Global

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.

Jazz owes a lot of its popularity to the phonograph, going back to the early days, when Thomas Edison invented the musical box that brought jazz to people who lived outside of the areas where jazz musicians played. Through phonograph records, they could hear the music of such people as "King" Joe Oliver. He was the first of the legendary great trumpet players to come out of New Orleans, the city where most experts in the field say that jazz originated. Jazz was played in the whorehouses in that city, and Louis Armstrong credits Oliver as being one person from whom he learned his style of playing trumpet.

It was immensely significant for black America that the last major public demonstration in the U.S. in the 20th century was a protest over global economics and trade. More than forty thousand people came to Seattle to oppose the policies of the World Trade Organization, which since 1995 has functioned like an international cabal in league with powerful corporate and financial interests. Labor activists went to Seattle to force the WTO to enact trade sanctions against nations that use child labor, prohibit labor unions and that pay slave wages to their workers. Environmental activists came to Seattle to pressure the WTO to ensure environmental safeguards would be part of any global trade agreements.

What motivated both labor and environmentalists is the political recognition that issues like human rights, employment and healthcare cannot be addressed individually as separate issues. Nor can they be effectively discussed only in the context of a single nation-state. Capital is now truly global, and any analysis of specific socioeconomic problems that may exist in our country must be viewed from an international perspective.

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.