during the G-8 summit in Genoa, it is now Italy's men in blue who find themselves at the center of criminal investigations and political debate. Using physical evidence and eyewitness testimony, critics charge that the Italian police engaged in systematic beatings and human rights abuses, leading some to compare the conduct of the Italian police to the Chilean security forces under Pinochet. At an August 3 press conference, lead investigator Francesco Meloni said, "The reports of violence, and the identical testimony of scores of persons who passed through jails in diverse hours and days during the G-8, suggest a systematic method of torture and genuine violations of human rights."

Most pointedly, Italian magistrates, journalists and politicians are demanding to know how a July 21 midnight police raid on the headquarters of the Genoa Social Forum, organizers of the antiglobalization protests, was authorized, and who is responsible for the wide range of abuses alleged to have taken place. A police review, a parliamentary inquest and at least four judicial investigations are looking into accusations. In all, ninety-three people were arrested, and all but one released without charges. Photos taken of protesters show broken teeth, bruises and head wounds. Police are also said to have confiscated videotapes and computer hard drives that the Genoa Social Forum had been using to document misconduct.

Police justified the raid on the grounds that the Genoa Social Forum was aiding and abetting the violence of the "all blacks." Only two Molotov cocktails were actually found, however, along with a handful of sticks, iron bars and pocketknives, which strained credulity as a "cache of weapons." Many observers believe the raid was in fact a calculated reprisal against leftist organizers, blamed by police for giving cover to the violent protesters, despite the fact that the Genoa Social Forum had called for nonviolent modes of resistance. "It was probably a sort of vendetta--of a Chilean type," said Riccardo Barenghi, editor of Il Manifesto, which has been following the story closely.

Initially the new, right-wing Italian government of Silvio Berlusconi, for whom the G-8 summit was supposed to be a kind of debut, blocked calls for a parliamentary investigation. Berlusconi later changed course. The first casualties of the probes came August 2, when three top police officials were removed from office by Interior Minister Claudio Scajola, who himself had just survived calls for removal from Italy's center-left opposition. Opposition leaders want the scope of the investigations to include political responsibility for the violence. Most important, they want a close examination of the role of Berlusconi's deputy prime minister, the neo-Fascist Gianfranco Fini, who was in Genoa during the G-8 and maintained close contact with the police and security forces. For at least some of this time, Fini was actually ensconced at police headquarters. Was he involved, investigators want to know, in the decision to raid the Genoa Social Forum or in encouraging police to take a hard line?

Barenghi said he believes that the ascent of Fini's National Alliance Party, with its roots in Italy's Fascist past, helped shape the climate in which the police operated. "Certainly the most violent among the police felt themselves authorized to beat people from the fact that today in Italy we have a government of the right, which has within itself the heirs of Fascism," he said in an interview. A related issue is exactly who made up the "black bloc." Spokespersons for the Genoa Social Forum charge that some black-clad protesters were drawn from the far right and infiltrated the antiglobalization movement to discredit it. Italian newspapers have published documents revealing that police had knowledge of such plans. One high-profile observer, Italian activist-priest Fr. Vitaliano Della Sala, has said he believes that some far-right elements had tacit police support.

What impact such charges may have on Berlusconi's government, if they are confirmed, is unclear. The story has dominated Italian newspapers and television broadcasts. Three Italian bishops issued a statement saying they had not seen such violence in Italy since World War II, and that the beatings suggested that police were "punishing the expression of ideas someone doesn't like." Polls by the respected firm Datamedia show, however, that most Italians are less outraged by the police, even if accusations of misconduct are true, than by the protesters, whom they blame for an estimated $40 million in property damage. Many Italians are terrified of a resurgence of the violent radicalism of the 1970s and the Red Brigades. Berlusconi has said he is "100 percent with the police," and in a sense he may be reading the national mood about right.

Some people just don't believe in getting over it.

In June, Charles Porter, 82--who left the House of Representatives just as George W. Bush was entering prep school--proposed a resolution to the Oregon Democratic Party calling for the impeachment of the five Supreme Court Justices who awarded the White House to Bush. The party wouldn't go quite that far. But it did officially resolve: "The Democratic Party of Oregon supports the immediate investigation of the behavior of the US Supreme Court Justices Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O'Connor, William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, for decisions in December that led to Americans being denied their right to choose a President of the United States."

The Oregonians, the first (and so far only) state party to make such a statement, then bannered the resolution on their website (www.dpo.org). "I've got to tell you, I'm surprised," says Oregon state Democratic chairman Jim Edmunson. "There's been a large amount of interest. We've had e-mail, letters, contributions from people all over the country. It's like the movie Network: 'I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore.'" The Oregon Democrats' website now includes hundreds of letters seconding their resolution, people writing "thank God some Democrats found some cojones" and, of course, "I refuse to get over it."

Paul Behrenndt, Democratic chairman of neighboring Washington, has sent the resolution around to other states. The Democratic committee of Ocean County, New Jersey, has posted the resolution on its website, as has Democrats.com, an organization of 25,000 party activists.

Where there hasn't been a response, concedes Edmunson, has been from any member of Congress. "The silence is deafening," he says. "The only people who haven't responded are the people who could do something about it." Edmunson's own Democratic Congressman, Peter DeFazio, former chairman of the House Progressive Caucus, sympathizes with the resolution but isn't about to go leaping to his feet in the House. "The Supreme Court is political. It's not a long stretch to see that they made a political decision. There are a number of right-wing political hacks who have been named to the Court, and they made a bad decision," says DeFazio. But, he says, "I can assure you that [House Speaker] Dennis Hastert, who won't even consider my proposal for a bipartisan commission to consider election reform, is not about to sanction a resolution to investigate the Supreme Court."

One prominent figure in the 2000 election--the one who finished third--also has doubts about an investigation. "They wouldn't be able to get across the separation of powers," says Ralph Nader. "The Court is not going to address subpoenas."

Still, even if it's unlikely that George W. Bush's White House will be repossessed, there are indications--for example, the attention paid to recent books on the Court's action by Vincent Bugliosi (based on an article in The Nation) and Alan Dershowitz, and an article in the Yale Law Journal--that the election that wouldn't end might still be alive in 2002, and even 2004. Stirring up the troops, instead of setting off a constitutional crisis, seems to be about what Edmunson expects. "This was just a glorious middle finger in the wind," says Edmunson. "The best thing you can do with your middle finger sometimes is poke someone in the eye with it."

For progressives, the mayoral race in New York City could be the most significant electoral test since the 2000 presidential election, one with broad national implications. That's because of the candidacy of Mark Green. He far surpasses his rivals in the upcoming Democratic primary in his ability to articulate a progressive vision for New York City in the twenty-first century. He is something unusual in this city's politics--a classy, smart, articulate public servant, seasoned and tested. Quite simply, he's the best-qualified person for the job. His election would carry a political bonus: As chief executive of a major city he would be a role model for like-minded candidates in other cities and inspire young idealists on the left to enter politics. The national visibility that comes with the New York mayoralty will make him an effective voice for a rejuvenated urban progressivism. We're itching to see him debate his likely GOP opponent, media billionaire Michael Bloomberg, in a clear-cut test of message versus money.

Green has displayed a steadfast commitment to political activism and consumer advocacy since the 1970s, when he was one of the most effective of Nader's Raiders. This background reflects a principled skepticism about corporate power that is rare among politicians and that animated his creative activism as New York's Commissioner of Consumer Affairs and more recently as Public Advocate. Electing him mayor would give New Yorkers an ombudsman at the top.

Green has been a contributor to this magazine for more than twenty years, but we do not endorse him for parochial reasons. Rather, we see his contributions to The Nation as testament of his allegiance to progressive values. His special talent as a writer is a plus because it has given him the ability to articulate and dramatize complex issues in ways that engage a broad audience.

The only other candidate running as a progressive in the upcoming primary is Bronx borough president Fernando Ferrer, who has focused on championing the "other New York," the poor and the minorities cynically written off by the Giuliani administration. But his record raises questions about his governing skills at the citywide level and the depth of his commitment. In 1996, positioning himself to run against two solidly left candidates, he presented himself as a centrist, DLC-style Democrat.

In contrast, Mark Green has been a tireless and effective voice for the poor and the working class. As Public Advocate, he fought the secretive Giuliani regime and he can be depended on to let the sunshine in at City Hall. Unlike Giuliani, racial justice is a critical priority for him; in a polyglot city it's a measure of the kind of public official he's been and the kind of campaign he's run that he alone scores consistently well in polls among blacks, Jews, Latinos and white Catholics. He has vigorously opposed racial profiling and has been a sharp critic of police brutality, notably in the Amadou Diallo case. He has also shown an intelligent support for good policing, rising out of his awareness of the primacy of public safety and the right to be secure in one's person as a basic human right. As he sums up, "I'm a proud progressive Democrat on issues like social justice, choice, gay rights."

Although we have our differences with Green, he embodies the best chance in many years to prove that a world-class liberal can govern a world-class city.

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.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the former senator, has a careerlong history of promoting bold new ideas for government, helping turn them into public policy and then explaining a few years later, with urbane detachment, why the scheme was wrongheaded folly. If the White House should succeed in dismantling Social Security as we know it, expect Moynihan to hold forth a few years from now on how stupid that was. The ex-liberal neocon intellectual is nimble if not reliable. In retirement he sounds like a born-again libertarian serving as high-minded front man for George W. Bush's privatization campaign, with textual conceits supplied by the Cato Institute.

Shame on Moynihan, but don't leave out his co-chairman on Bush's Commission to Gut Social Security, Richard Parsons, co-chief operating officer of AOL-Time Warner. Both are media darlings, well spoken and knowledgeable, but both are too smart not to know the deceitful word games their commission is playing on Americans. Big media, with a few honorable exceptions, are respectfully swallowing the big lies. In its news columns, the Washington Post described defenders of Social Security as "know-nothings" and "Luddites." On the editorial page, the Post called House Democratic leader Richard Gephardt "demagogic" for his reasonable assertion that Social Security's problems can be fixed without cutting benefits. The Moynihan-Parsons lies are more artfully crafted than the broadsides from ham-handed right-wingers, but they encourage the same fallacious inferences, designed to mislead and frighten: Social Security is on the brink; it hits the wall in fifteen years; the Social Security trust fund is a mere accounting device--the trust fund, the pair wrote in the Wall Street Journal, "holds no accumulated reserves of wealth but only promises that future taxpayers will be asked to redeem.... Where will the Treasury get the money?"

These scaremongering phrases are verbal tricks on innocent citizens unfamiliar with the accounting realities. Moynihan knows better because he co-engineered the bait and switch the last time a bipartisan commission "reformed" Social Security, back in 1983, when Congress raised the payroll tax rate dramatically to build up huge Social Security surpluses--$1 trillion now, more than $3 trillion by the end of the decade--the very surpluses Moynihan now suggests are meaningless. Social Security no longer operates on a pay-as-you-go basis; it's now pay-in-advance. Roughly three-quarters of the country pay more in regressive payroll taxes than in income tax. They rightly resent it, and Bush wants to whip that resentment into support for privatization.

If the money isn't there, as Moynihan-Parsons insinuate, what happened to it? The federal government spent it. What did it buy? Mainly, Reagan's huge tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, also his military buildup. That money was borrowed, and when more workers retire, the government has to pay it back.

Practical solutions to this noncrisis are simple and modest in scale. The government can reborrow funds in the bond market to pay back Social Security when that becomes necessary. Or Congress could eliminate the earnings cap on payroll taxes that now exempts income above $80,000 (even Moynihan would raise the cap to $100,000). Or, for equity's sake, it could restore the estate tax on the wealthy that Bush just repealed and dedicate the revenue exclusively to Social Security.

Bush's privatization scheme is another grand attempt at bait and switch, only this time the money will be turned over to Wall Street, which just lost $3.5 trillion in net worth for American households. Yes, some people do win big in the stock market, but many others lose. The real trade-off citizens are being asked to accept is giving up the rock-solid security of social insurance for the open-ended risks of private investment. The ex-senator would not experience this, since he has a Congressional pension--a promise Congress is unlikely to rescind.

The affluent welcome the choice since they are already well fixed for retirement, but the majority will, I expect, wisely reject it. Social insurance does not make anyone rich, but it delivers what it promises: a modest but secure nest egg for retirees (also widows, orphans and the disabled). Moynihan's malicious insinuations to the contrary, Social Security can default only if the nation has collapsed in utter ruin or if right-wing politics cancels everyone's insurance policy.

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.

President Bush's plan to privatize Social Security seems to be picking up steam, if his commission's recent report is any indication.

Somethin's happenin' here
What it is ain't exactly clear.
      --Buffalo Springfield

Unstable chemistry can cause spectacular effects--that's one way to think of Buffalo Springfield. Another is to consider the band an American musical smorgasbord (though it had three Canadians in it), descended from the Whitmanian ideal to be vast and multitude-containing, and from the self-invented musical yawps of folks like Harry Partch. Yet another is to see it as a pivotal pop avatar, with direct spinoffs like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and Poco, and a big impact on every major rock band of the past thirty-five years, from the Band to the Eagles to the Police.

It was a smaller world in 1966; the few narrow byways off mainstream culture, whether jazz or the folk revival or political satire or Beat poetry, all eventually intersected. Which brings us to that fabled day when five folk-revival refugees connected. Richie Furay and Stephen Stills pulled up behind Neil Young's 1953 Pontiac hearse with Ontario plates in a traffic jam on the Sunset Strip. Furay and Stills had been part of a nine-member New York City outfit called the Au Go-Go Singers. Young had met Furay in New York and taught him a surreal song, "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing." Stills, who'd grown up everywhere from Illinois to Central America, first met Young on tour in Canada; the two had decided to try to work together then, but Young split, so the day was postponed until LA gridlock brought them together. Stills had come to LA to audition for the Monkees; he failed because of bad teeth. Young had come looking for Stills. In the hearse with Young was fellow Canadian folkie Bruce Palmer. They agreed to form a band virtually on the spot, and went to pick up Dewey Martin, who played drums. Thus was born, in the best mythic rock and roll manner, Buffalo Springfield, one of the period's best garage bands.

Its members had very different voices and their harmonies blended richly; they could be edgy or gentle. Their songwriting was strikingly diverse, their individual musicianship adept and adaptable. Their music ran the gamut from the raunchiest rock to the trippiest, from cutting-edge to banal; it was frequently powered by soul-music bass and beats, and constantly stirred in soul, country, blues, gospel, jazz, raga, Latin--you name it. Between 1966 and 1968 they held together, as periodic pot busts banished bassist Palmer back to Canada, and ego blowups between Stills and Young escalated and sent Young packing for part of 1967; they were arguably the most important rock band in America, even with only one significant hit. Then in May 1968, after yet another pot bust in Topanga Canyon with Eric Clapton and the financial collapse of a Southern tour after Martin Luther King's assassination, Buffalo Springfield disintegrated.

Which brings us to Buffalo Springfield (Rhino/Atco), a prosaically titled four-CD set that, for better and worse, captures the band's kaleidoscopic range. They could be blandly commercial. On their first album, Beatlesy efforts like "Sit Down I Think I Love You" and "Do I Have to Come Right Out and Say It," with earache-inducing harmonies right out of the British Moppet Handbook, inadvertently highlight meatier material. For when the Sunset Strip riots hit in 1966 as the LAPD cracked down on Pandora's Box, a teen rock club, Stills penned the group's only AM hit, "For What It's Worth"; when it made the charts, it was inserted into the hastily revamped first album.

The song marked a new sound: ominous, with its identifying riff of two single reverb-dripping guitar notes over rumbling bass, its vaguely threatened and threatening lyrics, its stark yet sweet harmonies. (It's also inevitably popped up in contemporary film and ad soundtracks.) That filed the band forever under "folk-rock," although it's hard, listening back, to imagine why.

Live, the Springfield's shows were renowned for their volume and violence, as guitarists Young and Stills dueled and thrashed for power--a stage-bound parable of the group's inner workings, perhaps, but also a fabulous generator of sonic ideas. Young's experimentalism and lunges into feedback were complemented by Stills's sweeter melodic turns--though they could, and often did, switch roles at the drop of a beat. Furay's rhythm guitar nestled between the athletic, r&b-meets-McCartney bass of Bruce Palmer and the shape-shifting drumwork of Dewey Martin. They made awesome homemade improvisations.

The boxed set's second disc gives glimpses of those, via previously unreleased jams. "Kahuna Sunset" is a hippie fantasy, an updated surf-guitar lilt that left-turns into a raga-inspired jam. (Not to worry that raga is a complex form demanding discipline and knowledge: Ravi Shankar, discipled by the Beatles and John Coltrane, was the moment's international-music icon. And thousands of teen guitar players, fascinated by the altered sounds that would flower most fully in Jimi Hendrix, wanted to sound like a sitar doing modal runs.) It closes with Young's Yardbird-influenced rave-up style, though his attack is almost diametrically opposed to Yardbird guitarist Jeff Beck's: Young frets slowly with his left hand and with his right picks feverishly.

On "Buffalo Stomp," guitars wind in and out until the jam revs into squalls of feedback against a backdrop of interwoven solos--rock Dixieland. Among the players is Skip Spence on kazoo; he was Jefferson Airplane's first drummer and would soon co-found Moby Grape, a multivocalist guitar army from San Francisco's Flower Power era, much like Buffalo Springfield itself. And pieces like "Bluebird," a guitar-stuffed four-minute mini-suite on disc, would open into mammoth jams onstage.

In the studio, Buffalo Springfield grazed even more widely. They could unchain their pop imaginations and their record collections and run wild across an American landscape that had recently been opened wide by Bob Dylan and the Beatles.

When British rockers invaded the United States in 1964, they peddled reworked American r&b, rockabilly and other pop to American kids tired of saccharine hits by voiceless commercial fabrications named Bobby and Fabian--forerunners of today's teenypop idols. The Brits were especially good at recycling r&b hits by black artists, often invisible on the white-dominated pop charts of the time, into guitar-powered pop with Everly Brothers vocals. Far from the land where these forms were born, British kids heard them as a release from the boredom of homemade UK folk-revival offshoots like skiffle; they became building blocks to be played with as much as styles to be mimicked. It was the same energy that had led 1950s blue-collar Southern kids to refashion r&b and country into rockabilly in their back yards.

Eclectic, populist, postmodern--choose what terms you like--this was key to the 1960s transition of rock and roll into rock. The guitar, portable and cheap, made music-making widely available; garage bands were the ubiquitous result. As electric amplifiers became smaller and cheaper, even basement-bound guitarists could experiment with sound shaping--punching holes in a speaker to get fuzztone, loosening tubes for distortion, rolling the volume pots for violin effects. Early effects boxes for plugging into the signal chain started to appear. It was like getting a do-it-yourself art kit.

It was also an extension of America's postwar cultural renaissance. Whitman's heirs--jazz artists, the Beats, the Abstract Expressionists, the folk revivalists--all shared a romantic, if sometimes romantically cynical, critique of that hangover from the Great Depression and World War II, the gray-flannel 1950s. As counterweight they re-emphasized the value of play, long recognized as one of art's core cultural values; influenced by jazz improvisation and the civil rights movement, they revamped play into an artistic and a moral code. The subcultures of black America were valued even when they were misunderstood.

The romantic notion of authentic popular culture--a folk culture where there is minimal mediation between artists and audience--is an elusive grail. In modern commercial pop culture, that polarity is always in flux, but the folkie notion was a potent one during the 1960s. It was ironic that Bob Dylan, in a characteristic paradox, translated that model into both artistic and commercial success; inevitably, he was accused of selling out. And yet, armed with his nonvoice and limited guitar skills and panoramic musical taste and rapidly growing imagination, he personified the folk revival's longing for a popular hero who would forge a new sound and, incidentally, a new sense of community.

He had plenty to play with: Postwar America was full of new musical syntheses. Both jazz and folk musicians were interested in music from Africa and India, the Caribbean and Asia, for instance, as well as African-American gospel and blues. Thanks to the likes of Dylan and the Beatles, this legacy energized garage bands, crackling across the Anglo-American world, where forming a band became something countless thousands of kids did. Think of garage bands as the inheritors of the 1950s folk-revival aesthetic, and as the precursors of hip-hop: the street-level site where the reassimilation of pop culture becomes a feedback loop. In that sense, Buffalo Springfield was one of rock's ultimate garage bands.

Naming themselves after a logo Stills spotted on a steamroller, they were late for the party that was already cresting toward the Summer of Love and Woodstock, but they quickly made up for lost time and joined the central cast. Soul music was their touchstone; it wasn't just an accident that they recorded for Atlantic Records, a big indie label that made its fame by recording black artists from Joe Turner to Solomon Burke. And in the mid-1960s, soul music ruled the dance floors of America. The Rascals and the Righteous Brothers lifted blue-eyed soul into artistic and commercial payoff. Even whitebread folk-rockers like the Byrds were, thanks to Gram Parsons, countrifying soul hits like "You Don't Miss Your Water."

Neil Young, by contrast, wrote "Mr. Soul," a fierce attack on celebrity (including his own) and the record biz; his wispy vibrato rode with metalloid and country guitars over thundering Four Tops-style bass. He also wrote "Burned": "Been burned," he yelps, "and with both feet on the ground," a characteristic verbal incongruity backed by musical incongruity. Chugging Motown bass and honky-tonk piano share center soundstage: The piano takes a just-enough-out-of-tune solo, followed by Hawaiian-flavored slide guitar, which downshifts into a Beatles-knockoff rideout. This was the band's second single.

With its demos and remixed and finished tracks, Buffalo Springfield amply demonstrates how explosive and creative the band's chemistry could be. It leaves a curious fan wanting more when a more casual fan has had more than enough. In me, it inspires a list of highlights:

Two Young demos of early interior dreamscapes--the painfully ethereal "Out of My Mind" and vulnerable "Flying on the Ground Is Wrong." The tight-wound Stills-Furay harmonies and beautiful acoustic simplicity on the demo for "Baby Don't Scold Me," ultimately released as a mix of stiff Supremes' drumbeats, reverb and psychedelic guitar raunch that overshadowed the bittersweet lyrics. "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing," an early Young art-rocker with twining guitars, opaque lyrics and a time-signature shift that highlights Furay's unpleasantly blocky phrasing. The massed-guitar country-rock and Miles Standish love triangle of "Go and Say Goodbye." The r&b goodtime feel of Stills's "Hot Dusty Roads," with its heavily treated guitar solo and whimsical genre twist: "I don't tell no tales about no hot dusty roads/I'm a city boy and I stay at home." The Zombies-ish jazz-bossa inflections of "Pretty Girl Why," and the walking bass and jazzy modal drone of "Everydays," cut more than a year before Miles Davis's Bitches Brew. The guitar-orchestra suite called "Bluebird." The drippy psychedelic orchestration and Moody Blues-like choir on "Expecting to Fly." The vocal handoff, straight out of two-tenor gospel groups, on "Hung Upside Down," where Furay's soulful lead yields the chorus to Still's raunchy wails. The gently stinging ironies of "A Child's Claim to Fame," underlined by hired hand James Burton's dobro solo. (Burton played guitar with Ricky Nelson, Elvis Presley and Gram Parsons.) The galloping drive and stinging guitar lines of "Rock and Roll Woman" that leave you feeling like you've just danced with a truck. The Dylan-modeled imagery and phrasing of Young's demos like "The Rent Is Always Due." The art-house melodrama and Sgt. Pepper orchestration of "Broken Arrow." The dark blues of Stills's husky musings and piano on the demo for "Four Days Gone." The punk flipping the bird to convention of "Special Care," where Stills plays all the instruments but drums.

That last cut is from Last Time Around, which was recorded over nearly a year; as time wore on, the band was disintegrating, as the Beatles did during the White Album. Stills and Young started producing their own sessions; Stills sang and played nearly all the parts on cuts like "Questions," here a biting soul-rocker with blues-drenched vocals, later cutely rearranged as a harmony piece for Crosby, Stills & Nash.

Young was out of the Springfield when they appeared at Monterey Pop, the June 1967 fete launching the Summer of Love. He was back for the Topanga Canyon bust. His bandmates would recombine: latter-day bassist/engineer Jim Messina with Richie Furay in Poco; Stills with the Byrds' David Crosby and later Young again. They'd all pursue solo careers: Young most spectacularly, Stills with solo projects and co-op ventures like "Super Session," which joined him with Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper. Meantime, Buffalo Springfield became a legend.

Is the boxed set an effective representation of the legend? Well, it's got the same middle-finger whimsy the group itself had: The booklet, perhaps as a tipoff to its sensibility, opens with a Wallace Stevens-inspired page titled "Various Accounts of Their Meeting in Hollywood." And it's taken ten years to put together because of the same old egos. It's definitely worth complaining that the twenty-six duplicated album cuts could have been replaced by additional rarities. The booklet's sometimes hard-to-read design, a postmodern swirl of artfully collaged documents and pictures, leaves misinterpretation rampant, though the one-page historical essay by Pete Long is fact-packed. The fan's-eye view by Ken Viola jumps disconcertingly around the booklet. The discographical annotation is complete but could use explication. And there's a complete tour schedule, which ends with Buffalo Springfield opening for the Beach Boys and Strawberry Alarm Clock on the last 1968 tour. It's worth recalling that at just about the same time, Jimi Hendrix was opening a tour for the Monkees.

Though no doubt Irvine Welsh would sneer at the very idea, on the evidence of Glue he is working-class Scotland's greatest living ethnographer. As he follows the fortunes and misfortunes of four characters over thirty years, he does for the inhabitants of Edinburgh's housing schemes what Damon Runyon did for the Prohibition-era criminal classes of New York: He recreates a closed society that functions according to its own rules, oblivious and largely impervious to those of the law-abiding, job-holding, standard-English-speaking, education-valuing middle classes.

The rules are no metaphor: Characters refer to them repeatedly, and toward the end of the book Welsh conveniently spells them out for us. Of his ten, here are the first six:

1.  never hit a woman
2.  always back up your mates
3.  never scab
4.  never cross a picket line
5.  never grass friend nor foe
6.  tell them nowt (them being polis, dole, social, journalists, council, census [takers], etc.)

If middle-class values ever penetrated Welsh's world (which they barely did), they don't count anymore. By 1980, every schoolboy knows that there are no real jobs left: Carl's father has worked the lathe at Ferranti's all his life, but there's no factory left for his son to follow him into, leaving Carl a deejay without a day job.

Juice Terry has had one job in his short career--going round the schemes selling juice (that's soda, or tonic, or maybe cola to you) off a van to the local kids. Twenty years later it still defines Terry to himself. "The juice lorries, that wis ma game. Tae gie me ma proper title ah wis an Aerated Waters Salesman. Goat peyed oaf back in 1981," he explains to an understandably baffled American visitor. Scorning the employment office's attempt to shunt him into minimum-wage burger-flipping, the only alternative he comes up with is the occasional housebreaking project, which doesn't really count as work, though it certainly takes effort.

Billy, the nearest thing to a traditional success story of the four, is a professional boxer who eventually leverages his local celebrity into ownership of a profitable bar. Wee Gally, the last of the quartet, takes a few unexpected detours through the criminal justice system and never quite makes it to regular paid employment.

They all keep busy, though, as do most of their friends--a bit of drug dealing here, a stint at window-washing there, a paying gig for Carl at a local club, the dole underpinning them all. In what's become in effect a nonprofit society, the Protestant ethic is as irrelevant as Terry's nostalgia for the good old days selling Irn Bru and Vimto.

With some shining exceptions, Welsh's characters are pretty smart, but not one of them finishes high school. There's only one answer to the accusation/question, "Are ye steying oan?"--"Waste ay fuckin time." That's not in the rules; aspiring to education is probably the most blatant evidence of class treachery, and the pathetic Gally keeps his ambition to finish school and really work on his foreign-language skills firmly to himself. Everybody knows that school's real function is to prepare you for the tedium of employment: Hauled in for being late, the boys are informed that "a school which tolerates lateness is by definition a failed school. It is a failed school because it has failed to prepare its pupils for a life of work." Carl points out that "thir isnae really any jobs now. Like where muh dad works, at Ferranti's, they jist peyed oaf a loat ay men." But teacher knows best: "There's plenty of work for those that are prepared to work. Always has been, always will be."

Showing off your education is even worse. When Billy's brother, Rab Birrell, starts taking a night school course on media and cultural studies, he immediately becomes an object of mingled suspicion and contempt. "Never gie a schemie an education," thinks Terry. "There was Birrell on some poxy course at Stevenson for ten minutes and he thinks eh's fuckin Chomsky." And a fellow boozer concurs: "The typical cynical schemie intellectual, too much of a critic to ever achieve anything in life.... Birrell, who actually believed that talking his pompous shite about politics to half-pished or jellied cunts in west-side pubs was going to raise their consciousness and inspire them to take political action and combine to change society."

At the same time, the lads are incensed when outsiders assume they're ignorant, stupid or bigoted. Carl gets denounced as a neo-Nazi after a photographer catches him in what looks like a Hitler salute: "He asked if we were fascists and a couple of us did the John Cleese thing as a piss-take. I was stupid. Stupid no tae realise that they can be as 'ironic' as they like, but schemies are never allowed to be the same. Even if it's what we grew up on, only we just called it taking the piss."

Welsh traces his characters' lives, decade by decade, from childhood to adulthood, 1970 to the very near future, pairing the two losers Terry and Gally with the two winners Billy and Carl. The episodic structure suits his talent for the vignette and the set piece; when he attempts a full-length story with a single protagonist, as in Glue's predecessor Filth, he falls flat, and the belated attempts at creating any sort of plot make for the weakest parts of this book. The longitudinal design is really what gives Glue its depth and a lot of its political and social resonance, making it more than just another slice of low life, Runyon without Runyon's cheeriness. How did these innocent wee bairns, mostly well behaved in school, helping their mothers in the house and carrying home the messages, turn into violent, drugged and/or drunken, at best intermittently functional, borderline or actually criminal, adults?

Welsh gives us a lot of clues, but his prime suspects are remarkably traditional ones: broken homes, absent or emasculated fathers. Gally's dad is arrested the day Gally starts primary school, and spends most of the book in prison; Terry's dad has long since vanished and his mother has remarried--to a German, of all things. Even in the more intact families, the collapse of reliable employment has destroyed the routines that used to keep life going. Billy's brother and girlfriend are dole-moles, hunched around the TV set all day. Even more depressingly, Billy's laid-off father takes up gourmet cooking and surfing the Internet, to his sons' profound embarrassment. By contrast, a life filled with football riots, picking up lassies, dealing drugs and enduring marathon-length pub crawls seems healthy, active, enterprising and downright sociable.

The section set in 1980, when Carl, Gally and Billy are 15--meaning that they're about to hit the magic moment when they can legally leave school and illegally pass for drinking age--has the most to say about the mechanisms that turn wee laddies into big layabouts. Edinburgh's other famous writer in exile, Robert Louis Stevenson, said of his native city that "the delicate die early," and there's a survival-of-the-fittest quality to these opening chapters. Welsh traces a potent form of reverse peer pressure: The 15-year-olds do anything they can to emulate their marginally older mates like Terry--the local heroes who have already left school, been arrested, had sex (or claimed to), done drugs and of course passed out in the course of at least one night's partying. Wee Gally's big moment comes when he gets invited along on the planned football riot: "Wir oaf! My herts gaun fuckin boom-boom-boom, bit ah'm tryin no tae show it." These rites of passage are clearly defined as such: The notion that at least some of them are supposed to be fun seems not to have occurred to anyone. Performance anxiety is a recurrent theme, but Welsh takes it far beyond the bedroom (or more often the living-room settee), out into the football stands, the pub, the club and the police station.

In what's become a service economy with an adequate level of state child support, the women, unsurprisingly, cope better at work and at home than their unreliable boyfriends or husbands. Welsh is curiously vague about just what the women do when they're off on their own (the ones who have kids spend a lot of time in the park), but there's one thing his characters, male and female, are all sure of: When it comes to sex, the old double standard is out the window and everyone is the happier for it. The lads go to Munich for the Oktoberfest (and sex); the lassies head to Ibiza for sex (and sex). While you can't exactly call the relationships enlightened (these are not Sensitive Guys), the women take care of themselves, enjoy themselves and give as good as they get. Rule number one is broken exactly once, with disastrous consequences; football fans who head-butt other teams' supporters at a moment's notice wouldn't dream of laying a hand on a woman, and the women know it. ("'Nivir hit a lassie,' Wullie nodded. 'Definitely,' Duncan agreed sternly, as Maria looked at him with a you-just-try-it-pal expression.")

Welsh's American reviewers seem determined to flaunt their linguistic inadequacies. Salon assures us that "reading anything by Irvine Welsh is sort of like reading Chaucer if you are not fluent in Middle English"; not to be outdone, a New York Times reviewer complains about the opaque Edinburgh ghetto dialect, resigning himself to the fact that Glue "is full of the vernacular oddness that is Welsh's hallmark." Well, your dialect sounds pretty funny to us too, ya wee septic. As Welsh's compatriot, playwright John McRay, puts it, "It's not ma accent, it's your ears." The dialogue that apparently baffles these readers is lovingly transcribed in a quasi-phonetic style that would delight the heart of Henry Higgins, but actual Scots words and phrases are--to this reader--surprisingly thin on the page. For whatever reason, there's little sign of the vivid vernacular I remember from my own childhood. The Edinburgh poet Robert Garioch, writing into the 1970s, filled his verses with common words like scunner, clarty, thrawn, peelie-wallie--all terms that would have been in use at least by the parents of Welsh's main characters. A few echt expressions turn up in Glue--"torn-faced," "pooroot," "glaikit"--but you don't really need a glossary to follow the action. The endless cultural references are another matter, ranging from the Beano to Irn Bru to every Scottish football team worth mentioning and a fair number of their actual players (including--disclosure--my own cousin Alan Gordon, who played for Hearts back in the 1970s). Foreigners be warned: You won't get a lot of the jokes.

Edinburgh is always the point of reference, the center of the universe. (In Australia, Carl is underimpressed by Bondi Beach, which looks a lot like his native Porty--"mair sand but.") But it's an Edinburgh with a lot of bits missing. Terry says he hardly ever gets past Haymarket; prosperous Barnton and the Grange are familiar only as housebreaking opportunities. You'd never know Edinburgh featured tourist attractions like Princes Street Gardens, Holyrood Palace or St. Giles's Cathedral; in fact, you get the distinct impression that Welsh's characters have never encountered these well-advertised landmarks. What they do know in excruciating detail are the miles of low-income slum-clearance housing projects, invisible from the part of Edinburgh that the visitors get to see. The publisher might have given thought to including a map of Edinburgh and Leith, color-coded to show the fine social gradations between Stenhouse and Drylaw, Niddrie and Sighthill, Broomhouse and Granton, Leith and Leith. ("Thir's Leith n thir's Leith mate," the cab driver explains to the American visitor, whose failure to appreciate this key distinction brings predictable disaster.) But it's surely impossible to convey to any outsider the depth of scorn Welsh packs into "Tranent."

Like his characters, as soon as Welsh leaves Edinburgh he's out of his depth. His Germans are stage Germans: On their visit to Munich, as Terry embarks on a fight with the police, Carl is warned by his host, "You should tell your friend that in this country there is little to be gained in antagonising the police." (Carl sensibly keeps his response to himself--"It's the same in oor country, but that disnae stoap us.") Americans are stage Americans; Australians...well, luckily they don't get to say much. When his people migrate (to another class or another continent), you can feel Welsh losing touch with them. Sometimes this is on purpose. Ex-prizefighter Billy Birrell has abandoned most of his old mates by the end of the book, a move marked in a scene of intolerable pathos--to a Scot, at least: When Terry shows up in the new pub, expecting a cheery welcome and drinks on the house, Billy turns him away. But sometimes it feels more like a failure of nerve: When Carl fetches up in Australia, he seems to have lost all purpose, in his own life and in the story, and within a few pages, sure enough, Welsh has him on an emergency flight to Edinburgh, back to his father's deathbed and people who speak his language.

The remaining lads, still true to form, turn up to visit Carl's dying father. Terry's checking out the nurses; Billy's being suitably sympathetic to the family while trying not to get in another fight with Terry; Carl listens to his father's last words:

Mind the ten rules, he wheezed at his son, squeezing his hand. Carl Ewart looked at the broken parody of his father, sprawled under the sheets in his bed. Aye, they really worked for you, he thought.

But all the same he finds himself replying, "Of course I will, Dad." For once Welsh isn't taking the piss: In spite of the depredations of Thatcher and Blair, the end of work, the death of Elvis, the arrival of Ecstasy, AIDS, techno and cell phones, in Edinburgh the basics never change.

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.

A little way into the film version of Louis de Bernières's bestselling novel, set on the Greek island of Cephalonia during World War II, a group of villagers crowd around a list of casualties posted in the public square. Until this point we have seen only minstrel-show peasants, conversing in broken English and executing perfectly choreographed folk dances. But now an elderly man collapses with grief and cries out in his own language: "Oh god, oh god, my boy. My boy has been killed."

The moment feels real; while it lasts, contact is made with history. Then we are back in the fantasy world of director John Madden's Anglo-Hollywood confection, where all the women are brave and the children above average, the Italians love pasta and opera, and the Greeks are good-hearted and proud. The romance between moon-calf Nicolas Cage as a captain of the Italian occupying forces and smoldering Penelope Cruz as the local doctor's daughter is pure Hollywood creampuff: It could almost have been shot in the 1950s as a vehicle for Sophia Loren. Only John Hurt as Cruz's gnarled old dad manages to keep his accent straight and suggest some sort of interior life. The grueling final battles between German and Italian troops come as a relief: Here, again, the film borrows its power from the events it commemorates. Captain Corelli's Mandolin is promoted as a love story, but the only interesting thing about it is the history it mostly tries to treat as a backdrop.

When Mussolini fell in the autumn of 1943, Italian forces occupying Rhodes and the Ionian Islands refused to surrender their arms to the Germans. Instead they turned their guns on their former allies, sometimes assisted by Greeks who fought at their side. The gesture was heroic but hopeless. In Cephalonia thousands of Italians were captured and massacred by German firing squads; many more drowned when ships ferrying them to the mainland were scuttled by the Nazis. The film of Captain Corelli differs from de Bernières's novel in its account of these events, and especially of the part played in them by the Greek partisans. Both have been shaped by the protracted political struggle in Greece and abroad over the country's wartime past.

The civil war that followed Greece's occupation by the Axis powers has a special place in Anglo-American history. It was the hot war at the birth of the cold war, the moment that produced the Truman Doctrine to justify American intervention. The bitter fighting between the Communist-led mass resistance movement, which effectively controlled the country, and the forces of the British- and then American-backed government in exile tore villages and families apart and left political scars that have still not completely healed. Before the imposition of a repressive peace, American-made napalm was used by the Greek Air Force against its own people, and Britain decisively handed over the leadership of the postwar West to the United States. Afterward many thousands of suspected leftists were interned, tortured and executed. (Most of those who went into exile, in the Soviet bloc, were finally allowed to return in the early 1980s.) Greece suffered decades of right-wing rule shored up by the harassment and imprisonment of dissidents, culminating in the CIA-supported dictatorship of 1967-74.

Not surprisingly, popular accounts in English of the Greek war have been heavily ideological. In the 1980s, at the peak of Ronald Reagan's obsession with the Evil Empire, an impassioned account by the Greek-American journalist Nicholas Gage of his mother's murder by Communist guerrillas was hailed as a revelation and was duly made into a major motion picture. As the waning imperial power, Britain produced nothing to compare with this, unless you count the rather subtler memoirs of the brilliant Oxbridge boys parachuted into the Greek mountains to make contact with the resistance. Louis de Bernières's novel, first published in 1994, was in some ways a late excrescence of cold war culture. Though it claims to despise both Fascism and Communism, it offers a sympathetic portrait of Greece's prewar dictator Metaxas while caricaturing the partisans as a cowardly bunch of murderers, thieves and rapists too busy fighting their own people to bother with the Germans. (This last canard originates with Sir Reginald Leeper, His Majesty's wartime ambassador to the Greek government, who was anxious to discredit the resistance in London. In fact, the leftist partisans bore the brunt of the fighting against the Nazis.)

The book was a glittering success. As an antiwar novel written by a former soldier, it has a sure grip on its driving passion. Its stylish intelligence and historical sweep gave it highbrow credentials; its gripping narrative and rousing themes of love, death and loyalty insured mass-market appeal. Captain Corelli's Mandolin is the book Hugh Grant is reading at the end of the British yuppie comedy Notting Hill--an icon of intellectual aspiration. Like the work of John Fowles, who also used a Greek setting for his novel The Magus, it pleasurably engages the brain without the discomfort of aesthetic or moral challenges. Its detailed picture of a different yet familiar world is enticing and absorbing--and marred by surprisingly few howlers (Greek is not written in Cyrillic characters, nor are lambs roasted on Easter Saturday). De Bernières did his homework, and it shows.

Amid the general adulation no one seemed to notice or care about the novel's historical distortions, until the Morning Star accused de Bernières of "the most crude and brazen anti-communism." (De Bernières pulled no punches in his reponse: "How long are you people going to sit in the dark in an air pocket wanking each other off? Your ship has sunk, brothers. It was historically inevitable....") In Greece, too, the early reviews were positive--including the notice in the Communist newspaper Rizospastis, much to its later embarrassment. This may be partly because the Athenian publisher thought it prudent to excise passages like this one:

In Cephalonia the Communists began to deport awkward characters to concentration camps; from a safe distance they had watched the Nazis for years, and were well-versed in all the arts of atrocity and oppression. Hitler would have been proud of such assiduous pupils.

It is also because Greece is a small country accustomed to being worshiped for its past and patronized for its present; a successful British writer who had bothered to immerse himself in its culture and recent history was bound to be given the benefit of the doubt.

Still, it was not long before political antennae were set quivering, and the novel sparked a new skirmish in the long-running and highly coded argument about the civil war. The Greek left emerged from its long silence after 1974 with an understandable tendency to romanticize the partisans. The right has kept up a steady barrage of accusation about leftist atrocities. Over the past decade Greek historians have begun to escape the cold war vise and produce more nuanced and detailed studies of the conditions that led to polarization and violence on both sides. But in the overheated atmosphere of the Greek media, there is little room for such subtleties.

When news of the plan to film Captain Corelli on Cephalonia reached the island, hackles immediately went up. Like most of the Greek islands, Cephalonia leans left: Sixty percent of the vote goes to left-of-center parties, 12 percent to the Communists. Many former partisans are still alive. Vangelis Neochorotis, now 92, whose efforts, both in the resistance with his wife, Amalia, and in the Greek-Italian war of 1940-41, were rewarded with twenty-one years in prison, told the British journalist Seumas Milne, "De Bernières's book is an insult to the whole Greek people. But I believe it is also part of a global drive to rewrite history...to convince people that political and social change is a dead end and that if you struggle for a better world, it only leads to bloodshed, suffering and failure."

Neochorotis is not the only veteran of wartime Cephalonia who has spoken scathingly of de Bernières's novel. Ninety-year-old Amos Pampaloni, former general manager of the Italian Automobile Club, knows more than most about the events it draws on. His own story, told this spring in a BBC documentary, bears a striking resemblance to Captain Corelli's, and formed the basis for Marcello Venturi's The White Flag, an Italian novel published in the 1960s and mentioned in de Bernières's acknowledgments. During the war Pampaloni was a captain in charge of the 33rd artillery regiment, Acqui division, in Cephalonia. Like Corelli, he fell in love ("innocently," he emphasizes) with a Cephalonian girl; he played a key role in the Italians' decision to attack the Germans; and he was shot and left for dead among the corpses of his men by a German firing squad. Unlike Corelli, though, Pampaloni was rescued by the leftist partisans and spent a year with them fighting the Germans on the Greek mainland before returning to help liberate Cephalonia. Pampaloni movingly describes that year as one of the best in his life, an unforgettable time of idealism and solidarity. His memories may be tinged with the glow of nostalgia, but they should still give pause to anyone taken in by de Bernières's hatchet job.

In the end, faced with the prospect of caravansaries of film crews importing much-needed cash along with inevitable chaos, the Cephalonian authorities decided to cut a deal with Captain Corelli's British producers, and a committee of officials and historians was set up to vet the project. Assured that the film would be a pure love story--à la Doctor Zhivago--and would not touch on the civil war, they agreed that filming could go ahead. (They may also have been mollified by the choice of Shawn Slovo, daughter of South African activists Ruth First and Joe Slovo, to write the screenplay.) Judging by the credits, half the island found employment on the set, restoring houses, splicing cables and dressing the actors' hair. Donkeys (increasingly rare in Greece) were rented at a premium; fishermen ferried paparazzi to spot the stars who came to sun themselves on Cephalonia's newly famous beaches. Cafes and restaurants were renamed after the novel, and travel companies began to hawk Cephalonia as "Corelli's island."

The film is indeed considerably kinder to the partisans than de Bernières's book. Their main representative onscreen is Mandras, the jilted fiancé of Penelope Cruz's character, Pelagia, and though the way he is played by Christian Bale suggests that the guerrillas were a bunch of pouting postadolescents, he is not an unsympathetic figure. A scene from the novel in which Mandras returns from the mountains and rapes his former love was cut in postproduction. (For the sake of "balance" we are shown instead a young woman hanged by the partisans for kissing a German on the cheek; there were instances in Greece of women being killed for fraternizing with Nazis, though the more usual treatment, as in France, was a humiliating head-shaving.) Most important, resistance members are shown helping the Italians against the Germans, in spite of de Bernières's assertion that they "took no part, seeing no reason to shake themselves out of their parasitic lethargy"--a key restoration, one would imagine, for Cephalonia's veterans.

Still, it would be interesting to know what those veterans make of the film when it reaches Cephalonia. In hindsight, the wrangling over the resistance seems to have distracted everyone from a more fundamental point. Distortion is only one way of stealing history. As global culture homogenizes the world, places that have kept their identity unvarnished become valuable commodities; once discovered, their shelf life is brief. With Captain Corelli's Mandolin and its attendant tourist boomlet, Cephalonia has taken one more step toward becoming a simulacrum of itself. For a while, the ching of the cash registers will sugar the pill. But eventually the punters will move on to the next hot spot, leaving a hollow feeling in their wake.

This has not been a good season for God.

The President now says he will make the decision on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research before Labor Day--in time to catch the wave of his just-announced refocusing of his Administration on "values." (Apparently tax cuts for the rich and drilling in the Arctic aren't catnip to women voters. Who knew? Bring on that all-abstinence-all-the-time cable station America's soccer moms are clamoring for!) Perhaps revealing more than he intended about customary decision-making procedures at the White House, Bush has said that his Administration is being "unusually deliberative" about stem cells. Most people, not to mention the powerful biotech industry, say they want the research to go forward, even though it involves the destruction of four- to six-day-old blastocysts left over from fertility treatments. However, Bush not only promised during the campaign that he would eliminate the funding, he went to the Vatican in July for direction, as any good Methodist would do, where the Pope declared that "a tragic coarsening of consciences accompanies the assault on innocent human life in the womb," and out of it, too. If only Bush had gone to a rabbi--modern medicine practically is the Jewish religion.

In a rational world, the President would decide on funding by thinking about whether this was the best use of the country's money and brainpower--but then, in a rational world, the President would not be making this decision at all, as if he were a medieval king dispensing largesse and boons. In this world, the stem cell debate is not about health policy, it's about abortion: Is a 150-cell blastocyst--the equivalent of a fertilized egg not yet implanted in the womb--a person or not? Many people usually lined up on the antichoice side have a hard time visualizing a frozen speck as a baby, especially since, as my friend Dr. Michelle pointed out, that frozen speck could be helping to cure diseases Republican men get, like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. (Would we be having this debate if the research showed promise to cure Chagas' disease and sleeping sickness?)

According to Orrin Hatch, it's OK to destroy a frozen embryo because the embryo is only a person if it's in a woman. This location theory of personhood is obviously unsatisfactory: You put the cells in the woman, it's a person, you take them out, it's not a person, you put them back in, voilà!--it's a person again. You might as well say Orrin Hatch is a person in his office but not in his car. If, as antichoicers like to claim, what makes personhood is a full set of chromosomes--rather than, say, possession of a gender, a body, a head, a brain--then a clump of cells in an ice cube tray is at least as much a person as Trent Lott. Maybe more.

I think I see a way to help the President out of his difficulties. The White House should ask opponents of embryonic stem cell research to sign a legally binding pledge forgoing any treatment or procedures derived from it, both for themselves and their minor offspring. If they really believe that frozen embryos are children, they should have no problem with this. An impressive list of right-wing pundits have laid out the argument in characteristically colorful fashion: Andrew Sullivan, for instance, insisted in The New Republic that the blastocyst is "the purest form of human being" and to kill it is to "extinguish us." (Someone should tell him that nearly half of all fertilized eggs fail to implant and are washed out with menstruation--maybe there should be funerals for tampons, just to be on the safe side.) In the Washington Times, Michael Fumento writes that stem cell research "rightly or wrongly" summons up visions of Dr. Mengele's Auschwitz experiments. Who, after all, would be willing to treat their illness with a potion of boiled 5-year-olds? Well, maybe some very bad 5-year-olds, already set on the path to crime and low SAT scores by single mothers, but you see my point. As Eric Cohen put it in The Weekly Standard, "to ask the sick and dying to love the mystery of life more than their own lives" is a bit like asking comfortable Americans to sacrifice themselves in wars against tyranny around the globe: "Both require a courageous commitment to something larger than self-interest." The mystery of life versus, well, life. Let's put people on record.

If frozen embryos really are children, though, is it enough not to kill them? Don't we need to rescue them from the icy wasteland to which they have been consigned? Their selfish yuppie biological parents may have abandoned them, but the Family Research Council says that every frozen embryo should have "an opportunity to be born" and I am surprised that the antichoicers haven't yet rallied to the cause. True, a few women unable to conceive naturally have been implanted with the leftover embryos of others, but there are some 100,000 frozen embryos in need of homes--it's like a whole other foster-care system.

Antichoice women are the only hope to get those embryos out of Frigidaire limbo. As they like to say, an extra pregnancy is just an inconvenience, its health dangers much exaggerated by prochoice babykillers and its opportunities for moral growth scorned by our culture of death. So, Concerned Women for America, give a frozen embryo the gift of gestation! Mona Charen, Ann Coulter, it isn't enough to write columns comparing stem cell research to tearing transplantable organs out of freshly killed prisoners--you could be leading the way! Think of the talk-show opportunities. ("Chris, some people think we right-wing women are a pack of peroxided harpies, but when I thought of those adorable cells just trapped in there with the yogurt, I knew I had to help!") They can always put the baby up for adoption so it will be raised by normal people, as they think pregnant singles ought to do. Frozen embryo rescue would be an interesting project for the Sisters of Life, the antichoice order of nuns founded by the late John Cardinal O'Connor. Sort of a virgin birth kind of thing.

In a pinch, the President can always call on welfare moms laid off from their jobs at Wendy's in the looming recession. It would be a natural extension of his plan to offer healthcare directly to poor fetuses, a sort of housing program for blastocysts. Compassionate conservatism at its best!

We said that Kim Jong Il was just the guy
For whom we needed Star Wars in the sky.
Now Kim Jong Il declares we needn't worry
That he might up and bomb us in a hurry:
He isn't testing for the missile race;
He's got a moratorium in place.
Does this, then, mean that we won't have to wield
A multibillion-dollar missile shield?
Well, no, for other wicked rogues remain.
If they go, we'll find others as profane.
If all rogues disappear, we won't be glum,
We'll hope that if we build it, they will come.

Isabel Segunda, Vieques, Puerto Rico

In this smallest of small towns one could get the impression that there was something parochial--something "not in my backyard"--about the campaign to expel the United States Navy. But to be present on the day of the referendum was to see a kind of historical revenge being enacted, as well as the rebirth of a latent national consciousness. The mayor of Vieques, Damaso Serrano, remembers seeing a boyhood friend being shot dead for crossing the wire around the base. Other local veterans have never forgiven the expulsion of their families and the demolition of their old homes. But it is not, in general, motives of resentment that animate the voters. I did a stop-by at the headquarters of "Option Two," the movement for the immediate cessation of the Navy's presence and practices on the island. The preponderance of activists was female, from a variety of political backgrounds, concerned certainly with the recent death of a civilian on the firing range but much more preoccupied with terms like "dignity" and "recognition." One of them, a beaming veteran, told me that she'd been to Washington for the celebrations in 1976 to call for "a bicentennial without colonies."

The Option Two majority--some 68 percent, as it turns out--seem to see this more as a chance to make themselves felt in Washington again. The opposition 30 percent are likewise fond of citing broader issues. The choice, they say, is between Americanization and "Fidelization." (The Cuban exile community in Puerto Rico, with some help from Miami, was extremely active in framing the question in this way.) And this minority, bear in mind, took a firm stand in favor of keeping the Navy presence indefinitely and allowing live-fire exercises. The only option that nobody chose was the Bush Administration's too-little-too-late proposal of dummy-ammunition testing accompanied by a phased withdrawal. (The Republican and Democratic hawks in Congress don't think much of it, either.) Had the vote been islandwide, it is extremely improbable that the pro-Navy forces would have got as much as 30 percent. Vieques depends very heavily for jobs on the Navy, and the Navy had recently been extremely punctilious about remembering to pay compensation to local fishermen for time and earnings lost during exercises. Neither in San Juan nor in the largely black town of Loiza did I see more than the occasional pro-Navy bumper sticker or window display, whereas signs reading paz para vieques or no una bomba más or, more bluntly, fuera la marina (Navy Get Out!) were everywhere to be seen. (And Loiza seemed to me significant because blacks in Puerto Rico have historically supported statehood over independence.)

Indeed, the largest single bloc of Puerto Ricans of all stripes still do prefer statehood to independence. But of what value is that, when the United States itself makes it so abundantly clear that it doesn't want Puerto Rico as a state? The other alternative--an enhanced form of "commonwealth" or colonial status--is exactly what is being eroded by the Vieques confrontation and by the refusal of Congress to allow a binding vote on the island's future.

Military politics is not peripheral in Puerto Rico. The island was originally annexed in 1898 for strategic reasons. Puerto Ricans, unrepresented in Congress, have always been well represented in the uniforms of the United States armed forces, and the whole question of citizenship without statehood is closely bound up with that fact. (The antidraft movement during the Vietnam years was especially intense on the island for just that reason.) The military-industrial complex throws a lengthy shadow here, both as employer and as provider of subsidies. It has also long been a political arbiter.

The leading San Juan columnist, Juan Manuel Garcia Passalacqua, created quite a sensation recently when he published some still-secret War Department documents from the 1940s, a time when the independence movement seemed more of a threat. In 1943 the War Department told Congress that it found it "impossible to acquiesce in the premise that Puerto Rico can be given sovereignty status." Two years later, the department insisted that any bill relating to the status of the island "should be modified so as to provide [that]...the US government shall retain exclusive military jurisdiction over the island of Puerto Rico, regardless of the form of provisional or commonwealth government set up for transitional purposes." It also stipulated that "the United States may, by presidential proclamation, exercise the right to intervene in any manner necessary for the preservation of the government of Puerto Rico and for the maintenance of the government as provided by the Constitution thereof."

In effect this means that the "commonwealth" status quo of the past half-century has been a military device for keeping Puerto Rican politics in a state of suspended animation. Thus the slogan Fuera la Marina, even when uttered on the small island of Vieques off the eastern tip of Puerto Rico, has much more considerable implications than at first appear.

Bush, of course, probably owes his election to the creative counting of absentee military ballots in Florida. (See the New York Times of July 15.) And few Presidents have been more anxious to propitiate the military-industrial nexus. But Bush has also staked quite some part of his presidency, and of his hope for re-election, on "making nice" with Hispanic America. When asked about the Vieques protests he replied in conciliatory tones about "our friends and neighbors who don't want us," for all the world as if Puerto Rico really was a nearby independent state. But it isn't; it has neither the rights nor the duties of a sovereign state or a state of the Union. The nonviolent movement against the Navy has, as Passalacqua later put it to me, offered a safe and patriotic yet extremely subversive challenge to this condition of suspended animation. Perhaps, after all, that is a little provincial and backyardish, but then the power of the powerless is often exercised by indirect means.

So, a bunch of really old guys were sitting around the Senate cloakroom shooting the breeze when one of them brought up the latest fountain-of-youth gimmick.