Op-Ed

On Jan. 15, the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. and the ninth anniversary of the Gulf war, 10 people will begin a month-long fast on the steps of the Capitol in Washington D.C. They're members of Voices in the Wilderness, the Chicago-based group that has been trying to marshal public opinion here against the sanctions (instigated by the United States through the United Nations) against Iraq. The group won't eat, and will spend each day lobbing politicians, human rights groups, government officials and the press.

There are plenty of awful U.S. policies that have survived the turnover into this new millennium, but few of them can be as malignant as the sanctions that have been killing Iraqis at a steady rate since they were imposed in 1990. The United Nation's Children's Fund (UNICEF) and other U.N. agencies in Iraq reckon that more than 1 million civilians, mostly children, have died from malnutrition and disease as a result of the embargo. Despite the United Nations oil-for-food program, UNICEF estimates that more than 4,000 children under the age of 5 die each month as a consequence of this same embargo.

So here we are in the Year Aught, the millennium's over, the Christmas tree is down, we're in debt, and here comes January, February, Ry-Krisp and cottage cheese. Now is the winter of our discontent, so I think we ought to coordinate our paranoias.

I've been worried about our paranoias lately -- we don't have them in order.

Some of us got all paranoid about the Y2K bug, while the media enjoyed a late-year terrorist boomlet. Traditionalists are sticking with the Russians and still want to build Star Wars. I couldn't figure out why, at this late date, the Strategic Defense Initiative still has legs, unless it's because the Republicans haven't had a new idea since the Reagan administration, so they're stuck with it.

But then I happened to pick up one of those old techno-thrillers, a vintage late-Cold War gem, that had the Soviets hiding astonishing technological capabilities, all the better to eat us with, my dear. How fiendishly cunning were those Soviets in the thrillers -- and I realized you can't have an entire genre of literature loose in a society for years and years without repercussions.

A few numbers tell a dramatic story about extreme changes in media fascination with the Internet.

After the 1990s ended, I set out to gauge how news coverage of cyberspace shifted during the last half of the decade. The comprehensive Nexis database yielded some revealing statistics:

It's taken me quite a while to make up my mind about the Democratic presidential contest. I find Al Gore as discouraging as everybody else does. Even if you agree with him, imagine trying to work up enthusiasm for Gore.

I once spent a day with Al Gore off the record, so I know there's a real human being in there somewhere. Lord knows what happened to it.

Meanwhile, Bill Bradley has been coming up and coming up. It's always been clear that the man is a class act, without a phony bone in his body.

The trouble is, class acts are a problem in this country. Adlai Stevenson was a class act, and he lost twice. I've had my political heart broken by class acts more times than I care to remember. I'm class-act-shy.

Almost every cycle we get some candidate greatly esteemed by those who know and care a lot about government -- John Anderson, Bruce Babbitt, Paul Tsongas -- some brainy, professorial type who appeals to some of the media, all the college kids and practically nobody else. No lunch-bucket appeal.

I long since decided that if the candidate doesn't have some Elvis to him, he ain't gonna make it. Bradley has zip in the Elvis department.

Let's pause a moment before we head for the exits. I'm talking about the spectacular, the ludicrous, the humiliating and uproarious discomfiture of the Y2K doomsayers. How deliciously wrong they were! We're dealing here with one of the biggest busts since the Edsel.

Are there lessons to be drawn from the fiasco? I suppose the core phenomenon to be looked at is the propensity of the richest, most secure nation in the history of the planet to believe that collapse, utter and awful, is just around the next corner. This mental outlook is understandable in, say, Poland, which has been invaded and ravaged not a few times in this century. And there are some ethnic fractions here -- Hmong, for example -- who could be pardoned for having an apprehensive take on the future. But the Hmong weren't buying all those generators, or laying in enough canned food and bottled water to last through the rest of this century.

Happpy new millennium, everybody! And wasn't that an instructive little episode? All those nutters and even normal citizens conned by doom-mongers into laying in supplies and weapons.

And didn't the media have a lovely time scaring us all to death about terrorism? You'll be happy to know that the Border Patrol at Ojinaga was on full alert. There's more damage done by fear in this world than by evil.

And now for Old Business, as they say in the agenda world. If you want a perfect example of why people despise politicians, try six Republican presidential candidates, each of them taking the position that Elian Gonzalez, the 6-year-old from Cuba, should remain in this country.

Is there something wrong with me, or is this a no-brainer? According to the boy's relatives in Miami, he is close to his father, who took care of him during the day. Juan Miguel Gonzalez is an excellent father who works as a hotel doorman, meaning he has a job in Cuba's dollar economy. Nor is the boy being sent back to a dreary island prison.

You may think a person would bring up the subject of political rhetoric in our day only to dis it, to mourn the decline of the once-noble art, to compare the puny babble of our modern pipsqueaks to the magnificent cadences of Jefferson, Lincoln and Churchill, and so lament anew. Not me.

What I mourn is that none of the current candidates measures up to the glory years of the Ineffable Big George Bush and the Immortal Dan Quayle, who shall be forever revered for setting new standards in political language.

My personal favorite in the oratory sweepstakes is George W. Bush, who is rapidly developing a style that may yet become comparable to his father's. He is a master of the perfectly opaque response. We now know that Ronald Reagan's famous line in the 1980 campaign -- "There you go again!" -- was carefully scripted in advance. This leads to visions of an entire team of W. Bush speech writers cogitating on how to achieve the perfect nonanswer.

Examples:

• "Whatever's fair."
• "Whatever's right."
• "I’m all right on that."
• "Whatever is fair between the parties."

And, a recent gem of opacity:

Eternal vigilance is the price of ... um, well, guess we can't say that anymore. We might get sued.

Mostly when we think of threats to free speech, it's government actions or laws we have in mind -- the usual bizarre stuff like veggie libel laws or attempts to keep government actions or meetings secret from the public.

Sometimes you get a political case, like Gov. George W. Bush's effort to stop a Bush-parody site on the Internet. The parody, run by a 29-year-old computer programmer in Boston named Zack Exley, annoyed Bush so much that he called Exley "a garbageman" and said, "There ought to be limits to freedom." (That's not a parody -- he actually said that.)

Bush's lawyers warned Exley that he faced a lawsuit. Then they filed a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission demanding that Exley be forced to register his parody site with the FEC and have it regulated as a political committee.

This fits in with the four instances in which faculty members at the Bush School of Government and Public Service in our fair state were reprimanded at the behest of Bush associates for saying less-than-glowing things about our governor.

In the nation's biggest news weekly, the final headline of 1999 posed a question that preoccupies many journalists these days: "A Second American Century?"

Providing some answers on the last page of Time's Dec. 27 issue, pundit Charles Krauthammer was upbeat. "The world at the turn of the 21st century is not multipolar but unipolar," he wrote. "America bestrides the world like a colossus." We are supposed to see this as a very good situation.

"The main reason for the absence of a serious challenge to American hegemony is that it is so benign," Krauthammer went on. "It does not extract tribute. It does not seek military occupation. It is not interested in acquiring territory." With such declarations, Time magazine echoes its founder, Henry Luce, who coined the "American Century" maxim six decades ago.

Like his colleagues in the punditocracy, Krauthammer recognizes that foreign rivals are restless. ("The world is stirring.") Yet the outlook is favorable: "None have the power to challenge America now. The unipolar moment will surely last for at least a generation."

The arrival of 2000 reminds us that life is short. Deadening routines often squander our time, while evasions take unnecessary tolls in human suffering. But much better possibilities remain.

Every day, a nationwide media barrage encourages us to be cynical and passive. Endless dramas of politics and grand commerce -- amorality plays -- are performed with great zeal. We're supposed to cheer. But many of us find the glorified spectacles to be dispiriting rather than uplifting.

The words of America's leading politicians reverberate through a national echo chamber. They tout global supremacy and higher market share as ultimate virtues. Dissenting voices are mostly circumspect. Pundits debate how -- but not whether -- the U.S. government should use such measures as diplomatic arm-twisting, financial blackmail and military might to impose its will on the world.