Global

AUSTIN, Texas -- A hearty round of congratulations to all concerned in this year's presidential race for three weeks of politics at their finest.

First, we had the great debate over whether the vice president smooched his wife for too long at the Democratic National Convention -- a matter of burning moment to the republic -- complete with exegesis of the smacker as to whether or not he frenched her. Comparison of the candidates' economic plans was shelved for that week.

Then we had the Debate on Debates, a subject gripping the nation and affecting the very lives of all who dwell herein, with the referees in solid concert that W. Bush's ploy to make Al Gore look slippery was too cute by half and only succeeded in underlining Bush's gutlessness. Consideration of global warming was postponed.

Next we had a reprise of that old favorite, the Open Mike Gotcha, with Bush calling a New York Times reporter a major-league casserole. Although it can be argued that Bush's failure to apologize was major-league tacky, the matter necessitated shelving all questions related to economic globalization.

AUSTIN, Texas -- When I was in my 20s, the subject of insurance was so vastly boring that it was a way to describe a bad date: "like talking to an insurance salesman." It's still sort of like your teeth -- something you'd rather not think about but have to take care of -- so let's plunge in.

As Jonathan Cohn pointed out in the May 1 New Republic, the object of health insurance is to get as many people as possible into one big pool, mixing the sick with the healthy. This way, the healthy pay a little more than they otherwise would, but those who get sick pay a lot less.

Since everyone gets sick eventually, if only from old age, it works out fairly. Your chances of never being sick a day in your life and then dropping dead of an undiagnosed heart condition at an early age are less-than-lottery-slim.

Within the past two weeks, we've a report from the FBI on the "school shooter" threat profile, which again strains to make a link between popular culture and teenage mass murderers. We've had a report from the Federal Trade Commission lacerating the entertainment industry for marketing violence to minors. The Senate Commerce Committee, on which Senator Joe Lieberman sits, is scheduling hearings on these issues later this month.

For their part, Al Gore and Lieberman have told the entertainment industry that it has six months to clean up its act or, once installed in the White House, the next Democratic administration will draft laws to compel Hollywood, the computer and video companies and the music industry to mend their ways.

Grandstanding about the entertainment industry has been a specialty of Al and Tipper Gore since Al first entered Congress in 1977 (a year in which the couple were formally born-again.) Tipper was part of a Congressional wives' club agitating against violence and sex on TV shows, and then, in the mid-1980s, came Tipper Gore's famous campaign, abetted by her husband, against explicit rock 'n rap music.

AUSTIN, Texas -- The "case" against Wen Ho Lee of the Los Alamos Laboratory is disgraceful. The man was held for nine months over a "case" that never even rose to the level of contempt. And by and large, the media have been culpable as well.

One need know very little about nuclear weapons to realize that the likelihood of Lee's having given away the "crown jewels" of our nuclear secrets was extremely remote, starting with the fact that the W-88 technology is more than 20 years old. Science just doesn't work like that. I suppose this is another indication of how short the American media are in trained science writers.

Nor was it difficult to discern from the beginning that the case, qua case, was quite rank. Wen Ho Lee was busted and smeared all over the front pages for something that we knew almost immediately was not that unusual, and we knew that the same thing had been done by the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who was not accused of treason.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Let's all take a long step back and then look at this again: Is the human race just another species in the long history of Earth that's too dumb to adapt and survive?

We clever upright primates have so far outstripped everyone save the cockroaches, but we seem to be forgetting what knocked off so many of the other major species: climate change. And if we're not smart enough to learn from that, it's our turn to go extinct.

Nothing like a couple of days of 110-degree heat to remind us that global warming has nothing to do with the end of the Cold War. According to the fossilologists, the Big Ones, like the Ice Age, may have had a proximate cause -- meteor hit, giant volcano eruption blotted out sun ... something happened. But in your relatively short tens of thousands of years, all you get is a more or less cyclical back-and-forth. Now coral reefs in the Pacific that are a thousand years old are dying. This is not cyclical.

After many months of controversy over her anti-gay statements to millions of radio listeners, Dr. Laura ascended the airwaves to an even higher and mightier pulpit. Her crusade has reached televisionland.

Over the summer, Schlessinger held onto the misconceptions that led her to describe homosexuality as "a biological error" manifested by "deviants." Meanwhile, she tried some damage control -- but couldn't let go of her bigotry.

In a July interview with Time magazine, she insisted: "Not being able to relate normally to a member of the opposite sex is some kind of error. I do not see that as insulting at all. It is a statement of biological fact."

Actually, it's nothing of the kind. Dr. Laura is about as scientific as William Jennings Bryan was at the Scopes trial, thumping the Bible as a backbeat for old prejudices. Fortunately, these days, most clergy are far more enlightened.

AUSTIN, Texas -- OK, let's try this again verrrrry slowly, class -- like Al Gore in his Mr. Rogers mode.

George W. Bush on education, supposedly his strong point, is making no sense. He is getting it all wrong and is dumbing down what could have been a really useful debate on how to fix the public schools.

For political reasons, he needs to claim that his little nostrums have more to do with the improvement in Texas public schools than the fundamental reforms made long before he showed up.

This is depressing and dangerous, and could well lead to our once again falling for some cute little quick-fix slogan (higher standards, end social promotion, vouchers, accountability, back to basics, phonics, school choice), while ignoring the real basics (smaller class sizes, more preschool programs, spending more on poor kids and better classroom equipment -- not to mention fixing the roofs and the windows).

Remember the days when liberal groups screamed with fear on a daily basis about the onrush of the Christian right and raised millions by playing on the fear that Pat Robertson would seize power and force God's way down the throats of all freedom-loving Americans?

Earlier this week in Peoria, Ill., Democratic vice presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman was at it again. He said religion should be part of public life and politicians have an obligation to make America's "moral future better by the tone we set." Just over a week earlier, on Aug. 27 at the Fellowship Chapel Church in Detroit, Lieberman declared, "The Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, not freedom from religion." Lieberman nominated the Judeo-Christian God as the basis of morality and the spiritual engine of our society. "As a people," he said, "we need to reaffirm our faith and renew the dedication of our nation and ourselves to God and God's purpose."

The greatest struggle of any oppressed group in a racist society is the struggle to reclaim collective memory and identity. At the level of culture, racism seeks to deny people of African, American Indian, Asian and Latino descent their own voices, histories and traditions. From the vantagepoint of racism, black people have no “story” worth telling; that the master narrative woven into the national hierarchy of white prejudice, privilege and power represents the only legitimate experience worth knowing.

Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks makes the observation that the greatest triumph of racism is when black people lose touch with their own culture and identity, seeking to transcend their oppressed condition as the Other by becoming something they are not. Under colonialism and Jim Crow segregation, people of African descent were constantly pressured to conform to the racist stereotypes held of them by the dominant society. Some succumbed to this pressure, assuming the mask of “Sambo” in order to survive, or to ensure that their children’s lives would go forward.

The major political surprise of this summer was Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore’s selection of Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman as his running mate. Lieberman, a socially conservative Orthodox Jew, had first become widely known nationally as the most prominent Senate Democrat to denounce President Clinton’s misconduct in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The media, for the most part, was overwhelmingly positive with the selection of the first Jewish candidate on a major party national ticket. The New York Post, for example, declared that Lieberman was “Miracle Man Joe.” The Miami Herald summed up the general media consensus: “Gore’s VP Pick Historic.”

What was most unusual was the Republican response to Lieberman, which was also extremely positive. William Bennett, Reagan’s former secretary of education declared that even “conservatives acknowledged that the vice president had made a wise choice by picking a man of principle, intelligence and civility.” Republicans immediately noted that the Connecticut Senator was ideologically closer on many issues to Texas Governor George W. Bush than to Gore.