February 26, 2001 | The Nation

The former dictator is charged at last, and human rights are the talk of the nation.

His dream is an open northern border. But first, he must end southern poverty.

You Can't Get There From Here

San Jose, Calif.

JoAnn Wypijewski in "Back to the Back of the Bus" [Dec. 25] sheds much-needed light on the ongoing civil rights struggles, which lack the Bull Connors and Jim Clarks of an earlier era but produce results that discriminate with equal power. However, in her brief summary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, she overlooks, as is generally the case, the role of the Women's Political Council.

Formed in 1946 by Mary Fair Burks, the WPC, under the leadership of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, printed the leaflets calling for a boycott of the buses in protest of Rosa Parks's arrest. The WPC had been planning a bus boycott for years, waiting for an opportune moment to strike. When word got around to the ministers about the boycott, they agreed to support it, albeit without publicly announcing this support to the white community. E.D. Nixon resented this hesitancy, calling them "little boys" who "lived off these poor washerwomen" and "ain't never done nothing for 'em." The ministers were properly ashamed and--with Martin Luther King Jr.--decided to publicly support the boycott. The rest, of course, is history.

Forgetting the role of citizens' groups like the WPC obscures the dynamics of social change. It was the local citizens of Montgomery, working together for years without white publicity, who created and sustained the boycott and in doing so handed the national microphone to Dr. King for the first time. Today the struggle for economic and social justice continues in Montgomery, carried on (again) by "ordinary" citizens like Carolyn Rawls and Johnnie Carr.

GABE THOMPSON

Montgomery, Ala.

To respond to JoAnn Wypijewski's jab at the Southern Poverty Law Center in "Back to the Back of the Bus": We don't remember the Montgomery Transportation Coalition asking us for money, but that's beside the point--we probably wouldn't make a grant to the group unless the request came from a coalition attorney seeking to cover case costs for a particular civil rights action. Because of our historic mission, that's the form that most of our grants for advocacy efforts take (see the Strategic Litigation Project at www.splcenter.org).

Contrary to the article, we have worked to help alleviate the transportation problems of the poor, not just in Montgomery but in Alabama as a whole. In the mid-1990s, we filed a case that attacked the state's failure to provide a transportation system for poor people (Medicaid recipients) in need of medical care. Although the court of appeals ruled against us on technical grounds, our victory in the district court caused the state to adopt a transportation program for Medicaid recipients that is still in operation.

One of our more recent lawsuits, currently before the US Supreme Court, forced the state to give its driver's license examination in foreign languages. Precisely because public transportation in Alabama is so abysmal, that case addressed an acute problem for poor and working-class immigrants. The issue is whether private parties can enforce the "discriminatory effects" regulations issued under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The enforceability of these regulations is central to the efforts of many advocacy groups across the nation that seek to prod local governments to devote more resources to public transportation.

These two cases give some indication not only of our concern about the transportation problems facing the poor but also of the unfairness of Wypijewski's suggestion that we devote all our resources to the fight against white supremacist organizations. Although the public often associates us with this fight because our courtroom successes against hate groups have captured headlines, our supporters know that our work is not limited in this way.

Last, to the claim that our new building is "assaulting the Capitol area's landscape," all we can say is, we've never tried very hard to fit in around here!

J. RICHARD COHEN, legal director
Southern Poverty Law Center

WYPIJEWSKI REPLIES

New York City

Thanks to Gabe Thompson for the history I didn't have the space to recount. Indeed, Jo Ann Robinson was one of the central strategists, with Fred Gray and E.D. Nixon, of the boycott and, with them, had been organizing for just such an opportunity since at least March of 1955, when 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on the bus. Rosa Parks, who apart from being a seamstress was also secretary and youth director of the Montgomery NAACP, was certainly aware of this. It was also Robinson who suggested that her pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church might be a good leader for the boycott because he was young and articulate and, having not yet involved himself with community politics, would not alienate any of black Montgomery's powerful factions. Robinson herself never held any official position in the boycott organization because to do so almost certainly would have cost her her job as a professor at Alabama State College. She tells her story in The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It. A terrific collection of oral histories of the people who made the boycott can be found in The Children Coming On..., edited by Willy S. Leventhal. One final historical note: 1955 marked the second time Montgomery's blacks boycotted public conveyances over segregation. The first was in 1900, when transit segregation was put into law. For that whole summer blacks refused to ride the trolleys. The white power structure was forced to make a minor compromise but would not cave for more than a half-century; almost another half-century on, the long walk to transit freedom in Montgomery continues.

Meanwhile, here's J. Richard Cohen congratulating himself and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which in thirty years of existence has addressed the transportation crisis twice and the transit racism in its own hometown not at all. While the two interventions aren't insignificant, they do nothing to alleviate the transportation problems of the majority of low-income Alabamians, nor do they strike at the root of those problems. And of course they have nothing to do with the local bus system. After my article was published, Jon Broadway of the Transportation Coalition again tried contacting various people at the center, Cohen among them, to see if there might be some way this institution with an endowment of $120 million might assist the struggle going on just outside its heavily fortified doors. Four phone messages and a number of e-mails later, he's still waiting for a reply.

Perhaps simple courtesy is also "beside the point" for the center's puffed-up crusaders, seeing as how the coalition's work doesn't fall within their "historic mission"--i.e., bringing headline-grabbing lawsuits. But because even the Federal Transit Administration's Office of Civil Rights advises activists that the fight for transit justice in America is unlikely ever to be won in court, that historic mission turns out here to be a self-serving cloak for indifference. Even at the level of rhetoric, Cohen and his colleagues, who regularly expound on civil rights issues in Op-Ed pieces or letters to the editor in the Montgomery Advertiser, have not bestirred themselves on the bus crisis.

What is the Southern Poverty Law Center doing instead? Mostly making money. I would never have suggested that it "devote[s] all [its] resources to the fight against white supremacist organizations," because the center doesn't devote all of its resources to any kind of fight. In 1999 it spent $2.4 million on litigation and $5.7 million on fundraising, meanwhile taking in more than $44 million--$27 million from fundraising, the rest from investments. A few years ago the American Institute of Philanthropy gave the SPLC an F for "excessive" reserves. On the subject of "hate groups," though, Cohen is almost comically disingenuous. No one has been more assiduous in inflating the profile of such groups than the center's millionaire huckster Morris Dees, who in 1999 began a begging letter, "Dear Friend, The danger presented by the Klan is greater now than at any time in the past ten years." Hate sells; poor people don't, which is why readers who go to the center's website will find only a handful of cases on such unlucrative causes as fair housing, worker safety or healthcare, many of those from the 1970s and '80s. Why the organization continues to keep "Poverty" (or even "Law") in its name can be ascribed only to nostalgia or a cynical understanding of the marketing possibilities in class guilt. It barely even handles death penalty cases anymore, and lawyers struggling in the South to save the lives of people, mostly poor, on Death Row, will never forget that it was Morris Dees who smoothed the way to a federal judgeship for Ed Carnes, author of Alabama's death penalty statute and a notorious hanging judge.

With allies like Carnes and a salary close to $300,000 putting him among the top 2 percent of Americans, Dees needn't worry about "fitting in" with the masses of Montgomery. Naturally, he'd erect a multimillion-dollar office building that's a monstrosity. "I hate it," a security guard across the street told me, as the sun's hot rays bounced off the building's vast brushed-stainless-steel-clad southern exposure and onto his face, making him sweat, roasting his skin while he stood watch for the militia nuts Dees would have his donors believe are lurking around every corner.

So, readers, rip up those pledges to the Southern Poverty Law Center. To help people in real struggle, send your money to:

§ Montgomery Transportation Coalition, c/o Jon Broadway, 600 South Court St., Room 200, Montgomery, AL 36104; (334) 244-3972. (It is pushing for expanded city bus service, a community voice in transportation decisions, spending equity and environmental justice.)

§ Rosebud Community Center, c/o Mrs. Arzula Johnson, 7376 Highway 10, East Pineapple, AL 36768; (334) 682-9703. (In the countryside where there are no taxis or buses, it provides educational and social activities and owns an old schoolbus but can't afford the insurance to operate it.)

§ Annemanie Tutoring Program, c/o Mrs. Jeanette McCall, PO Box 354, Catherine, AL 36728; (334) 225-4452. (Another rural project without benefit of public transport, it tutors students after school and conducts adult job training. Unless it can replace its van, it won't be able to continue past this school year. It also needs computers and building materials.)

JoANN WYPIJEWSKI

This column may be reprinted and/or distributed by electronic means, but only for non-commercial use, and only with the inclusion of the following copyright information: Text © copyright 2001 by Mumia Abu-Jamal. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the author.

John Ashcroft took office swearing on a stack of Bibles--on three of them, actually, one for each of his children--to run "a professional Justice Department that is free from politics." Sure. That's why he, or someone in the White House spin department, chose Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to administer the oath. There are multiple messages here. There's the photo-op-that-looks-like-America message; there's the twin-martyrs-to-liberal-attacks message; and most important, there's the wink-and-nod message conveying Ashcroft's idea of constitutional interpretation. Thomas, let's not forget, is the Supreme Court Justice who has written that Roe v. Wade is this century's Dred Scott and who has held that prison guards punching out inmates' teeth doesn't constitute cruel and unusual punishment.

With Ashcroft confirmed, the symbolic terrain of abortion rights is where the Bush Administration seems determined to first test the boundaries of the politically possible, as evidenced by Bush's provocative ban on federal funding of overseas family-planning agencies in the middle of the Ashcroft hearings. On Meet the Press just forty-eight hours before the Judiciary Committee acted, Vice President Cheney refused to rule out seeking to overturn abortion rights--despite Ashcroft's confirmation conversion to Roe v. Wade as "settled law"--and made it clear that "trying to find ways to reduce the incidence of abortion" will be a top priority of the Ashcroft Justice Department.

And beyond abortion? Will W.'s determination to peel black support away from Democrats trump the new AG's historic hostility to voting-rights reviews and desegregation suits? If Bush is serious about easing black mistrust, the first thing he must do is make sure Ashcroft names a reputable deputy attorney general for civil rights, not an anti-affirmative-action ideologue. And if Ashcroft doesn't give the department's voting-rights lawyers latitude to follow up on the US Civil Rights Commission's inquiries in Florida, all those multiracial photo-ops will be exposed as a bad joke. Another key issue: How far and fast will Ashcroft move in asking the Supreme Court to modify its longstanding ban on aid to parochial schools for purposes that primarily advance religion? Lowering that bar takes on new importance with the Bush Administration's faith-based social-services initiative.

Ashcroft's first high-level appointment--of Theodore Olsen as Solicitor General--is no surprise, given Olsen's Supreme Court victory in the Florida case and his affiliation with the Clinton-hating center of conservative legal politics, The Federalist Society. Higher education affirmative-action cases--with universities trying to defend their admissions policies against reverse-discrimination claims--are piling up at the Supreme Court's doorstep and will provide one of the first windows into how far Olsen and Ashcroft will go toward challenging established federal policies. Likewise an environmental case, Gibbs v. Babbitt, involving red wolves, with conservatives challenging the Endangered Species Act as unconstitutional. In the final hours of the Clinton Administration, Solicitor General Seth Waxman weighed in with a brief defending the act, and environmentalists are watching to see if Olsen rushes to submit a new brief to the Court.

With the first two federal executions in four decades now pending--Timothy McVeigh with a May date and Juan Raul Garza granted a six-month stay by Bill Clinton--Ashcroft more than any Attorney General in memory occupies ground-zero in the death penalty debate. And he'll decide how vigorously to enforce federal gun-control laws already on the books. When it comes to reining in corporate monopolists, will Ashcroft even pretend to fulfill his confirmation pledge vigorously to enforce antitrust laws--laws that essentially fell by the wayside in twelve previous years of Reagan/Bush administrations? Watch the pending Microsoft case.

Perhaps the most legally and politically consequential choices facing Ashcroft involve an issue that divides even the Republican Party: the war on drugs. In Tulia, Texas, police have arrested 20 percent of the African-American population on drug charges. The FBI has begun a civil rights investigation, but Ashcroft, who never met a drug arrest he didn't like (as a senator, he argued for punishment over treatment and for making needle-exchange programs illegal), will determine whether it goes forward. Henry Hyde and Bob Barr pushed legislation last term to reform the corrupting system of property-forfeiture laws, while Connecticut Governor John Rowland now proposes restoring sentencing discretion to his state's judges in drug cases so more offenders can be pushed into treatment instead of mandatory prison. Will Ashcroft, whose power will be enhanced if the Administration follows through on downgrading the drug czar position from Cabinet status, listen to such Republican voices--or will he drive Justice further into the drug-war quagmire?

All this will play out on a political landscape already shaped by the Ashcroft nomination fight. If nothing else, the Democrats' forty-two votes against Ashcroft's nomination established the clout of civil rights and civil liberties groups and serves as a warning against Supreme Court nominations too far on the conservative fringe. At the same time, it's important not to ignore the defections of Senators Russell Feingold and Christopher Dodd, both of whom claim to have voted for Ashcroft out of respect for the right of a President to select a Cabinet that reflects his views. Given the capacity of Justice to administer swift and lasting damage to civil rights--a fact that led many other senators, aware of their constituencies' concerns, to vote against Ashcroft--that's a dangerous calculation. The coalition that opposed Ashcroft emerges from this fight well positioned to play the role of shadow Justice Department, but it will have to shadow the Democrats just as fiercely if a spirit of opposition is to be sustained.

Four days into the new Administration, President George W. Bush in effect declared war on Africa and Africans (though the corporate media failed to notice). Bush's very first foreign policy action was to defund international public health and family planning services by withdrawing US money from providers who also offer reproductive health education and abortion services using money from other sources. Bush's next action was to place under review an executive order signed by President Clinton that supports African countries' right to import or produce generic versions of HIV/AIDS medications that are still under US patent. The reversal of this order--done in the name of American pharmaceutical companies--would be the moral equivalent of imposing the death penalty on 25 million Africans.

These actions constitute an assault on Africans' health at a time when the continent faces the world's greatest health crisis, and they suggest a return to the blatantly anti-African policies of the Reagan era, which were characterized by a fabricated perception of Africa as a social welfare case. During the campaign, Bush and his advisers repeatedly stressed that Africa did not fit into the strategic interests of America, and Bush said during the debates that Africa was not a priority. (He did, however, announce his qualified support for debt relief for poor countries.)

Vice President Cheney's perspective on Africa is epitomized by his support for keeping Nelson Mandela in prison and his opposition to sanctions against apartheid South Africa while he was a member of Congress. More recently, as CEO of Halliburton, the world's largest oil services company, he was complicit in lining the pockets of the dictatorship of the late Gen. Sani Abacha in Nigeria. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was, until this year, a director of Chevron, another oil company that buttressed military rule in Nigeria and even hired the regime's soldiers, who fired on unarmed protesters at the sites of its operations. (A Chevron oil tanker bears her name!) With Bush himself coming from the oil industry, as do so many in his Cabinet, oil is likely to top the list of US interests in Africa as defined by the Bush "oiligarchy."

Neither Rice nor Secretary of State Colin Powell, both African-Americans, has demonstrated a particular interest in or special knowledge of Africa (General Powell's recent courtesy calls with generals Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Joseph Kabila of Congo notwithstanding). Moreover, both Powell and Rice are loyal Republicans with a shared orientation toward international affairs that derives from a narrow militaristic understanding of security. They are also unilateralists at a time when the need in Africa is for multilateral support for peace and security. Meanwhile, the basic illegitimacy of the Bush Administration in the eyes of the vast majority of African-Americans will make it more difficult for it to be taken seriously on democratization in Africa, support for which should be central to US policy toward the continent.

In the context of a Bush Administration and a divided Congress, breaking through the systemic US disdain for Africa will not happen unless there are dramatic shifts in public perceptions comparable to those of the 1980s regarding apartheid in South Africa. Public pressure will make the difference, just as it did then. AIDS must be seen for what it is: a consequence of global apartheid, in which basic human rights, including the right to quality healthcare, are denied along the color line. On debt cancellation, activists may find support in unexpected places: They can look not only to large segments of the religious community with close ties to the Republicans but also to Republicans skeptical of multilateral institutions, including the World Bank and the IMF.

The real foreign policy priority for the United States is the threat presented by the structural inequities that perpetuate war and poverty in a world where race, place, class and gender are the major determinants of people's access to the full spectrum of human rights. It will take democratizing the US foreign policy to make Washington understand this and public pressure to get government to act upon it.

BEWARE OF BUREAUCRATS BARRING GREEKS

It's a rare thing when journalists join with classicists. Perhaps that's why a standing-room-only crowd jammed into Columbia University's journalism school to see a panel on "Dissenting Journalism: Greece, the CIA, and the USA." The evening was jointly sponsored by the classics department and the journalism school's Delacorte Magazine Center, and the featured speaker was to be Christos Papoutsakis, editor of the Greek dissenting magazine Anti. We say "was to be" because at the last minute, the Bush State Department denied Papoutsakis a visa. Anti, founded in May 1972 as "a magazine of resistance" modeled itself on the American magazine Ramparts, and the panel included San Francisco Examiner managing editor Warren Hinckle, Ramparts's troublemaking editor, whom Papoutsakis looked forward to meeting. (Both magazines took repeated swipes at the CIA.) Other panelists included Victor Navasky and Christopher Hitchens of The Nation and Frances Stonor Saunders, author of The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (see review in the June 12, 2000, Nation). The NYCLU and PEN, among others, sent letters protesting the State Department's exclusion of Papoutsakis. As NYCLU attorney Arthur Eisenberg wrote in protest to Secretary of State Colin Powell and the US Ambassador to Greece, the First Amendment's "strong presumption against government restricting the expressive opportunities of individuals...should also extend to circumstances where individuals seek to enter this country from abroad in order to participate in academic and communicative enterprises." Because the US Consul General in Athens failed to identify the grounds on which Papoutsakis, aged 70 and a respected journalist, had his visa denied, one wonders whether the State Department is reverting to the bad old days of McCarthy-McCarran-Walter. And equally troubling, why the barring of Papoutsakis, front-page news in Greece, is missing from the US media. Perhaps they were too busy celebrating George W. Bush's first week in office to notice.

PREJUDICE AND DR. PENDERGRAFT

Barely an hour into the second day of deliberations on February 1, jurors in Florida Federal District Court handed down a startling verdict in the case of abortion provider Dr. James Pendergraft: guilty on all counts of attempted extortion, conspiracy and mail fraud. He faces up to thirty years in prison and fines of up to $750,000. After suing the city of Ocala and others in 1998 for failing to protect his recently opened clinic, Pendergraft, a dedicated and outspoken doctor who owns four other clinics in the state, was countersued by the federal government on these flimsy charges (see Katha Pollitt, December 11, 2000). His attorney, Jacob Rose, has vowed to appeal the conviction, which he, along with many others in the pro-choice and civil rights communities, believes is politically motivated. That's not all: Assistant US Attorney Mark Devereaux, who called Pendergraft a "headcrusher" during the trial, also claimed the doctor, who is black, "shucked and jived" on the witness stand. The prosecutors and their witnesses--many of whom are openly anti-choice--insist that the charges have to do with extortion, not abortion. But Refuse & Resist spokesperson Traci Stein declares, "It is clear that if Dr. Pendergraft was a high-profile heart surgeon, there would never have been an indictment."

NORTH AND SOUTH OF THE BORDER

When Mexican President Fox and US President Bush meet on February 16, immigration will be at the top of their agenda. As Congressman Bob Filner writes in a Nation web exclusive (www.thenation.com), "to a significant extent, the current level of immigration to the US is the result of policies designed and promoted on this side--not the other side--of the Rio Grande."

NEWS OF THE WEAK IN REVIEW

When the Minneapolis Star Tribune asked Ralph Nader about reports that progressive Democrats have "vowed never to work with him again," he replied: "The door's been closed for years. They just put the sign out." News to us.

A writer in Slate, commenting on the New York Times's recent two-part recap of the Wen Ho Lee case, observed that "Robert Scheer, who seeks full exoneration for Lee, will probably be disappointed because the Times concludes that Lee's behavior, while not demonstrably criminal, remains suspicious." This must be a reference to my October 23 Nation article and my numerous Op-Ed pieces in the Los Angeles Times questioning the presumption of the New York Times that former Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee was guilty of the most nefarious of spy charges.

Since Lee was never charged with spying and the case ended with a plea bargain to a relatively minor charge of mishandling classified data, it would seem that Lee does not require exoneration. To my mind, it is the New York Times that should seek forgiveness for smearing Lee as a dangerous spy by continuing to presume him guilty until he is proven innocent beyond the shadow of the Times's doubt.

In its two-part series, reported in the main by the same reporters responsible for the original stories, the Times never once critically examines its reliance on government leaks and sources. Much of its reporting seems to rely on one former Energy Department official, Notra Trulock, who now does PR for the right-wing Free Congress Foundation, and who was the subject of much controversy within his department, including allegedly spitting on an African-American colleague who dared differ with him. While the Times recap finally admits that Trulock was just about alone in the entire defense establishment in believing that China stole plans for the W-88 warhead and/or has manufactured such a weapon, he is still treated gingerly by the Times. Is it possible that Trulock, who is writing a book about the case, could embarrass the newspaper by disclosing the details of his relationship with the Times as it puffed so much smoke suggesting a national security fire?

There is, of course, no fire. China still has a puny nuclear force of twenty liquid-fueled nuclear-armed rockets, and if it wanted to bankrupt its society by engaging in a nuclear arms race with the United States, there are plenty of former Soviet scientists now on the job market. The Russians mastered the secrets of weapons miniaturization, much ballyhooed by the Times, three decades ago.

Unfortunately, instead of seriously examining its own culpability in this case, the Times's recap is another smear based on what the paper defines as Lee's odd behavior. The two main instances the paper offers of suspicious actions are so ludicrous as to raise questions about the acuity of its top editors. The main one is that a Chinese nuclear scientist whom Lee had met during a lab-approved visit to China publicly embraced and thanked Lee when the Chinese scientist later visited the Los Alamos lab. If Lee were a spy for China, why would that Chinese scientist so dramatically blow Lee's cover by publicly embracing him?

The bigger problem for the Times is that its journalists have spent the better part of two years trying to convince readers that Lee was a spy for Communist China who turned over our top nuclear secrets--"the crown jewels''--and that as a result, the balance of power between the United States and China fundamentally changed. The purpose, often stated by those pushing the hard anti-China line, was to allow China to threaten Taiwan without fear of US retaliation because of China's nuclear weapons strength.

However, the latest twist in the Lee case, laid out in the Times epilogue, is that the FBI and other intelligence agencies no longer believe that Lee was a spy for the Chinese Communists. Instead they have come up with the theory that he was possibly working for his native Taiwan all along, as did the Washington Post, based on the fact that he has a bank account there (never mind that it contains only $200 and that Lee visits relatives there). That the Times can pass along this new theory with a straight face attests to the newspaper's institutional arrogance. In the government's case against the Taiwan-born Lee, it was always a matter of once a Han, always a Han. Even the Times in its recap concedes that the government went awry in focusing on Lee because of his ethnicity, but it refuses to admit that the newspaper, in a major way, was complicit in railroading Lee.

As President Bush's Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tommy Thompson, the former governor of Wisconsin, will decide how federal authority is used to supervise an array of programs that reach the poor and disabled. He will also play a key role in proposing changes in these programs. How is he likely to use that power?

The press has raised questions about the extremism of other Bush appointments, but they've been easy on Thompson, who was confirmed 100-0 by the Senate on January 24. He's known as the father of W-2, the Wisconsin welfare program that virtually eliminated cash assistance to poor mothers. But, the story goes, he was also willing to spend money on the services and supports that women need to go to work and lift their families out of poverty. This, says the Washington Post, is "serious" welfare reform.

This is, in fact, sand in our eyes. Welfare rolls did plummet in Wisconsin, by 67 percent since 1986. By 1997 a mere 25 percent of Wisconsin's poor families were receiving cash assistance, compared with 60 percent in 1986. But income from work was not making up for these families' loss of welfare. The earnings of the 62 percent of welfare leavers or current recipients who worked averaged only $8,560 a year, substantially below the poverty line. Cuts in benefits caused the average income of families leaving welfare to fall by $2,000 a year, while 38 percent reported no income. These people tend to fall through the cracks in surveys, and Governor Thompson didn't have much interest in finding out what happened to them. When one commissioned study showed that his program to dock welfare benefits when children were truant from school seemed to be having the effect of increasing truancy, he simply terminated the research contract.

The number of children placed in foster care has risen rapidly in Wisconsin, by 32 percent in the past decade, and by 51 percent in Milwaukee, where the welfare population is concentrated. Reports of child abuse and neglect are rising, and so are the reported incidents of domestic violence and juvenile arrests. But by far the most Dickensian development is the rise in infant deaths. The national downward trend in mortality rates for black and Hispanic infants has been reversed in Wisconsin. The mortality rate of black newborns, once lower than other Midwestern states, is now the highest in the region. The bottom line is that Wisconsin's welfare cutbacks have left people working more but poorer, and substantial numbers of these people are desperately poor.

What then about those vaunted support services? In fact, Thompson vetoed one bill that would have allowed W-2 participants to count up to fifteen hours a week in vocational or technical college classes toward their work requirements, and another that would have exempted parents who need to be at home to take care of a disabled child. True, Thompson's administration has offered an ambitious childcare program, extending eligibility not only to former welfare recipients but to a wider swath of low-earning mothers. But what always matters as much as formal eligibility is how a program is administered, and the reality is that only 14 percent of eligible families participate.

Aside from what is left of cash assistance, the most important supports for the poor are the federal food stamp and Medicaid programs. Wisconsin boasts of what it calls the "light touch" in administering these programs. Not only does the state fail to inform people of their rights, but the US Department of Agriculture found that W-2 agencies put illegal obstacles in the way of people trying to obtain food stamp benefits. The result is that food stamp use has dropped in Wisconsin by 32 percent, the largest percentage drop in the nation. Medicaid enrollment also declined after the Thompson administration failed to implement a federal law requiring states to maintain coverage for families leaving welfare.

To be sure, Wisconsin has spent money, especially federal money. It pioneered a practice called "supplantation," which diverts federal welfare funds to pay for other state programs, or for tax cuts, while the state itself has reduced its spending on welfare to the bare minimum allowed under federal law. Meanwhile, administrative costs have skyrocketed.

The profits made by the private agencies that now administer much of W-2 contribute to the illusion that the state has spent money on welfare reform. In Wisconsin, as in several other states, for-profit and nonprofit companies now handle the determination of eligibility, job placement and the provision of support services. Because they receive a portion of the funds that are saved when caseloads and services are reduced, they have an incentive to deny benefits. As a result, the private agencies in Milwaukee have been able to keep for themselves $27 million of the $318 million in federal funds they administer. Moreover, recent investigations revealed that the largest of the private agencies, Maximus Inc. and Goodwill Industries, improperly billed the state hundreds of thousands of dollars.

What does a Thompson appointment bode for US social programs? As head of HHS, Thompson will be a strong and effective proponent of extending to the remaining big social programs for the poor--food stamps and Medicaid--the same changes in federal law that allowed welfare to be privatized and turned into block grants. He is already on record as favoring this, and even if Congress were to resist, he has the authority to use waivers to the same end. Wisconsin has a waiver request pending now to privatize the administration of food stamps. The Wisconsin record on welfare shows us the danger this poses to poor people. And with Bush in the White House and Thompson at HHS, even the modest restraints the federal government has until now imposed on rapacious state administrations will be gone.

Nick Bromell is a brave man. At a time when "zero tolerance" is inscribed on the national currency, when you can go to prison for twenty years if some jailhouse snitch says you were part of a drug-selling operation with him, Bromell argues that "there was something rigorous and instructive in getting stoned and listening to music as if it really mattered." He points out that millions of people have listened to rock music with the help of psychedelics, and that this is something that remains unresolved in American culture, something at the heart of today's culture wars and the war on drugs. Rock and psychedelics together, he argues, mark "the crossroads where the sixties meet the present."

Bromell, who teaches English at the University of Massachusetts and whose previous book was a scholarly study of "Literature and Labor in Antebellum America," is one of those people who grew up in the sixties, convinced that something important happened then--and he's still trying to figure out what it was. (I'm another.) We have many good books on the events and movements and ideas of the sixties, most of which agree that the music was important in expressing the spirit and energy of the times. Bromell wants to do something else--to put the music of the sixties at the center of the story. Moreover, he doesn't focus on the musicians who created it--as does the current bestselling Beatles Anthology volume--or on critics' responses. Instead, he seeks to recapture what he calls "the primal scene" of listening to rock music: in the dorm room or the bedroom, alone or with friends, listening with intense concentration--smoking dope or dropping acid--seeking to understand loneliness and injustice and the fundamental instability of everything.

He readily concedes that there was a lot of foolishness and hedonism in that era but insists that those young people were also involved in a serious quest to understand themselves and their times--when the "times" were sometimes thrilling, sometimes terrible. "So much life, so much death; so much possibility, so much impossibility" (that wonderful line comes from the documentary Berkeley in the Sixties). Music and psychedelics, he writes, "could help you make sense of the senselessness of it all by helping you come to your senses, heightening them."

Millions of kids are still turning on today. The best research shows that in 1997, 14 percent of all high school seniors had tried LSD and 50 percent had tried marijuana. The figures have been surprisingly consistent since 1975. For young people then and now, marijuana and LSD are much more popular than heroin, cocaine and crack cocaine. Bromell asks a question the war on drugs fears: Why these drugs? That question leads him to another the drug warriors cannot ask: How does it feel?

"How does it feel? To be on your own?...Like a complete unknown?" Bob Dylan asked those questions in his glorious and ruthless song "Like a Rolling Stone" in 1965. He had taken LSD, given up explicit protest and begun considering the explosion of consciousness, and his Highway 61 Revisited, more than any other album, spoke to the quest of the emergent counterculture for meaning. And he was only 23. Dylan's answers were not comforting. With all the songs on Highway 61 Revisited, Bromell says, "we tumbled down the side of a ravine, falling from safe, distanced, middle class awareness of wrongdoing 'out there' to knowledge of something more terrifying 'in here.'"

The next year--1966--the Beatles released Revolver. They had already established an "uncanny rapport" with their fans; they "affected...the quality of life--they deepened it, sharpened it, brightened it," Bromell writes, quoting Greil Marcus. They didn't repeat themselves; as Warren Zevon said much later, "everything new they did was supposed to challenge you. The Beatles continued to be new as long as they were the Beatles." Revolver was the "breakthrough experience" for taking psychedelic drugs seriously--especially the last three cuts. First George Harrison sang "I Want to Tell You." This echoed "I Want to Hold Your Hand," but it was something else they wanted to do now--in Bromell's words, "to break the codes and the bullshit, to make genuine contact."

Then came Paul McCartney singing "Got to Get You Into My Life." At first it seemed like a song of typical teenage passion, but on closer listening the lyrics spoke unmistakably about LSD: "I was alone, I took a ride/I didn't know what I would find there./Another road where maybe I/Could find another kind of mind there." And then came the blissful part: "Ooh, did I suddenly see you?/Ooh, did I tell you I need you,/Every single day of my life?" Bromell's gloss: "McCartney isn't satisfied to be a solitary, misunderstood mystic. He's a showman to the core, not a shaman"--so he wanted to tell us about his breakthrough in consciousness.

Then came the culmination: Lennon's "Tomorrow Never Knows"--which Bromell made the title of his book. At the time it was an enigma, nothing like pop music, something that took many listenings in those dorm rooms. The lyrics provided explicit instructions for tripping: "Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream/It is not dying"--sung in what Bromell describes as "an incredibly far-away" voice, "compressed almost beyond recognition" and emerging from a "thicket of incomprehensible noise." "Tomorrow Never Knows" presented an electronically distorted swirling sound mixed with tape loops and sound running backward (including, we now know, parts of McCartney's guitar solo on "Taxman" slowed down and played backward).

This music might be understood as an evocation of the psychedelic experience, but Bromell hears it differently--the song represents a decision to "explore and exploit the electrical essence" of rock music, which after all started with the electric guitar and Elvis's voice in an echo chamber. It represented precisely the opposite of the view that the natural was the authentic and thus the best. This new product of recording technology was radically unfamiliar. The Beatles wanted to turn away from the comfortable and reassuring familiarity that is the essence of pop music and stardom, and instead confront their audience with strangeness and a kind of depersonalization. Psychedelics gave them the vision and the energy for this effort.

The phrase "Tomorrow Never Knows" is rich with meaning. On the one hand it conveys the tragic sense that back in 1966, we didn't know that "tomorrow" would bring not liberation but two decades of Reaganomics. But "Tomorrow Never Knows" can also be understood in a very different sense: Now that it is "tomorrow," we must concede that we don't really know what happened in the sixties--we are stuck with distorted ideological images. In particular, we tend to view the sixties with ironic detachment, consider the utopian hopes of the decade with embarrassment or with "a sardonic smile." In thinking about the sixties, Bromell wants us to resist the "irony-plated armature of academic discourse"--a wonderful phrase in its own right.

Of course, many writers have resisted ironic detachment. Historians and others have described the sixties as an explosion of democracy, a youthful challenge to established authority in the state, the university and the family, a renewal that, in its sweep and intensity, ranks beside the eras of Andrew Jackson and the New Deal. SDS occupies the center of this history for many because it articulated the crucial concept of the decade, "participatory democracy." But the personal quest for a meaningful life is typically not emphasized in these studies--a quest that Bromell suggests was often experienced not simply as liberation from traditional restrictions but as a burden, a weight.

"The Weight," the song The Band sang, is also full of meaning in Bromell's reading. The song concludes "She put the load right on me." But what was this weight? Was it the consciousness of the historic responsibility young people had taken on to speak truth to power, to throw themselves against the gears, to stop the war machine and the machinery of racism? Bromell suggests that it was also something deeper: the weight of the discovery that psychedelic drugs weren't necessarily so benign and blissful--that they unearthed, in Bromell's words, "something fundamentally malign at the very heart of things."

Jimi Hendrix, we are told, spent weeks working on his version of Dylan's 1968 song "All Along the Watchtower," another key to the era--especially the opening line: "There must be some way out of here." The line referred of course to Vietnam, but more broadly to many evils in the world: "businessmen they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth." It's tempting to conclude that "life is but a joke," but Hendrix and Dylan didn't want us to--instead they said "let us not talk falsely now, the hour's getting late." That sense of urgency is not unique to the sixties--today, Bromell writes, teenagers still feel trapped in an evil world they didn't make; they still yearn for a meaningful life; they "still stand there on the watchtower and wait and wonder."

Luckily for his readers, Bromell is a historian, and he knows that young people in many generations have asked similar questions. Emerson, for example, described youthful slackers in the 1840s, who dropped out of "common labors and competitions of the market" because they had had a private experience that transformed their consciousness. Emerson quotes one saying he realized "I had played the fool with fools all this time" and had been "a selfish member of a selfish society." He realized that "my life is superficial, takes no root in the deep world." And he concluded, "I wish to exchange this flash-of-lightning faith for continuous daylight."

What made the 1960s different from earlier generations, Bromell observes, is the tremendous broadening of the number of participants engaged in this quest. This broadening--facilitated by the commercial world of rock music--was fundamentally democratic. Just a decade earlier Allen Ginsberg spoke of "the best minds of my generation," but they were only a handful of people. Now Bob Dylan sang with warm good humor, "Everybody must get stoned"--and tens of millions asked how to transform a flash-of-lightning insight into continuous daylight.

Of course, cultural conservatives have devoted considerable energy to attacking this cultural politics. Allan Bloom thought Woodstock resembled Nuremberg; Francis Fukuyama argued that the counterculture did the most "harm" to "the weakest members of society...the black community"; and Daniel Bell wrote that rock music, like the Beatles' later work, made it "impossible to hear oneself think, and that may indeed have been its intention."

At the same time the forces of commercial culture continue to colonize the sixties. VH-1, the music video cable channel owned by Viacom, just named Revolver the greatest album in the history of rock. Sixties rock provides the soundtrack to countless TV ads--I still haven't recovered from Michael Jackson selling the sound of John Lennon singing "Revolution" to Nike for a sneakers commercial more than a decade ago, or from Bob Dylan himself selling the rights to "The Times They Are A-Changin'" to the accounting firm Coopers & Lybrand. (We do have a few holdouts: Springsteen, R.E.M., Tom Petty, Neil Young, U2, Pearl Jam, Phish and Tom Waits--here's hoping they never "stare into the vacuum of his eyes/And say, do you want to make a deal?")

Meanwhile, in academia, Emerson and Whitman have been admitted to the pantheon, but you better not write a serious book about Dylan until you're tenured. Nick Bromell's Tomorrow Never Knows brings us closer to the heart of what we call the sixties than any other book I know.

On October 1, 1996, I was one of three speakers who appeared before fourteen Minnesotans selected to participate in a "citizen forum" on healthcare reform sponsored by the Minneapolis Star Tribune and KTCA-TV, Minnesota's public television station. I made the case for a "single payer" healthcare system; the director of what was then called the HMO Council of Minnesota made the case for "managed competition"; and a third speaker made the case for "medical savings accounts" (MSAs). A single-payer system is one in which one payer (the government) reimburses doctors and hospitals. Managed competition is a theory that assumes that competition among HMOs can reduce healthcare costs without damaging quality of care. MSAs are traditional insurance policies with huge deductibles (typically $2,000 per person). After three and a half hours of discussion, eight of the fourteen citizens voted for single-payer, three voted for managed competition, one voted for a hybrid of single-payer and managed competition, and two abstained.

This vote strongly suggests that a sizable majority of Americans would support a single-payer solution to the healthcare crisis if they were ever exposed to a real debate about it. Other data support this conclusion. For example, a 1991 Harris poll found that 68 percent of Americans preferred Canada's single-payer healthcare system, compared with only 29 percent who favored the US system; a 1999 survey of professors and students at US medical colleges, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, found 57 percent of students and faculty members of America's medical schools "thought that a single-payer system...was the best health care system," while only 22 percent were willing to say the same about managed care. But despite the public's preference for a single-payer system, and despite solid empirical evidence that single-payer would provide higher-quality care for less money than an HMO-dominated system, managed competition was elevated to de facto US health policy during the early 1990s, while single-payer proposals were kept off the public agenda by big business and its allies in Congress.

In California, the single-payer movement forced a debate--a very lopsided debate, as it turned out--about the single-payer proposal by collecting a million-plus signatures to put the proposal on the November 1994 California ballot. From July until Election Day, the anti-single-payer forces, led by the insurance industry, bought $11 million worth of radio and TV advertisements and financed a direct-mail campaign. Our "good neighbor," State Farm, spent close to a million dollars in October 1994 alone on letters personally signed by State Farm agents urging their customers to vote against the single-payer initiative.

The defeat of the single-payer proposal is one of three examples of corporate agenda-setting told by Barry Casper in an absorbing book titled Lost in Washington. Casper, a professor of physics at Carleton College during the years he wrote this book and, for the first eight months of 1991, Senator Paul Wellstone's policy adviser, also describes two other battles between public interest groups and wealthy special interests--the effort to defeat the National Energy Security Act, a bill promoted by the auto industry and the nuclear and fossil-fuel industries, and the battle for campaign finance reform.

Just as polls indicated a majority of Americans would support a single-payer program, so polls indicated majorities of Americans endorsed the positions the public interest groups took in the energy and campaign finance reform debates. Casper cites, for example, a 1991 poll showing that 86 percent of Americans supported increasing the average fuel efficiency of the nation's automobiles from 27.5 miles per gallon to 40 by the year 2000, a policy opposed by the auto industry and a substantial portion of Congress, including, notably, Senator Bennett Johnston, Democrat of Louisiana, then chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. "We now have a political system in which a public policy proposal can have enormous popular support and the potential to garner an electoral majority," Casper concludes, "but it may not even get a fair hearing, much less a vote, in the Congress or anything approaching adequate coverage in the media."

Because Casper was a participant in the health, energy and campaign finance reform fights, his recounting of these battles is full of details, many of which have appeared nowhere else. The rich detail of these histories helps the reader to comprehend the myriad ways that big money sabotages democracy. These histories also prepare the reader to understand and evaluate Casper's proposals for reviving democracy. Many books have been written about the causes of and solutions to the corruption of democracy. But Lost in Washington, with the exception of William Greider's extraordinary Who Will Tell the People?, is the only book I know of that combines a detailed analysis of multiple public-versus-special-interest battles with a wide-ranging review of the solutions to the corruption.

As most readers of The Nation know, the corruption that afflicts American democracy is not the old-fashioned kind--the kind that occurs when politicians agree to cast aye or nay votes on particular bills in exchange for cash delivered in suitcases by shady characters wearing sunglasses. If big money were literally a disease, it would more closely resemble cancer than a knife wound--it attacks the body politic slowly, it weakens not just one but numerous systems (elections, committee hearings, the media, etc.) and, because the disease works slowly on many fronts, it is difficult to diagnose and explain thoroughly to the public. The histories of the health, energy and campaign finance reform fights told in Lost in Washington illustrate in disgusting detail how the money cancer has metastasized throughout America's democracy.

We learn, for example, the variety of tactics that Senator Johnston (recipient of gobs of cash from the energy industry) employed to make it very difficult for Senator Wellstone and other members of the Senate energy committee who opposed the National Energy Security Act (S. 341) to prepare for hearings on the bill. These tactics included giving opponents little time to study the bill and short notice on when hearings would be held and what the agendas of these hearings would be. Because the bill dealt with so many topics, Casper (Wellstone's chief adviser on this bill) needed five days in seclusion in order to comprehend the entire bill. But senators and their staffs are busy, and those five days did not become available to Casper until the Senate took a short recess early in spring 1991. But by then, Senator Johnston had held seventeen hearings on S. 341. The environmental groups with which Wellstone and Casper were allied were similarly disadvantaged.

We learn, to take another example, that Pacific Gas and Electric, a California utility with much at stake in the debate over S. 341 (and in the headlines these days because of California's blackouts) wined and dined Casper and eighteen other Congressional staff members at expensive hotels and restaurants in California over a four-day period in March 1991. During those four days, PG&E lobbyists and top officers, including its CEO, had access to the legislative staff that public interest groups can only dream about. The Sierra Club, Public Citizen and other groups that opposed S. 341 did not sponsor similar junkets.

How do we excise the money cancer from our democracy? The last three chapters of Lost in Washington sketch an answer to this question. Casper endorses a half-dozen reforms, including full public financing of elections, the "none of the above" option on election ballots, proportional-representation elections (instead of the current winner-take-all system), free or low-cost access to the media and third-party participation in debates. He devotes considerable attention to what he calls a National Citizens Agenda-Setting Initiative under which citizens could, if they were sufficiently organized, force Congress to hold hearings on proposals despised by big business and the Congressional pooh-bahs who set the legislative agenda.

Note how this proposal differs from the initiative process we know today. The initiative Casper is proposing would not establish a law but would, rather, force a vote in Congress on a proposed law. Casper, who was intimately involved in the unsuccessful 1994 citizens' campaign to pass a single-payer system in California by initiative, is well aware of the difficulties citizens' groups encounter in the traditional initiative process. The health insurance industry and other opponents of the single-payer initiative vastly outspent the advocates of the initiative, which lost 73 percent to 27 percent.

"The basic concept [of the National Citizens Initiative] is a simple one," Casper explains: "If a designated percentage (say, 3 percent) of registered voters in a designated fraction (say, one-third) of Congressional districts signed a petition saying they wanted a certain proposal considered and voted on, Congress would have to hold full and fair hearings and both houses would have to vote on it."

In order to assist citizens' groups in participating in this new process, Casper proposes that all citizens be given $50 vouchers annually that they could contribute to any initiative they choose. (Casper credits Greider for this idea. In Who Will Tell The People? Greider proposed an annual tax credit worth $100-$200 to each citizen that could be used for a wide variety of political purposes, not just initiatives.)

As someone who has spent the past twenty-five years organizing for underfunded citizens' groups, I am attracted to both parts of Casper's proposal--a national mechanism for forcing Congress to vote on issues of public interest and the proposed voucher. One can immediately think of a dozen reasons why the national initiative and voucher proposals might not work well. These reasons all boil down either to the maldistribution of money--big business simply has more of it than citizens groups do--or to the ineluctable fact that a small but substantial number of human beings are bigots or worse. We may ask, for example, whether the seed money needed to organize enough citizens in enough Congressional districts to contribute their signature and $50 to an initiative campaign will be more available to "astroturf" groups (fronts for big business) than to truly grassroots citizens' groups. Once an initiative forces hearings and a vote in Congress, what will prevent big business from buying the votes (indirectly, of course) needed to secure the outcome it wants? Won't bigots of all stripes get more access to Congress?

But similar objections can be made to virtually every other proposal for reviving democracy currently under discussion by small-d democrats. Forcing the media to give all candidates free exposure, for example, helps bigots and fools at the same time that it helps ordinary people with good hearts and functioning brains. One could argue that efforts to pass clean-election laws of the sort enacted in Maine, Vermont, Arizona and Massachusetts will soon be thwarted by big-business groups as they figure out that controlling candidates elected with the help of public money is a lot harder than controlling candidates who took big-business bucks to get elected.

There is no perfect or obviously best solution to the big-money cancer. I share Casper's belief that the solution to our anemic democracy is more democracy, not less, and that an effective solution will be one that embraces multiple proposals, including clean-election laws and Casper's national agenda-setting initiative proposal.

It's early Saturday morning and I am standing in the living room of a home that's been converted, for the day, into a porn set. Heavy light rigging, cables, crates of colored gels and video monitors now dominate what had been just another unassuming suburban home at the end of a cul-de-sac. In addition to worrying about all the usual concerns confronting a porn shoot--will the talent show up, will they be hung over, will they have all their paperwork in order, will some boyfriend or agent decide he's the director--I now have other matters to consider.

While I am safely nestled in the hills beyond La Canada Flintridge, 3,000 miles to the east George W. Bush is being sworn in to the presidency. And as he lays his hand on that Bible held by the very Chief Justice who helped install him into office, the power players in LA's fabled Porn Valley are hearing thunderclaps in the distance. The Perfect Storm has broken in the Beltway, they believe, and life preservers are now being passed out.

I know this because I'm a pornographer. Well, sort of. I originated and for the past several years have moonlighted as a producer on the Jail Babes video series, which launched Larry Flynt into the booming adult-video business. I have in that time been treated to the inner workings of a business that continues to fascinate libido-driven Americans. And recently Flynt's producers and our peers at other companies have been briefed in meetings and memos as to just how we are to react, given the new President and incoming Attorney General.

Fourteen years ago, of course, Reagan's Attorney General Ed Meese launched a celebrated (and reviled) antiporn crusade that included a bevy of busts; but since then the LA-based industry has grown into a multibillion-dollar business reaching into nearly every corner of America, culturally, politically and even economically. Consider that an estimated 25,000 video outlets across the nation stock adult material and that more than 10,000 new adult-video titles are released each year; last year there were 711 million rentals of hard-core sex films. Porn is a $10 billion industry--$4 billion of that in explicit video sales--that even has links to corporate parents like General Motors and AT&T. (Whatever collective pain and persecution the industry suffered during the Reagan and Bush the Elder years, when Bill Clinton rolled into the White House with a social agenda that did not call for the outright destruction of smut, pornographers in the San Fernando Valley--Wicked Pictures, Vivid Video, VCA and Hustler Video are the biggies--saw eight years of relative green lights and blue skies.)

In an effort to head off any potential anti-porno jihad by the Bush Administration, some of the major porn outfits have reached a common conclusion and issued sweeping new guidelines to producers and directors--rules that are supposed to make even the most eager prosecutor think twice before filing charges. Anxious to sanitize their product to the point where it passes muster with compassionate conservatives everywhere, especially those living on Pennsylvania Avenue, major producers in the industry are proposing to discard or ban a host of sexual acts and scenarios that have in some instances become staples of the genre.

Welcome to the era of kinder, gentler smut.

"Everyone has grave concerns," says Jeffrey Douglas, a lawyer who specializes in First Amendment issues and has represented the adult industry since the early 1980s. "Most of us on the legal side have advised those in the industry to assume, no matter who got elected, that the environment [read Justice Department] will be less sensitive to First Amendment issues."

While the focus on Attorney General John Ashcroft has to date been on his positions on civil rights and abortion, little attention has been paid until now as to how--and how effectively--the former senator from Missouri might weigh in on the culture wars surrounding the First Amendment.

Porn sage William Margold, who now runs a support organization for porn performers, says Ashcroft "casts a shadow" across sexual expression and that the industry may be in for some "radical attempts to clean us up." In fact, Bush asserted during the campaign that "porn has no place in a decent society" and vowed to "insist on vigorously enforcing" antipornography laws. Bush's comments should offer cold comfort to liberals who oppose commercial porn based on the exploitation that can and does occur in the industry (just as it does in many other industries, not slated for demolition). "Most people only deal with bad news when it is knocking at their door," muses Douglas. "George Bush and John Ashcroft are a really loud knock on the door."

Anticipation that the knock will be followed with a shout of "We have a warrant!" is what has led the porn companies to issue what at least in Hustler's case proved to be a twenty-four-point set of guidelines. We producers have been provided with what might better be described as a Just Say No List, for every line starts with a No (it can be viewed online at Inside.com). The list, which reads like material generated for a classic Lenny Bruce or Dick Gregory routine, discards everything from fetish rituals found on the fringe to some of porn's most signature sex acts.

First and foremost, producers and directors are no longer to shoot any material that depicts a female model who appears to be suffering "unhappiness or pain." Ditto for "degradation."

Food can no longer be used as a sexual object, obviously sparing carrots, cucumbers and bananas from further degradation and heading off a full-scale investigation from the Department of Agriculture.

Blindfolds are also out.

So is wax-dripping.

So is sex in a coffin.

So is urinating on camera, unless it is done "in a natural setting" such as a field or roadside.

No male/male penetration can be shown.

Bisexual encounters are also out, as are scenes involving transsexuals.

Other verboten activities include fisting (an act sometimes featured in Penthouse), "menstruation topics" or spitting or saliva passing mouth to mouth.

A self-imposed ban from the late-1980s on subjects of adult-age incest (i.e., college-aged guy is seduced by middle-aged mom) will continue during the Bush Administration, despite the fact that mainstream theaters project the topic with such films as Spanking the Monkey. Ironically, this forbidden fruit is the subject of the 1980 film Taboo, which the industry trade publication Adult Video News recently reported as one of the all-time bestselling adult videos, with sales topping a million copies.

The new guidelines also state: "No black men, white women themes." Perhaps in a tip of the hat to Thomas Jefferson, producers can continue to feature white men having sex with black women. (In other words, maybe the new Administration won't view scenes of white men screwing blacks as out of the ordinary.)

Perhaps the most surprising item on the list is a prohibition of the until-now obligatory facial "money shot," in which a male performer ejaculates on the face of the female performer, a staple long before Deep Throat brought porn out of the basement. This brought a howl from Margold when he read it. "Facials are the crowning achievement of this industry," he proclaimed, only half-joking. "It's what we built this industry on!"

The new rules do allow a male model to ejaculate on a female model, with the caveat that the "shot is not nasty." Lawyers will now be able to jack up billable hours to determine if the semen on a left breast is "nasty" but the semen on a right elbow is to be approved. Douglas is equally derisive in his assessment of the new guidelines: "That list is complete horseshit," he says. "It's probably a third generation of someone's interpretation of what a lawyer suggested."

For all of Margold's humorous dismissal and Douglas's disdain, the new guidelines are no laughing matter for the major porn companies. For these firms and those who run them, the adult-entertainment business is no longer about making an artistic statement for sexual freedom. It is about making money. Getting busted is not in the business plan. While there is a consensus that trouble is brewing, there is disagreement about just how effective renewed prosecutions will be and even whether attempts at self-censorship will do anything to stop them.

Roger Jon Diamond, a Santa Monica- based lawyer who has been defending adult material since the late 1960s, and whose cases have gone to the Supreme Court, feels some of the worry may be overblown. "I don't think Bush or Ashcroft can successfully bring us 'Meese II,'" he says. "Too much material is already out there in too many places. How are they going to prove community standards [a central requirement of the 'Miller standard' the Supreme Court set in determining obscenity] now? You can't unring the bell."

While Douglas notes that the chances of the Bush Administration killing off an industry that has survived every President (and Attorney General) since Nixon are slim, he warns that the government would be just as happy to inflict some serious pain on it. And here, Diamond notes that the industry's will to draw a line in the sand and fight prosecutions may well determine how much damage is inflicted. "It's like soldiers landing on the beaches. You know you are going to take the beach, but some guys up front are going to have to take some bullets for everyone else. So the question becomes, who is willing to take some bullets?"

"Irrespective of Ashcroft, the Bush Administration brings very dangerous forces into play," Douglas says. "Unable to influence Congress, to satisfy the religious right they are going to have to take action outside the legislature, and the area they have the broadest discretion in is the prosecution of crime. And Congress will not be outraged. Bottom line: There will be aggressive obscenity prosecutions." If the previous two Republican administrations are any indication, Douglas says, the industry can expect at least thirty or more companies to be targeted by the Justice Department. That's about how many were put in the crosshairs under both Reagan and Bush Senior.

Douglas maintains that the real question confronting the adult industry is how the expected prosecutions will take shape. "It will depend on whether [prosecutors] want to grab headlines and simply appease the religious right," Douglas says. "Or do they really want to change content?"

If they seek a purely political nod to the hard right in the GOP, prosecutors are likely to seek prison sentences and wage a no-quarter battle to that end. Douglas says that tack was taken by prosecutors under the Reagan Administration--an era that he darkly notes was marked by Justice Department attorneys who signed their official correspondence "Yours in Jesus Christ."

If prosecutors want to shape what the industry creates rather than exact a blood tribute through prison time, Douglas says they are likely to hew to the tactic the previous Bush Administration employed: levying huge fines that will cripple the targeted companies.

"It was a hell of a lot more fun to film in this town when it was illegal," Margold adds, noting that he went to jail a half-dozen or more times as a result of working in porn. "But the industry can't return to its outlaw roots, because there are no more outlaws. The guys who run the companies now are sheep complacently chewing on their dollar bills. If they get busted they won't fight, they'll crack."

Douglas has seen that happen firsthand. "You have to be emotionally prepared as well as financially prepared to fight the government. It's easy to say, 'I believe in what I do and I'll fight for my right to do it,'" he says. "But you find that a lot of big talkers will plead out real quick."

The real danger, Douglas says, "is that professional censors may well be brought in and will have the awesome powers of the Justice Department at their disposal. Guys who think, 'I am an agent of God, and God says in order to keep Satan from rising we need to destroy the porn industry.'" Perhaps the question isn't whether a Justice Department filled with zealots can destroy porn but whether the industry--once defined by a rebelliousness that the Sexual Revolution imbued it with--can salvage anything of its former self.

It's hard to remember at times, but there was a brief, shining period when the concept of what was being filmed actually mattered. Stepping out of society's closet in the early seventies, American porno was a bastard art form that offered directors real freedom from conventional standards and restrictions. Filmmakers like Jonas Middleton, Robert McCallum, Cecil Howard, Henri Pachard and Kirdy Stevens explored the rich mines of human sexuality. Those men were joined by women like Helene Terrie, who wrote and produced Taboo, and Ann Perry and Maria Tobalina, both former presidents of the Adult Film Association of America. There were a lot of busts, trials and pain along the way. Now the question arises, Why were those sacrifices made? Did those people sit in jail and prison just so others would censor themselves into depicting officially sanctioned sex? Was that the point?

George W. Bush and John Ashcroft have won half the battle simply by showing up. Some in the business feel that even those of us shooting under the new guidelines will be targeted. As one producer noted, "They hate us all, and they'll come after the whole industry."

The silver lining to these storm clouds is that censorship, even the self-imposed kind, usually backfires, eventually creating only more of what it tried to suppress. If the past and human nature are any indication, that will be the case here, especially given the size of the market today. While producers for big companies are forced to shoot under new rules, the outlaw element in porn, provocateurs like Rob Black and Max Hardcore, will likely rise (or sink) to the occasion and do the necessary dirty work to keep porn, well...dirty.

The way it should be.

SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL

The Sundance Film Festival has been dominated for so long by a circus of cell phones, models, agents and celebrity-hunting media hounds that it has become difficult to locate worthy films amid the crush of tabloidesque media coverage. Adding to the problem has been the spread of indie films aimed at

industry standards, a subset dubbed "Indiewood." This year, thanks perhaps to dotcom crashes and economic sobriety, the streets of Park City, Utah, were lined with a bit less gold, and Sundance reclaimed its birthright as the soul--not merely the platform--of independent film, delivering a full slate of entries concerned with meaning, truth and real-world issues. Over and over, films rejected formula in favor of new styles, production tools and narrative strategies. There were even political broadsides on Main Street, courtesy of the Guerrilla Girls and "Alice Locas." Agitprop messages targeted the film profession: The U.S. Senate Is More Progressive Than Hollywood, proclaimed one; Female Senators: 9%. Female Directors: 4%. The stickers were a welcome addition to the usual huckstering aimed at getting folks to a movie.

As usual, some of the most thought-provoking and soul-stirring work was found in the World Cinema section. The Back of the World ("La Espalda del Mundo"), by the Madrid-based Peruvian director, Javier Corcuera, is a trilogy of injustice that takes its time getting to know, and introducing us to, its central characters: a child laborer and his family and friends in Peru; a Kurdish exile in Stockholm; his Turkish village; and death-row inmates and their families in Texas. They all have names, details, faces. Tilting at the windmills of child labor, ethnic repression and capital punishment, Corcuera wisely favors the individual over the polemical. Utterly free of didacticism, The Back of the World brushes its subjects with the luminosity of an oil painting. It's impossible to exit the theater unmoved.

Far different is the dramatic film Without a Trace ("Sin Dejar Huella") by Mexican director Maria Novaro. She's concerned with freedom, not restraints. Her fanciful script follows two women on the run across Mexico, from Juárez to Cancun. A red car is after them, but is it the angry drug dealer or the corrupt policeman at the wheel? In this breezy road movie, Novaro finds plenty of opportunities to poke delicious fun at the state of affairs in her country, from Vicente Fox's cowboy style to the idealization of Subcomandante Marcos. Its shared Sundance award for best Latin American film should help the movie in the United States, where it's bound to be compared to Thelma & Louise; after all, they were heading for Mexico when they ran into the Grand Canyon.

Of the US films, the most audacious and risk-taking was Waking Life, an extraordinary animation from Austin-based director Richard Linklater, whose previous films (Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise) hardly prepared the audience for this foray into philosophy and psychic phenomena (he was represented by a second film in the festival as well, of which more later). Linklater teamed up with Bob Sabiston and Tommy Pallota to make a live-action film with digital footage of seventy-five people--actors, academics and experts--walking and talking, then engaged a team of artists to animate the footage using Sabiston's new type of software. The result is a film peopled by remarkable hybrids that look like cartoons but move and speak like real folks.

Waking Life's protagonist, a drawn-upon Wiley Wiggins (Dazed and Confused's long-faced star), meanders through town looking for the meaning of life, the nature of consciousness, the difference between dreaming and being awake. People give him advice. "So whatever you do, don't be bored. This is absolutely the most exciting time we could have possibly hoped to be alive. And things are just starting." Stuff like that. Meanwhile, colors and lines mutate on screen. Nothing is as it seems. Linklater and his animation collaborators have clearly had a lot of fun, morphing characters into their own conversational subjects, destabilizing their environs, throwing the material world into question. To extend the fun, the film's promotional packet was a coloring book. Get it? Color outside the lines, or something like that. A fervent tour de force, Waking Life augurs well for the new technologies. If it becomes a hit on college campuses, it just might spark a revival of existentialism, which one character insists has been unfairly pegged as negative when it's actually quite an optimistic philosophy.

After years of seeing juvenilia touted as hip, it was a treat to discover dramatic films made with maturity and restraint, performed by splendid actors at the peak of their careers, written and directed by filmmakers who knew just what they were doing because this wasn't their first time out of the gate. The Deep End by Scott McGehee and David Siegel and The Sleepy Time Gal by Christopher Münch were two such films, prompting their viewers to think hard about both film and life itself.

The Deep End was inspired by Max Ophuls's classic noir, The Reckless Moment. McGehee and Siegel went back to the original source, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding's novel A Blank Wall, and made it their own. In their version, the brilliant Scottish actress Tilda Swinton plays a mother who will do anything to protect her gay son--even if that entails confronting a sleazy Reno gay-club proprietor, disposing of a corpse, diving into Lake Tahoe and standing up to a blackmailer. Finessing all her actions with a stunning display of spunk, Swinton carries the film lightly on her shoulders. The Deep End easily deserved the award for cinematography that it won, too: One shot, an image of Swinton reflected upside down in a drop of water falling from the kitchen faucet, aptly captures the watery universe dragging her down.

Writer/director Christopher Münch's task in The Sleepy Time Gal is considerably harder, as he deliberately places his film outside the confines of genre. Much of the pleasure of viewing The Sleepy Time Gal lies in the transcendent performance of the great Jacqueline Bisset, who plays the eponymous heroine, a onetime radio DJ fascinated by the early history of New York City, where she grew up and where she takes her son (Nick Stahl) on a nostalgic visit to upper Washington Heights near the start of the film. As the story proceeds, Bisset's character discovers she has cancer. No, she doesn't find any miracle cure; it's not that kind of movie. No, the daughter she gave up for adoption (played by the undervalued Martha Plimpton) probably won't show up in time for a sobfest finale; Münch isn't that kind of filmmaker. Instead, the film is about what matters in life, what we can and cannot do or undo, the difficulties and mistakes in relating to one another. Ultimately, it ponders how death rearranges all our certainties. Bisset's deathbed scene takes the breath away, especially for anyone who has ever sat vigil watching a loved one breathe their last.

Both The Deep End and The Sleepy Time Gal are evidence of a new intelligence that, given half a chance, could reanimate American independent cinema. Will they be seen? The Deep End was picked up by Fox Searchlight and will certainly be coming to a theater near you. The Sleepy Time Gal still lacked a distributor by festival's end.

The festival's Grand Jury Prize for best dramatic film was awarded to The Believer, a traditional but well-made examination of one Danny Balint, a disgruntled yeshiva student turned skinhead thug. "Love your enemy" is his reply to those who question how he happens to know so much arcane Judaica. In one scene, the increasingly confused Danny is busy simultaneously trashing a synagogue and rescuing a Torah from his gang's defilement. Inspired by the true story of a neo-Nazi unmasked as a Jew, director/writer Henry Bean peoples his tale with a frightening cast of characters meant to compose a right-wing salon of New York intelligentsia, elegant yet all too happy to deploy messengers like Danny.

Judaism turned up in documentary, too. Where The Believer gave us a character torn between faith and ideology, Sandi Simcha DuBowski's Trembling Before G-d documents real-life characters torn between religion and sexuality as they struggle to combine their faith as Orthodox Jews with their identities as gay men and lesbians. Happily, the film has a hero: Rabbi Steven Greenberg, the first openly gay Orthodox rabbi, whose joyousness stands in marked contrast to the pervasive suffering. In what has to be a Sundance first, DuBowski and Rabbi Greenberg invited believers and nonbelievers, Jews and gentiles, to a Sabbath dinner. Some fifty Sundancers took time out from chasing the next hot title to break bread and discuss something other than movies. It was to its credit that the meal felt more like a spiritual respite than a promotional tie-in.

If the search for truth, faith and life's meaning surfaced early in the festival, another, more specific subject soon presented itself. The theme of rape showed up in a number of films--another festival first. While the act of rape is unfortunately nothing new in Sundance offerings, the exploration of rape as a brutal experience demanding investigation and even retribution is very new indeed.

The Business of Strangers, a tense chamber-piece starring Stockard Channing and Julia Stiles as unlikely business associates thrown together by a plane cancellation, uses rape as a crowbar to pry open the psyche. Channing is terrific as a tough businesswoman whose defenses crumble when she thinks she's been fired. She hasn't been, but the momentary vulnerability sets her up for an encounter with Stiles, playing a wild-card beauty who's captivating and unreliable. Writer/director Patrick Stettner focuses his story on an allegation of rape and enactment of revenge. But did a rape ever occur? That's a question that soon comes up again.

Richard Linklater conceived Tape, a much smaller production, as a low-budget exercise in using the new digital cameras. On his one-room set, one man confronts another with his memory of a long-ago rape, and they thrash out their arguments with Beckett-like intensity. Linklater manages to make us pay attention to the story, perhaps because stars are involved: Ethan Hawke as the accuser, Uma Thurman as the alleged victim who refuses victimization and Robert Sean Leonard as the accused rapist turned, yup, filmmaker. It's a wonderfully tense tale, played out with humor and sarcasm.

Unlike Business, with its lush 35-millimeter look, Linklater played up the digitality: His camera swoops and pans all over the room while camera angles stretch the limits of what we're used to seeing. Why? Because he can. Tape was one of the films brought to Sundance by InDigEnt, a new outfit established to finance low-budget films ($150,000-$200,000) shot with digital cameras and intent on exploiting the cutting-edge styles and basement economics that the so-called digital revolution keeps promising. Like it or not--and many filmmakers and critics don't--digital production is already a reality and was ubiquitous at the festival. The documentary category is almost completely converted, as many filmmakers in that world have long since been forced by economics as well as production necessity to give up film for video.

The theme of men confronting one another over rape reappears in Things Behind the Sun, the new opus of Allison Anders (Gas Food Lodging, Grace of My Heart), which draws on her own experience of rape at age12 to create a powerful film detailing how such an act can deform everyone involved for years to come. Actress Kim Dickens is sensational as the promising singer-songwriter driven to self-destruction by a rape in her youth. A young rock critic tries to remind her of what she's tried hard to forget, then goes on to confront his imprisoned brother, the perpetrator. Anders takes a hard look at questions of memory, guilt and recuperation. Anders shot her film, too, in digital video and credited the intimacy of the medium with achieving such emotionally powerful scenes.

The most controversial rape debate centered around Raw Deal: A Question of Consent, a documentary that makes the fictions look tame. Billy Corben and Alfred Spellman look at an infamous 1999 University of of Florida incident: A Delta Chi fraternity party went bad, and the exotic dancer hired for the night, Lisa Gier King, went to the police charging rape. After viewing videotapes of the night in question, though, the cops arrested King instead of the frat boys and charged her with filing a false report, claiming the tapes showed consensual sex [see Jennifer Baumgardner, "What Does Rape Look Like?" January 3, 2000]. The Campus NOW chapter argued that the tapes proved rape. The state attorney sold the gamey videos for $20 to anyone who was interested. Once Raw Deal played Sundance, the New York Post splashed it all over its front page, further blurring the hazy line between investigation and sensationalism. In the film, the explicit footage is so rough that voyeuristic pleasure would seem unlikely; Raw Deal is sure to spark debates about date rape, coercion and the limits of individual responsibility. At least as scummy as the alleged rapist is the sanctimonious fraternity brother who speaks contemptuously of King, disses her social status, then is seen engaged in sex acts with her. It's a dark, dark view of both frat life and contemporary morality.

It took a fiction film--Series 7: The Contenders, by first-time director Dan Minahan--to top that toxic level of contamination, this time in the form of parody. Minahan learned the vocabulary of the new "reality" TV so well that Series 7 is a pitch-perfect satire of the genre: It takes the form of a TV show that selects contestants at random, arms them and instructs them to fight to the death. In its Darwinian universe, the survivor is, well, the winner. Series 7 is brilliant irony, complete with television-style promos and wild video-camera chases (yes, digital again) meant to convince viewers that it's "real." At least this year, for once, Sundance itself didn't look like a franchise of just such a program.

When it comes to oil politics and Alaska the Bush Administration and the environmental movement are already treading the measures of a familiar dance. President Bush is insisting on the urgency of drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He points to a supposed oil shortage that has somehow darkened homes and businesses up and down the West Coast. The environmental movement is already ramping up its national mail campaign rallying supporters for the battle to save the Refuge.

The actual game is bigger and more sinister.

Let's start by disposing of some myths. Start with the ludicrous claim of the Bush crowd that California's energy crisis can be solved by oil drilling in Alaska. Nationwide, oil provides only 3 percent of the source fuel used to generate electricity. In California the figure is less than 1 percent.

Bush is offering California exemptions from its supposedly onerous clean-air rules, claiming that once freed from such red tape the state's utilities and power producers could build a new generation of plants powered by fossil fuels. The Wildlife Refuge's oil won't be of much help here, since government officials estimate that even on an expedited schedule, oil couldn't flow from the Refuge until the year 2015.

Nor is the oil companies' problem in Alaska a shortage. Recall that back in 1995 British Petroleum, ARCO and Chevron entreated President Clinton to cancel the twenty-two-year ban on export of crude oil from Alaska to other countries. Congress had made such a ban a condition for permitting construction of the Alaska pipeline. The intent of the ban was to insure that Alaska's oil would help stave off any West Coast oil shortage. The companies wanted the ban lifted because they had a glut on their hands and required new markets.

Clinton dutifully assented, and the oil companies began exporting Alaskan crude forthwith to Japan, South Korea and China. The extremes to which they went in using Clinton's waiver to bilk US consumers came to light in January when The Oregonian won a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, gaining access to 4,000 pages of documents in the Federal Trade Commission's files concerning the merger of BP-Amoco with ARCO.

An FTC economist had concluded that BP-Amoco was selling oil to Asian refineries at prices lower than it could sell to US refineries on the West Coast, in order to manufacture a US shortage. As evidence the FTC had e-mail traffic passing between BP managers who talked about "shorting the West Coast market" in order to "leverage up" the prices there. Another BP manager gloated that this scheme was a "no brainer." The FTC reckoned that this ploy allowed BP to hike prices at West Coast pumps by as much as 3 cents a gallon.

So the oil companies' strategy is to exploit the electricity crisis to seize at last a number of long-sought objectives: not just access to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which would be a great symbolic victory, but also tax breaks worth billions for oil and gas extraction from wells across the country.

The big prize for the oil companies in North America isn't the Refuge but sites off the Alaska coast and the Gulf of Mexico: "Deepwater," says Geoff Kieburtz of Salomon Smith Barney, "is where the real pure exploration activity is going on in this country." Here we come to one of the lesser-known legacies of the Clinton era. Under the encouragement of Bruce Babbitt's Interior Department, deepwater drilling operations nearly doubled in the Gulf of Mexico in the year 2000 alone.

Among those roaring their protests at this activity is Governor Jeb Bush of Florida, who three days after his brother's inauguration implored the new team to place a moratorium on deepwater wells in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, saying that "Florida's economy is based upon tourism and other activities that depend on a clean and healthy environment."

Right now the Interior Department is looking at 688 lease applications that piled up in the Clinton years for new offshore oil development in the Beaufort Sea, and from the Gulf of Alaska's Copper River Delta (perhaps the greatest remaining salmon fishery in the world), the Cook Inlet (flanked by the Katmai National Park and the Kenai Peninsula), Bristol Bay and the Chukchi Sea up by Point Hope, the entire coast of Alaska is in play.

At the national level the big environmental groups are focused entirely on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which is indeed in peril. But they would be advised to learn the history of that very Refuge. It was originally set aside in 1957 by President Eisenhower. In the same package Ike's Interior Secretary, Fred Seaton, opened up 20 million acres of Arctic coastline to oil development.

There are local groups--from the Gwich'in trying to save the Refuge and the National Petroleum Reserve west of Prudhoe Bay, to the Inupiat Eskimos defending their whale hunting grounds against oil derricks in the Beaufort Sea, to the Northern Alaska Environmental Center in Fairbanks--taking on the oil companies' grand plan. They understand the stakes more clearly than the national green groups, with the laudable exception of Greenpeace.

As for the Wilderness Society, National Audubon and the others, rapt in their fixation on the Refuge, they seem to be ceding without a fight the rest of the Alaska coast, the Gulf of Mexico and maybe even the Rocky Mountain front. Just listen to Deborah Williams, executive director of the lavishly funded Alaska Conservation Foundation. She recently journeyed to the Refuge with Lesley Stahl of CBS's 60 Minutes and vowed that not one oil rig would ever rise on the plains of the Refuge.

But at the same time Williams told the New York Times that she supports oil drilling in the National Petroleum Reserve, which is eight times as large and just as pristine as the Refuge, because "I drive a car and use petroleum products. We all have to be responsible and balanced." Williams, it should be added, was working for Bruce Babbitt at the Interior Department as his Alaska specialist when he OK'd test drilling in that very part of the Alaskan tundra.

With Democrats he must entice, he
Has proven good at making nicey.
So now, if everyone relaxes,
He'll sharply cut all rich folks' taxes
And help the oil biz and tobacco
And nominate some right-wing wacko
As Justice--qualified, he'll promise,
Like Daddy did with Clarence Thomas.
The Democrats will fold in batches,
And light cigars with White House matches.

Don't look now, but the various recounts under way in Florida are determining that the wrong guy is in the White House. The media have demonstrated remarkably little interest in this story. Nobody is saying that Bush should be removed, but the fact that he lost both the popular vote and, without the intervention of the Supreme Court, would probably have lost Florida and the Electoral College vote should count for something.

Recall that before rendering its decision the Court acted so precipitately to stop the count, as Bush hero Justice Antonin Scalia helpfully explained, explicitly in order to insure public ignorance of the genuine result. "Count first, and rule upon legality afterwards, is not a recipe for producing election results that have the public acceptance democratic stability requires."

One aspect of the Court's controversial majority opinion dealt with the validity of Florida's 110,000 "overvotes," where a machine count recorded more than one vote for President. When examined by hand, many of these votes turned out to be legal, since the punch card (or check mark) matched the name of the candidate written in by the voter. The Gore team stupidly ignored these votes, and the refusal of the Florida Supreme Court to consider them (in favor of an "undervote only" count) was one reason given by the Supreme Court for overturning that decision. So count the overvotes and what happens? The final answer is not in yet, but it sure looks bad for Bush.

In late December, the Orlando Sentinel took a look at about 3,000 overvotes in Lake County. They found more than 600 valid ballots that had been ignored by the machines, with Gore picking up 130 even in this heavily pro-Bush county. In late January the Chicago Tribune reported that in fifteen counties with a particularly high rate of overvotes, more than 1,700 votes that showed a clear choice had been discarded. Most of the counties in the Tribune's study were small, rural and predominantly Republican. Yet even so, Gore's net gain was 366 votes. And a Washington Post review of the computer records of 2.7 million votes in eight of Florida's largest counties reported that overvotes trended toward Gore at a rate of three to one.

Undervotes tell the same story. A study by the Palm Beach Post of 4,513 of that county's ballots set aside for possible court review indicates a Gore pickup of 682 votes, surpassing Bush's alleged 537 statewide margin. These patterns demonstrate that the Republicans' strong-arm tactics in Florida made sense. Without them, their guy would be cutting brush back in Crawford.

Today, with the conspicuous exception of the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne Jr., most of the punditocracy appears to think it an act of bad sportsmanship to point out that the man appointing far-right extremists to oversee the nation's legal system and its natural resources is a pretender to the throne. Sam and Cokie mock the idea as a joke. George Will smirks, "I don't think when the country hears media declaring Gore the winner they're impressed."

Perhaps the most instructive document of the "Get Over It" school of political science was an angry TRB column in The New Republic penned by the magazine's former editor and famed "gaycatholictory" Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan attacks writers he terms "the usual suspects" for questioning the quality of Bush's mandate. Suspects include such distinguished scholars and writers as Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel, Yale law professor Jack Balkin, New Yorker writer and successful former editor of The New Republic Hendrik Hertzberg and TNR senior editor Jonathan Cohn (whose argument did not even appear in the magazine until after Sullivan's attack on it). Each called upon the Democrats to resist Bush's extremist tendencies, most notably the nomination of John Ashcroft for Attorney General.

Sullivan's ire is a bit puzzling. Leaving Florida aside, he is furious at folks opposing a potential chief law enforcement officer who, as senator, refused to approve the ambassadorial nomination of James Hormel because, like Sullivan, Hormel is gay--something Ashcroft believes is "a choice which can be made and unmade." Now, personally, I don't have a dog in this fight, but I can hardly imagine feeling such generosity should a President wish to turn over the legal system to a man who happily discriminates against those of us who have made the "choice" to be, say, Jewish.

Sullivan argued that the rejection of Ashcroft would be "without precedent." In support of this view and "as a testament to the level to which liberalism has now sunk," he quoted from a TRB that appeared in 1925, "It is universally conceded the Executive has the right to select his own official family, and their submission to the Senate is merely a form."

Leave aside the strange assertion that because somebody said something in TNR in 1925 it must therefore be true seventy-six years later. (A year earlier the magazine had pronounced Pablo Picasso "not a great painter or a great master of composition...and in no serious sense a thinker." Does that make it so?) In any case, Sullivan should have kept on reading. The last time the Senate decided to reject a nominee for Attorney General turns out to be--you guessed it--1925, and the Republic somehow survived. Ashcroft should have been sent packing if only to insure that gays who live and work in communities less tolerant than Sullivan's can practice their "choice" unmolested by people like Ashcroft.

Eight Democrats may have lost their nerve this time, but the great thing about mistakes, I keep telling my 2-year-old, is that you can learn from them. As the new Florida counts appear to demonstrate even more clearly than before, George W. Bush and the Republicans hijacked the 2000 election with the help of their discredited accomplices on the US Supreme Court. They have no right to traditional forms of democratic deference, particularly when pursuing an unpopular extremist agenda. An honest media ought do everything possible to insure that no one loses sight of the astonishing circumstances through which Bush acceded to the presidency. Get over that.

In the spring of 1980, presidential candidate Ronald Reagan took me
into his confidence. Leaning back in his seat as we jetted to yet another
state primary, he told me he'd been thinking about outer space. To be
more precise, about our ability to track "a glove lost by an astronaut
that is still circling the Earth up there," and yet our inability to stop
missiles "that are coming at us."

While he didn't actually use the words "Star Wars," this was Reagan's
first public embrace of a space-based ballistic missile defense, as
Frances FitzGerald notes in her definitive book, Way Out There in the
Blue.

Having always liked Reagan, since interviewing him during his first
run for governor in 1966, I didn't want to disabuse him of one of his pet
ideas. Reagan needed those notions, never grounded in reality but always
comforting, like props in a child's fantasy world.

I bring it up now because the new Bush Administration is determined to
spend $60 billion on building Reagan's space toy. While I'm as eager as
anyone to create monuments to Reagan's memory, why not finally build that
training center for high school dropouts in South Los Angeles that he
promised as governor? They still need one. Even carving Reagan's image on
Mt. Rushmore next to Teddy Roosevelt and the rest would be cheaper.

One has to respect the nostalgia that grips Republicans when they
think of winning the Star Wars for the Gipper. But despite having spent
tens of billions already on Star Wars technology, stopping a missile
hidden among thousands of cheaply deployed decoys will just not work.
This kind of ICBM defense is even sillier in an age where the only likely
enemies are a few pariah nations bent not in defeating us in battle but
in blackmailing us through terror. A nuclear bomb in a suitcase smuggled
in with the bales of marijuana that enter the country daily would do the
job much better. Of course a terrorist with half a brain wouldn't go
nuclear; he'd poison our water or air. But let's not get too real here;
we're talking Star Wars, an obsession of such enduring intensity that, in
the end, proponents will not give up until something very costly is
built, and I for one am tired of denying them their folly.

It's time to throw in the towel and give the defense contractors, who
have been lobbying for this boondoggle long and hard, their reward for
having bought the president of their choice. Build Star Wars, big and
bold, but build it not as a weapon, which frightens even the Europeans.
No, build it as a game, a World Wide Web Star Wars theme park. Let's
build it on a scale never before imagined, where you get to virtually
shoot down objects in space, and death only comes to those who dare
mention that it's just a game. But for other nations to not get nervous,
I say let's build those theme parks in every land and language so that
even the poorest nations lacking in indoor plumbing can have the most
up-to-the-minute imitation of space-based war.

Think of it: In the most forlorn outpost of Taliban-run Afghanistan,
old Osama bin Laden, long known as a computer nut, can sit on some rock
outcropping pounding away on his laptop, zapping virtual heathen capitals
of the world. His agents will have secured the latest Star Wars add-ons,
allowing him to pretend to exterminate millions with the push of button
on his wireless Palm Pilot, even when in the outhouse.

Of course, no one will get killed because this will be virtual war,
but there will be winners and losers depending on which side has acquired
the most elaborate toys. The international arms bazaars will be bursting
with the latest innovative devices; venture capitalists will invest
heavily in cutting edge "Star Wars, the Game" technology. The ultimate
reward, while not quite as satisfying as incinerated cities, will be much
more profitable: a commanding market share in what's guaranteed to be the
very newest of the new economy.

Not realistic enough? You think true fanatics will only go for blood
and flesh carnage? Huh, shows just how little you know about the new
world order. People and pain don't matter anymore, or we would be
spending that $60 billion slated for Star Wars on vaccines and clean
water in an old-fashioned terrorist abatement program.

Terrorists are no longer motivated by righting real world wrongs. What
matters to them is the illusion of power while doing God's work. That's
why God created violent space-based video games, so that the lunatics who
speak in the Lord's name can be harmlessly diverted.