September 17, 2001 | The Nation

DANIEL ELLSBERG--VIETNAM'S 'MYTH'?

Boulder, Colo.

In June, Carol Bernstein Ferry took her own life
in the presence of family members, as she had told them she would
after receiving a fatal diagnosis. Before she died she wrote an open
letter explaining her decision. We publish it as an eloquent
statement of the arguments for the "right to die."
            --The Editors

If my death can contribute to an understanding
of euthanasia, then I want it to do so. That is why I am writing this
letter, explaining why I choose to take active steps to end my life
rather than waiting for death to come gradually. With this letter I
also want to make it clear that, although I have the support and
tacit agreement of my children and close friends, no one but myself
will take the steps that cause death. It is unfortunate that I must
say this; our laws are at a destructive point just now, so if anyone
other than myself actually causes my death, that person will be
liable to conviction as a felon. What an absurdity! To help someone
facing a time--whether short or long--of pain and distress, whose
death coming bit by bit can cause major sorrow and anxiety to family
and friends, not to mention the medical help, quite useless, that
must be expended in order to maintain a bearable level of pain--that
this sensible deed can be construed a crime is a blot on our legal
system and on our power of thought.

I have known since last
June that I am terminally ill. Emphysema, a tumor in my chest and
recently a new tumor near my pelvis put it beyond question that I am
on the way to death. This seems to me in no way a tragedy--I am,
after all, 76 years old--but a natural ending. I don't feel called
upon to suffer until the last minute of a creeping death, nor do I
want to put my children through such a time, so I am choosing to make
a finish while I am still able to function.

I've had a
lucky life. I've had a lot of joy; I've had enough sorrow to know
that I'm a member in good standing of the human race; I have tried to
make myself useful. I have nothing to complain about, certainly not
death. I feel lucky now, in that I have been given a somewhat
definite span of life ahead. Once the approximate limit of that
span--six months to a year from last June--got absorbed into my
brain, many problems floated away. I no longer have to worry about
death, as it is with me now. Every day is a treat, an extra gift, the
positive side of the expression Borrowed Time. It is my hope that
people close to me, especially my children, can also enjoy this
relaxed attitude toward something that is, after all, inevitable. The
idea that I can probably manage to have a peaceful and relatively
painless ending is a comfort. For that probability to be a certainty
would be the best comfort of all. But that certainty could only come
if I were to have the help of a second person, and that I will not
have, as under present law that person would be in immediate
danger.

The moral beauty of suffering for its own sake is
important to many, for reasons that I find unfathomable. Religious
pressure, the idea that God enjoys our suffering, is beyond me. And
the terrible attitude of our lawmakers and politicians, considering
that any help toward a painless death should be punished, is a source
of wonder and shame. A few states--notably Oregon and Maine--are trying
to change their laws to allow the administration of painkilling
medicine even if it hastens the moment of death. Even this moderate
and humane act is being fought in legislatures of some states and in
the Senate. The idea that human life is sacred no matter the
condition or the desire of the person seems to me
irrational.

The people who think that it is immoral to make
a rational decision about ending life certainly have the right to
consider their own death in this light and to endure to the very end
whatever pain awaits them and their families. But they have flowed
over into the idea that it is their right also to control those
others of us who view the matter differently. There are societies
here and there that do not put up roadblocks when a person decides to
end life. However, the idea that each person's life is his own is too
radical or too abstruse for consumption in the United States. This is
the attitude that I hope will change, and soon. It is the attitude
that I hope to help soften by explaining that my suicide plan is
bringing me and those close to me a measure of security that my life
can end in as spirited a way as possible.

I appreciate
everyone who has been involved in encouraging me, including those who
have not encouraged me but who have withstood the temptation to
reprimand me. My decision has been arrived at after many years of
contemplation, not quickly or casually. I hope it will help others to
feel all right about preferring a peaceful, benign path into death.

The terrain of the battle for campaign finance
reform has now shifted to the House of Representatives and, less
noticed but more important, to the Massachusetts legislature. Two
approaches to reform are at issue. One limits the ways that private
money can be given and spent in elections; the other holds that
replacing big donations with public financing is the only way to
cleanse a rotten system.

In the House, reformers are
collecting signatures on a discharge petition that would force a
floor debate and a vote on the Shays-Meehan campaign finance bill,
which the GOP leadership buried in the last session. They need 218
signatures; Common Cause had tallied 205 signatures on the petition,
including fifteen Republicans.

House passage of
Shays-Meehan would be a significant victory for Congressional
reformers, but it will not win the war against the big money
corrupting the system. Like McCain-Feingold, its Senate counterpart,
Shays-Meehan bans soft money, but it also doubles the amount of
hard-money contributions wealthy special interests can make. US PIRG
reports that had these changes been in effect for the 2000 elections,
the top 144 lobbying firms in Washington would have been prevented
from giving $1.4 million in soft money, but they could have legally
given $8.7 million more in hard money.

The only way to
achieve meaningful campaign finance reform is through full public
financing. That's why Massachusetts, where a Clean Elections bill is
currently bottled up in the legislature, is so important. Like
similar legislation already implemented in Maine, Arizona and
Vermont, Clean Elections would enable public officials to run fully
funded, viable campaigns for office without having to depend on
private donors to any significant degree. Under Clean Elections laws,
candidates who agree to raise little to no private money and abide by
strict spending limits can qualify for equal grants of full public
financing for their campaigns. Additional matching funds are given if
a participating candidate faces a high-spending opponent. Prospective
candidates qualify by collecting a fairly large number of very small
(around $5) contributions. The laws free them from the private money
chase and make reaching out to voters on the issues and organizing a
grassroots base more important than fundraising ability. In short,
democracy the way it ought to be.

In 1998 Massachusetts
voters passed a Clean Elections initiative by a two-to-one margin.
But Thomas Finneran, the Democratic state House speaker, has used
various maneuvers to prevent the law from going into effect for the
2002 election. Finneran's machinations have rallied reform-minded
citizens to the law's defense. Pressure from grassroots activists led
by Mass Voters for Clean Elections has been so intense that several
lawmakers were compelled to switch their positions after a vote this
past spring in the state House that would have stripped the law of
its funding. Later, the state Senate overwhelmingly backed a
countermeasure that fully funds the system. Now the matter is bottled
up in a conference committee, while Republican Governor Jane Swift
has tried to force the issue by including full funding for Clean
Elections in an interim state budget and, we hope, will continue to
do so.

On August 1 candidates for statewide office started
the process of collecting the 6,000 contributions (of no more than
$100 each) the law says they must have to qualify for a base-level
grant of $1.6 million for the primary. Lower-level and legislative
candidates are seeking to "run clean" as well. But the vision of a
people-driven democracy won't be realized in Massachusetts until
Finneran relents in his opposition to a Clean Elections law. Readers
can help by going to the website www. massvoters.org or by calling
Finneran's office at (617) 722-2500. A March for Democracy, from
Lexington to Boston, is planned for September 16.

Just as
woman suffrage started with laws passed in the states and led to the
Nineteenth Amendment, the Clean Elections movement is bubbling up
from the states. After four pioneering states gave women the vote, it
took another twenty years before woman suffrage was national. Let's
hope it won't take that long for Clean Elections to become the law of
the land.

KATHY BOUDIN AND PAROLE DENIAL

Noted with dismay: New York prison officials' recent decision to deny
parole to former Weather Underground fugitive Kathy Boudin. This
magazine can spare no sympathy for the 1981 Brink's robbery in which
Boudin drove the getaway truck while former members of the Black
Liberation Army killed two police officers and a security guard. But
Boudin was an accessory, not a principal, in that robbery and had
surrendered before the officers were killed. In twenty years behind
bars, she has embodied the ideal of a prisoner remaking her life:
earning a graduate degree and teaching other inmates at Bedford
Hills. Even though the victims of the Brink's robbery and their
families were divided over Boudin, Governor George Pataki chose to
heed a vocal campaign by Rockland County police officials to keep her
locked up. That denial is part of a national pattern in which
governors, in the name of fighting crime, have made it almost
impossible for prisoners to earn parole. In some states 80 percent of
all applications are denied. The denial of parole is a hidden
engine of the nationwide prison crisis that's breaking states'
treasuries--and at the same time is leaving large numbers of
nonviolent offenders with no incentive to rebuild their lives. The
point of parole is precisely for officials and offenders alike to
step back from the acts that got inmates locked up in the first place
and look at the whole life. No possible purpose is served by keeping
Boudin incarcerated.

ON THE WEB: THIS WEEK@THENATION.COM

From the UN World Conference
Against Racism in Durban Mark Gevisser writes that South African
President Thabo Mbeki proclaimed that the divide between North and
South "also coincides with the divide between white and black,
broadly defined." Meanwhile, the Congress of South African Trade
Unions struck to protest his government's "neoliberal" economic
policy. Re the US-Israel walkout: Charles Tanzer reports that
while the United States emphasized concern over the language about
Israel in the final document, it "spent its time challenging nearly
every word of the text, objecting to language that might actually
require it to take steps to combat racism or acknowledge that slavery
was a crime against humanity" (see
www.thenation.com).

CAREY McWILLIAMS AWARD

Victor Navasky is co-winner of the American
Political Science Association's Carey McWilliams Award. Named
after The Nation's great editor, the award honors "a major
journalistic contribution to our understanding of politics." The
other winner is William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly
Standard. Asked how the association justified giving the award to
the proprietors of two such different magazines, a spokesman said
that they had in common a willingness to alienate their own
constituencies. We congratulate Navasky and commend to Kristol the
writings of Carey McWilliams.

The situation in
Israel is now critical, with more than 650 people killed, thousands
injured and the violence constantly escalating. It is no surprise
that since the second intifada erupted in September last year,
the Israeli left has been experiencing a kind of vertigo. Ehud Barak
led Israel to the edge of the abyss, and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
has taken a big stride forward.

Indeed, one of the
distinguishing characteristics of the current Israeli government is
its complete lack of a political program. During his election
campaign, Sharon promised to deliver security and peace. Half a year
has passed, and Israel is now further away than ever from attaining
either goal, even though Sharon enjoys more than 70 percent public
support and has a broad coalition in the Israeli
Knesset.

What, one should ask, has Sharon accomplished
since taking office? He has attacked Nablus with Apache helicopters
and Gaza with F-16 fighter jets, dropping one-ton bombs on buildings
in the center of Gaza City. Tank and infantry units have entered Beit
Jala and Jenin, and Israeli death squads operate regularly in
Tulkarm, Hebron and Ramallah; at least forty-two people have been
killed during assassinations. Moreover, Palestinians have been under
siege for months, and their economy has all but collapsed, leaving
thousands to cope with grinding poverty. The extensive restrictions
on freedom of movement have not only prevented Palestinians from
reaching hospitals and work but have also cut off access to drinking
water in 218 West Bank villages.

The Sharon government has
carried out all these actions and many others in order to quell the
Palestinian uprising, that is, the Palestinians' struggle for
independence. Meanwhile, the United States has reacted with little
more than a murmur of protest, often giving Israel a green light to
employ disproportionate force. It has actually obstructed many of the
attempts to restrain Israeli violence, most recently during the
August 20-21 United Nations Security Council meetings.

That
the Security Council actually convened in order to discuss
Palestinian demands--particularly the request that the UN employ
international monitors in the occupied territories--was, in a sense,
already an achievement; for five months the United States had
succeeded in blocking the issue. But, as is usually the case when the
Security Council gathers to deliberate about Israel, the meeting
produced no result. "The gravity of events on the ground," US acting
UN ambassador James Cunningham explained, "questions the
appropriateness and effectiveness of any action" that the UN might
take. When a situation is extremely grave, so the twisted logic goes,
the UN should refrain from taking any measures. This approach, which
the United States consistently pursues in order to "protect" Israel
from external intervention and criticism, made it clear to the other
Council members that a proposal to send monitors would be
vetoed.

Paradoxically, however, it is Sharon's measures
against the Palestinians--and not international monitors, popular
resistance or even suicide bombers--that are endangering Israel most.
Sharon has yet to unveil a political plan that will bring an end to
the current crisis and establish a lasting peace; his pronouncements
and deeds are limited to military tactics. Moreover, a military
discourse has taken over the public domain and has, so to speak,
colonized the political realm; so much so that the vast majority of
Israelis--58 percent of former doves included--currently support a
government that opts for military solutions rather than political
ones. The wide public acceptance of Sharon's mantra regarding
Israel's unwillingness to negotiate under fire is a case in point, as
is the ubiquity and popularity of the slogan "Let the Israel Defense
Forces Win."

Like all military discourses, this one is
informed by questions relating to the use of violence. And where
violence completely reigns, as Hannah Arendt observed, politics--the
sphere of speech--is obliterated. A vicious circle has emerged, for
violence begets violence, as both Israel's policy of assassination
and the Palestinian suicide bombers have proven so
well.

The destruction of Israel's political realm has
affected all aspects of public life, not only those areas relating to
Palestinians. It is no coincidence that the Likud-Labor coalition has
yet to hold serious discussions about Israel's negative economic
growth (a 0.6 percent decrease over the past six months), the
dramatic increase in unemployment and the rapidly deteriorating
healthcare system. These are political issues about which the
hegemonic militaristic ideology has little, if anything, to
say.

So long as the martial discourse Sharon champions
remains dominant, Israel will continue on its disastrous path. This
is no minor matter. History teaches that following the destruction of
the political realm regimes that are oblivious to justice tend to
emerge. The Israeli government has chosen its course; it is now up to
the public to resist it.

As the crowded podium at the conservative Democratic Leadership Council's summer conference in Indianapolis illustrated, plenty of Democrats are prepared to steer the party even further right than Al Gore did in 2000. Among Democrats who are thinking presidential, there are too many buyers for the DLC's line that Gore's "people-versus-the-powerful" rhetoric was too populist. But as David Corn argues on page 11, the great mass of Americans, Democrats or Disenchanteds, buy the notion that the opposition to Bush must not just talk the people-versus-the-powerful talk but also walk the progressive populist walk.

At a moment when George W. Bush is doing everything in his power to illustrate the inability of conservatives to manage the affairs of state, there is a dramatic opening for progressives. This is a rare circumstance--following a contested election, with a bizarrely divided government--and it calls for bold approaches.

The point is not to pick a particular candidate. The point is to recognize that progressives must have a candidate in 2004, if only to free us from the constraints of a choice so narrowly defined as the 2000 Democratic primary pickings of Gore and Bill Bradley. That's the point Senator Russ Feingold, whose environmental advocacy and consistent critique of corporate free-trade policies have earned him a reputation as the Senate's "greenest" member, will try to make in coming months as he explores the prospects of a progressive presidential bid. "I'm worried sick about what's going to happen with Supreme Court nominations, trade policy, the environment, if we get eight years of Bush," says the Wisconsin Democrat. "But I'm also worried about the prospect that we could have four years of Bush and then four years of a DLC Democrat." Feingold knows his maverick style--he backed Attorney General John Ashcroft's nomination, he says, to defend the principle that a President, particularly a future progressive President, has a right to his appointees--could make the selling job difficult. But he takes comfort from the fact that another maverick, his campaign-finance-reform mate John McCain, shook things up in 2000. And, he adds, "I want to live in a country with a progressive President. I may not be that President, but I want people to start thinking now--not in two years, when it's too late--about how we get a progressive President."

Feingold should explore his chances. The same goes for Representative Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, a fierce critic of NAFTA and US military adventurism, who has been to Iowa and soon will visit New Hampshire. "I want to get people thinking about these issues in the context of presidential politics," says Kaptur. Reverend Al Sharpton says that "progressive leadership is in a deep crisis at the moment in the Democratic Party"; he has asked Harvard professor Cornel West to head a presidential exploratory committee.

Progressives need not pick a 2004 candidate yet. But progressives do need to recognize, as conservative Democrats have, that now is the time to begin giving shape and substance to the opposition to Bush. Presidential nominations are no longer decided by a few primaries every fourth year; they are decided years earlier, as candidates begin to establish themselves. Feingold, who backed Gore in 2000 but refused to join the Democratic bashing of Green Party candidate Ralph Nader, makes a case for a quick start when he says, "On the merits, Nader was right in a lot of what he said. My difference with him is that I think we need to make the fight inside the Democratic Party. And we need to start doing it now, not in January 2004."

Bush lied. About
the cost of his tax cut. About who benefits. About his budget. He
lied when he claimed he could throw money at the military, fund a
prescription drug benefit, pass his tax cut and still not touch the
Social Security surplus. And he's lying now as his budget office
cooks the books to mask the fact that he's already dipping
into the Social Security surplus--without counting the full cost of
his military fantasies, or a decent drug benefit, or the inevitable
tax and spending adjustments yet to come.

Democrats have
every reason to rail about Bush's lies and to condemn his
irresponsible tax cut--about a third of which will go to the
wealthiest 1 percent (and for which, it should be noted, twelve
Democratic senators voted). But Democrats are about to lock
themselves in their own box with their posturing about the "raid on
the Social Security trust fund."

There is no lockbox and no
raid. The Social Security and Medicare trust funds are credited with
bonds for every dollar of surplus whether the money is spent, given
away in tax cuts or used to pay down the debt. Those bonds--the most
secure investment in the world--can be redeemed when Social Security
payments start to exceed payroll taxes. When the surpluses first
showed up, Clinton invented the notion that paying down the debt
would "save Social Security first" as a clever tactical ploy to fend
off Republican tax cuts. With the economy growing and unemployment
low, debt reduction had a threadbare rationale. But even then,
Clinton was forfeiting a historic opportunity to argue for meeting
vital needs: healthcare, housing, more classrooms and teachers,
preschool for all. Now Democrats have turned Clinton's tactics into
perverse principle. The trust fund surplus is "raided" if it doesn't
go toward debt reduction. House minority leader Dick Gephardt argues
that Bush should present a new budget--one with either less spending
or more taxes.

But the world economy is teetering on the
verge of a global recession. Japan is sinking. Europe is slowing.
Latin America is a basket case. The US stock market has tanked.
Corporations are slashing investment and laying off workers.
Consumers are starting to tighten their belts. State and local
governments are cutting programs. This is hardly the moment for the
federal government to run the second-largest surplus in history. And
Bush already has his tax cut for the wealthy. So all the Democratic
posturing about the lockbox puts pressure on spending. Already White
House flack Ari Fleischer says the squeeze "will prevent the
politicians from busting the budget and spending more pork." Worse,
Democratic talk about "raiding the trust fund" adds to the myth that
Social Security is at risk--a big lie that Bush is pushing to sell
private accounts and cuts in guaranteed benefits.

Democrats
should be indicting Bush for turning his back on working families by
enforcing austerity in a time of need. They should be making the case
for extending unemployment insurance, aiding poor mothers (the first
to be laid off), making investments in housing, schools and mass
transit that can help jump-start the economy. And they should be
taking credit for the tax rebate that people are getting--that was a
Democratic idea that wasn't even in the Bush plan. Instead, Democrats
are whistling Calvin Coolidge and ceding the growth argument to Bush.
Bush says his tax cuts are needed to help the economy revive; that's
right--only he's lying about his tax cut. Most of it doesn't kick in
for years and goes to the already rich. Those cuts should be
reversed, particularly the ones in the estate tax, which is paid only
by the wealthiest families. Democrats should reclaim the money for
investment in making America better.

Now we have a
dishonest debate: Bush lies, and Democrats defend austerity in a time
of need. It's time for progressives inside and outside Congress to
find their voice and break with austerity politics.

Two of the most
famous figures in the Democratic Party, Senators Joseph Lieberman and
Hillary Clinton, have introduced the Media Marketing Accountability
Act of 2001, which, among other things, would make it illegal to
market or promote adult-rated rap and rock-and-roll albums to kids
under 17 and would empower the Federal Trade Commission to decide
which R-rated films may be marketed to minors.

In April,
Senator Clinton said, "If you label something as inappropriate for
children and then go out and target it to children, you are engaging
in false and deceptive advertising." And this summer Democrats,
occasionally joined by some Republicans, have browbeaten
entertainment-industry leaders at Congressional hearings, accusing
them of evading the rating system and selling salacious material to
young people. But the R rating on films doesn't mean kids under 17
shouldn't see them; it means they shouldn't see them without an
adult. Many parents want their kids to see such R-rated films as
Billy Elliot and Erin Brockovich. As for records, the
"parental advisory" sticker informs the buyer that the record
contains profanity, but it does not have an age
recommendation.

Lieberman disingenuously says, "We're not
asking the FTC to regulate content in any way, or even to make
judgments about what products are appropriate for children." But
that's precisely what his radical bill does. It empowers the FTC to
"establish the criteria" for new ratings for records and films, and
would legally require record companies and film studios to create and
implement "an age-based rating or labeling system." Marketing would
be deemed to be targeting minors if "the Commission determines that
the advertising or marketing is otherwise directed or targeted to
minors." With the FTC defining marketing to minors on the basis of
FTC-mandated ratings criteria, backed by the crippling financial
penalties for "unfair or deceptive acts or practices," it would be
able to decide which music and movies could be mass-marketed and
thus, by and large, which ones would be released.

Lieberman and Clinton apparently believe that federal
bureaucrats are the ideal arbiters of the appropriateness of
entertainment for teenagers. Lieberman told Inside.com, "We
know the difference between Schindler's List and Saving
Private Ryan and some of the slasher flicks that are aimed at
teenage boys. That's a decision best left to the administrative
agency."

Two days before the legislation was introduced,
the FTC issued a surreal report that criticized record companies for
advertising stickered albums on the World Wrestling Federation TV
show SmackDown! because 36 percent of its audience is under
18. So according to the FTC it's OK for younger teens to watch guys
knocking the living daylights out of each other, but it's not OK to
sell rap music to those same kids! Not surprisingly, more than 70
percent of the albums the FTC monitored were by African-American
artists. (The FTC also included the rock band Rage Against the
Machine, whose lyrics are frequently political, on the list.) At the
Hip-Hop Summit in June, attended by African-American leaders
including Cornel West, Martin Luther King III, Louis Farrakhan and
several black members of Congress, even those who criticized the
content of certain albums agreed that this legislation is dangerous
and unfair.

While the FTC investigation was conducted in
response to the Columbine murders, Lieberman is a one-man slippery
slope who makes no bones about his desire to regulate nonviolent
dirty words, complaining that "the leading music companies...have
been doing little if anything to respond to the FTC report and curb
the marketing of obscenity-laced records to kids."

Although
the Washington elite focuses its rhetoric on corporations, young
people view these outbursts as attacks on youth culture. Just as baby
boomers didn't view Bob Dylan and the Beatles as "products" of CBS
and EMI, today's young people view rap and rock music as their own
culture, which appears to be precisely what middle-aged pundits hate
about it. George Will, for example, castigated rap lyrics last
September on ABC's This Week. Six months later, Will lavished
praise on Sopranos executive producer David Chase for his
creation. Both Eminem's Slim Shady and Chase's Tony Soprano are
violent, bigoted characters whose humanity and contradictions are
nonetheless illuminated by their creators. The primary difference is
that rap is the cultural language of young people.

Obviously, people of good will disagree about culture, and
there is nothing wrong with fierce criticism of any genre. But
Lieberman et al. want to go far beyond criticism. They want
government to have veto power over the marketing, and thus the
economic viability, of entertainment.

By supporting this
legislation Democrats may pick up a few "swing voters" who like the
symbolism of entertainment-bashing, but in doing so they risk
alienating young voters, fans of pop culture of all ages and civil
libertarians. It is hard to imagine the young people who still turn
out in the thousands to hear Ralph Nader speak at campuses being
attracted by Lieberman's approach. Voter turnout among young people
is at an all-time low, around 28 percent; and according to Voter News
Service, while Clinton had a 12-percentage-point margin over Bush
among 18-29 year olds in 1992 and a 19-percentage-point margin in
1996, Gore-Lieberman won this demographic by a mere 2 percent in
2000. None of the published postelection analyses by Democrats have
focused on restoring turnout or Democratic margins among young
voters.

Condescending to, alienating and demeaning young
people is bad morally and bad politically. No progressive movement
has ever succeeded without young people. Continued culture-bashing by
Democrats opens the door for more erosion of their natural base to
culture-savvy libertarians like Jesse Ventura.

It's like finding another Babe Ruth,
But he seems a bit long in the tooth.

Modesto, California

"Condit Country" is a bad enough slogan for
this agribusiness burg, yet, not satisfied with it, the city boosters
have also erected an arch across the main street. MODESTO, reads the
self-regarding inscription. WATER. WEALTH. CONTENTMENT. HEALTH. The
local Congressman is an embodiment of this narcissistic style, and of
the sort of Babbittry that accompanies it. Condit is always there,
when it comes to being photographed for a peach parade. He's always
there, on the House Agriculture Committee, when it comes to bills on
land and water rights. He's an irrigation ditch for the local
interests. His blond family--Carolyn, Cadee and Chad--is off a
cornflakes box. In common with his sometime friend and patron
Governor Gray Davis, Condit will make any political sellout his own
idea. Death penalty--yes. School prayer, public display of the Ten
Commandments, down with flag-burners and (now that you mention it)
let's reveal the names of people with AIDS.

Creeps like
Condit are, however, a dime a dozen in the Democratic Party, and I
was in a state of general agreement with Dan Rather when I first set
foot in the district. The disappearance of Chandra Levy had no
importance beyond itself; it was a tragedy only for her family.
Condit may have flirted with obstruction of justice by wasting the
time of the DC police, and with suborning perjury in asking Anne
Marie Smith to sign a false affidavit, but this was not on the
Clinton scale of abuse of power. Condit hadn't used the forces of the
state or mobilized large sums of public money in his battle to
insulate himself from unwelcome inquiries. What he has done has at
least been done on his own dime.

Thus I reasoned, idly,
until I got to the corner of 16th and H streets downtown, where
Condit has his headquarters. There wasn't much in the window, except
a banal poster enjoining one and all to say no to hate crimes and two
other exhibits. The first of these was a missing poster for Levy,
who, as is now notorious, disappeared a whole continent away in
Washington and is unlikely to be lurking in the greater Modesto area.
The second was a missing poster for a local girl named Dena Raley,
who has vanished in what the authorities call "suspicious
circumstances." I asked an experienced local if Congressman Condit
has always kindly displayed the posters for missing females in his
district office window. "Oh no," came the reply. "That's a new
thing."

I was at once seized with a powerful feeling of
disgust. Condit and his team of lawyers and publicists have been
saying unctuously for some time that they so much hope Chandra Levy
hasn't gone the way of all those other girls who go missing. "I pray
that she has not met the same fate," as Condit himself piously
phrased it in a letter to his constituents. The not-so-subtle message
is that life is unfair, whaddaya gonna do and don't look at me. But
to use the posters of the missing as an accessory in this fashion is
to take cynicism a stage further. I actually live in a place more or
less equidistant between Levy's old apartment in Dupont Circle and
Condit's oddly located pad in Adams Morgan, and I can tell you that
the disappearance of single females is not as everyday an occurrence
as some would have you think. I can also tell you that the Washington
Police Department is a laughingstock, as much among criminals as
among the law-abiding. It never called Dr. Levy back after he rang to
report his daughter missing in the first place, and when it says it
has no suspect in the case it really, really means it. It's a police
department that doesn't suspect anybody, and has for these many years
employed rather more crooks than it has managed to
apprehend.

The following night I watched Condit himself on
TV. Considering that our craven mass media had actually allowed him
to choose a lenient and unqualified interviewer, I thought that his
performance was not so much disastrous from a PR point of view (the
Dick Gephardt "take" on the matter) as calamitous from a moral one.
How incredible that he could say, not once but several times, that in
refusing to clarify the real nature of their relationship he was
honoring "a specific request from the Levy family," who had done no
more than tell another TV station that they were more concerned with
recovering their daughter than with discovering the details. How
contemptible! A man who will do this, and plainly rehearse to do it
with the assistance of the degraded professions of attorney and media
adviser, can be held to be capable of pretty much anything. The
squalor and shadiness of his other responses--alluding to Ms. Levy
repeatedly in the past tense, making out her family to be liars,
answering questions he wasn't asked, resorting to the word "we" when
he meant "I" ("we've taken a polygraph test," for Christ's sake) and
blaming his lawyers for a draft falsification submitted to Anne Marie
Smith--paled when set next to this one.

So I have changed
my mind, for what it's worth. By acting in this depraved way, by
managing to evoke only mild reproof from his party and by employing
the techniques of spin and "privacy" and procrastination when a
girl's life is in question, Condit has demonstrated something of
importance about our political class. Of course I don't know if poor
Chandra Levy went for an ill-advised ride on his motorbike, or
somebody else's. But after I had digested the Congressman's window
display, I walked over to the former Mel's drive-in, which is
featured in George Lucas's Modesto classic, American
Graffiti.

An ancient Chevy stood next to a battered
Packard in the parking lot, Elvis was on the jukebox, girls served
from rollerblades and the slogan ("Where the food is as good as the
root beer") was roughly accurate. A leathered biker pushed past me as
I emerged from the "Poppa Bear" restroom. On the back of his jacket
he had inscribed the words: IF YOU CAN READ THIS--THE BITCH FELL OFF.
It wasn't the most callous remark I heard in Modesto: I had to sit
through Connie Chung to hear it surpassed.

The best thing about my summer in the country was
that I didn't have a TV and usually got to the market after the tiny
clutch of papers had already been snatched up by the local
information junkies. So I missed a lot of Really Important News. Gary
Condit, who? Most of my friends believe he had "something to do" with
Chandra Levy's disappearance, despite the lack of any evidence or
motive or even credible scenario for same. This shows how desperately
we long for life to be more interesting than it really is, but will
somebody please tell me why the people at Buzzflash.com and other
hardcore Democratic propagandists want progressives, liberals,
Dems--whatever Nation readers are calling themselves these
days--to rally to the defense of this slimeball? He doesn't even have
a good voting record! (During the Contract With America years he
voted with Newt Gingrich 77 percent of the time, and he has been
pressed often to switch parties.) Count me out--I used up all my
humor and worldliness on Bill and Monica, not to mention their
numerous real-life equivalents. My position on sexually predatory
politicians, with their interns (and aides and flight attendants), is
the same as for the ever-popular aging male professor/bushy-tailed
young grad student combo: These people, both the men and the women,
are on their own. If half of Congress had to go home in
disgrace to Modesto, and half the intern pool learned the hard way
that there's more to getting ahead than giving head, why would that
be bad?

In sports news, we had the story of Danny Almonte,
the 14-year-old 12-year-old who pitched a perfect game for his Bronx
Little League team, leading them to a third-place finish in the
international championship. Bring on President Bush and Mayor
Giuliani, the television cameras and the ticker-tape parade! The
unearthing of Danny's true birth certificate, showing he was born in
1987, not 1989, was spun out in the press for days on end, with vast
quantities of shocked fake-solicitous moralizing ladled on by every
sports commentator in America and then some. Said sports agent Drew
Rosenhaus on CNN's TalkBack Live, "If you start cheating and
start making excuses for that, you're destroying the American dream
here." In quest of baseball glory, Danny's parents lied and exploited
him, messed with his head and, it was believed at one point, hadn't
even enrolled him in school--all very bad. But what do you expect in
our sports-and-entertainment-addled country? As Joyce Purnick pointed
out in an acid column in the New York Times, no one makes a
fuss about New York City public school kids who, against great odds,
win writing competitions or debating championships or excel
academically (not even the Board of Education, which had trouble
coming up with a list of relevant names)--and then we wonder why so
many inner-city kids blow off their education in favor of a "dream"
about being a rapper, a movie star, a model, a sports hero. The Bronx
is full of teenage Dominican immigrants like Danny, who've dropped
out of their awful schools, where they learned nothing, to face bleak
futures in the subproletariat, without even a chance at getting their
pictures in the paper unless they happen to be run over by a drunken
policeman. Where's the outrage about that?

Perhaps it's
being expended on superpublicist-to-the-stars Lizzie Grubman's
automotive rampage in the parking lot of the Hamptons' Conscience
Point Inn. Or perhaps it's been kidnapped by the Rev. Al Sharpton,
who's taking a break from black-Hispanic bridge-building over target
practice on Vieques to feud with right-wing New York Post
columnist Rod Dreher, who questioned the good taste of 22-year-old
singer Aaliyah's funeral procession down Fifth Avenue: "A
traffic-snarling, horse-drawn cortege in honor of a pop singer most
people have never heard of? Give us a break!" Dreher went on to
cruelly contrast Aaliyah's song lyrics with the poetry of Byron,
deserving recipient of lavish obsequies from a grateful nation. In
response Sharpton called for a boycott of the Post and its
advertisers: "It was ugly and divisive. She was degraded," he said.
"What would make her not worthy of this type of
funeral?"

Too right. I can't think of a more important
issue than celebrity funerals for a self-described national black
leader to be addressing right now! Unless, of course, it is the
absence of black faces on television, the pet cause of Kweisi Mfume,
president of the NAACP. Syndicated columnist Cynthia Tucker and
others have charged that Mfume was pushing this issue in order to
promote himself as a talk-show host, although media imagery and
representation is a standard issue for identity-based organizations
from NOW to the Anti-Defamation League. In any case, Mfume, a
national figure and former Congressman who appeared on cable for
years, would make at least as worthy a regular commentator as, oh I
don't know, the racially humorous Don Imus, or Rush Limbaugh, or
Chris Matthews. I'd watch.

The real issue, though, is that
television is the least of black America's problems. Sure, it's
absurd that all the young nudnicks on Friends, Will &
Grace, Dawson's Creek and other top-ranked shows my
daughter loves are white, but life is short and time's a-wasting. How
much energy does the nation's largest black organization want to
spend shoehorning an African-American best friend into Dharma
& Greg or getting Clarence Page more face time on CNN? It was
left to one Emory Curtis, whose essay "Blacks on TV or Educate Our
Kids?" was posted on the Black Radical Congress e-mail list in
August, to make the obvious point. For three years the NAACP has been
making a major issue out of the prime-time lineup. Where is its
crusade against the terrible state of education for black children?
Curtis notes that black kids trail by almost every measure: On last
year's National Assessment of Educational Progress, one in three
white fourth graders performed at grade level, which is itself pretty
shocking--but only one in twenty black fourth graders did. In
California, three out of four black fourth and eighth graders were at
the lowest level, "below basic"--about the same as eight years
ago.

Well, summer's over. Time to turn off the set?

He may have been screwed out of the election, but he's still a terrible candidate.

"Following the money" can prove devastating to critics of the illegal trade.

If they connect well with voters in 2002, they'll have an edge in a weak economy.

If they have come for the butterflies then

bless their breaking hearts, but the young pair is

looking nowhere except each other's eyes.

He seems like he could carry them both

over the street on great wings of grief tucked

under his coat, while all around them float,

like wisps of ash or the delicate

prism sunlight flashing off the city glass,

the orange-yellow-black-wing-flecked monarchs.

Migrant, they're more than two dozen today,

more long-lived than the species who keep

to the localized gardens--they're barely

a gram apiece, landing, holding still for

the common milkweed that feeds their larvae,

or balanced on bridges of plumegrass stalks

and bottle-brush, wings fanning, closing, calmed

by the long searchlight stems of hollyhock.

If they have come for the butterflies then

why is she weeping when he lifts her chin?

He looks like he's holding his breath back--

or is he trying to shed tears, too? Are

any left? He's got his other hand

raised, waving, and almost before it stops

the taxi's doors flare on both sides open.

Nothing's stirring in the garden, not us,

not the thinnest breeze among the flowers,

yet by the time we look again they've flown.