Global

On Oct. 13, Bill Clinton made his way, by way of helicopter and SUV, to the George Washington forest in the Shenandoah Mountains, where he disclosed his plan to protect 40 million acres of roadless land in national forests across the country. Amid the ecstatic cheers of environmentalists bussed to the site by the National Audubon Society Clinton declared that, "in the end, we’re going to protect all this," gesturing as he spoke to the surrounding trees. The networks and New York Times offered respectful coverage, some billing it as the greatest act of land preservation since Teddy Roosevelt created the national forests.

Those cheering environmentalists should have been warned by Clinton’s means of transportation to the great event. The first great flaw in his plan is that it appears to prohibit road-building, but not logging. These days, helicopter logging is becoming increasingly common as a way of extracting the trees from the cut-over terrain to the nearest available road. Logging won’t be banned it seems. Nor will livestock grazing, mining or dirt bikes. Even on its face, the plan falls short of protecting all roadless areas.

        This is a tale of two magazines.

        One of them has more than 100 colorful pages of ads packed into each issue. Brand names evoke the very good life just out of reach: Saks and Victoria's Secret, Gucci and Mercedes-Benz, Armani and Cartier.

        The articles are equally cool in this new magazine named Talk, which had its splashy premiere a couple of months ago -- making headlines with a Hillary Clinton interview that discussed the First Husband's childhood hurts and adult philandering. Now, Talk is settling into its lofty routine as trendsetter extraordinaire.

        Tina Brown, the editor in chief, describes Talk as "a new, upscale monthly magazine that provides depth, passion and context to the issues that obsess us." She adds: "Talk  tells the story of who we are. Talk  reveals us, obscures us, positions us."

There hasn't been a good row about art since Washington went berserk over "The West as America" at the Smithsonian in 1991. That was a fight about history.

The comment books were chock-full of spirited exchanges about art and its truthfulness about America's past. In other words, the uproar had content. It's harder to find much content thus far in the hullabaloo over the "Sensation" show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, beyond a glorious couple of weeks of grandstanding by Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Politicians are always at their most comical worrying about art, while simultaneously asserting the primacy of private enterprise.

"From what I've read, the exhibit besmirches religion," said George W. Bush, campaigning in the company of Gov. George Pataki. "It denigrates someone's religion. I don't think we ought to be using public monies to denigrate religion." Pataki wagged his head in agreement.

"That's right. When you use public money to denigrate someone's religion, I think it's wrong."

From the typographical clamor raised in the New York Daily News, you'd have thought New York Press columnist George Szamuely had been caught committing satanic abuse in a day-care center. But it tured out that Szamuely's great crime was to have taken too many books -- 580 is a number that shows up in the press reports -- out of the New York University library, and been remiss in giving them back. The News and other newspapers have exultantly noted that Szamuely faces an overdue fine of $31,000, plus charges of grand larceny and possible jail time. John Beckman, described as a university spokesman, strutted through the news stories like some frontier sheriff twirling his six-gun: "Don't mess with NYU librarians."

A little realism, please, starting with the nonsense about a $31,00 fine. This vast sum is merely what the library reckons to be the cost of replacement of all the books, irrelevant to this case, since all the books are present and accounted for.

        It's known as advertising, but we may as well call it psychological warfare. Our entire society is a free-fire zone for nonstop commercial assaults. Everyone is in the cross hairs -- no matter how young. And quite a few professionals with formal training in psychology have enlisted in the never-ending war.

        That's what worries the 60 psychologists and psychiatrists who have just sent a letter to the American Psychological Association. While the prestigious APA says that it seeks to "mitigate the causes of human suffering," the letter's signers contend that "a large gap has arisen between APA's mission and the drift of the profession into helping corporations influence children for the purpose of selling products to them."

        In the midst of "the sale of psychological expertise to advertisers to manipulate children for monetary gain," the signers add, "the profession does very little to protect innocent children -- the people it is supposed to help -- from the psychological cajoling and assaults that it itself helps to create."

        After weeks of bitter partisan wrangling over budget issues, the federal government began its new fiscal year on October 1. Such political confrontations have become routine in Washington. As strategists work overtime, news accounts provide us with ping-pong journalism -- informing the country about the latest shots that top politicos have slammed across the net.

        Lost in the media's play-by-play are some grim facts. While leading Democrats and Republicans fire off more rhetorical salvos, neither of the warring parties wants to preserve even the current (woefully inadequate) level of social spending. Neither party even has the decency to insist that federal programs for low-income Americans be adjusted for inflation.