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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.

When I took Texas history in public school, we weren't taught one single thing about the labor movement in this state -- but we did learn the name of the horse that Sam Houston rode at the Battle of San Jacinto, which happened to be Saracen.

So you may not have heard of the Great Southwest Strike of 1886, the largest and most important clash between management and organized labor in 19th-century Texas history.

In Bruceville, 16 miles south of Waco, is a monument to Martin Irons, who led the Great Strike. Even allowing for the florid sentimentality of 19th-century orators, Irons seems to have been an uncommonly good man, gentle and warm, and a natural leader.

He was born in Scotland in 1827 and immigrated to the United States at the age of 14. He worked as a machinist for the railroads all over the Southwest; he was a member of the machinists union and the Knights of Pythias. He was also interested in the Grange, the populist farmers movement.

I've just read a stunning new report titled "Off the Record: What Media Corporations Don't Tell You About Their Legislative Agendas." Unfortunately, the information in it will not be coming to a television set near you.

In the hours after release of the report, the big cable TV networks were devoting lots of live coverage to breathless stories about tragic deaths that occurred years ago. Yet again, mighty news operations focused on JonBenet Ramsey and Princess Diana. And none of the outlets were more transfixed with those stories than CNN -- owned by Time Warner, the largest media conglomerate.

As it happens, Time Warner figures prominently in "Off the Record," a carefully researched document from the nonprofit Center for Public Integrity. "No media corporation lavishes more money on lobbyists or political campaigns than Time Warner," the report explains. "The media giant spent nearly $4.1 million for lobbying last year, and since 1993 has contributed $4.6 million to congressional and presidential candidates and the two political parties."

AUSTIN, Texas -- The people of Texas should be gearing up to pitch a fit come January.

They want us to pay for more prisons. MORE prisons. We just finished the biggest prison-spending spree in history. Starting in 1991, we spent billions to more than double the number of beds in the system. They promised us that we wouldn't have to build another prison for at least a generation. And now they want more.

And there's one other point. This. Is. Not. Working.

The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that Texas has more of its people imprisoned than any other state -- 163,190. That's more than California, which has 13 million more people than Texas does.

The study, released this week by the Justice Policy Institute, not only finds Texas with the highest incarceration rate in the country -- it also finds the incarceration rate among young African-American men 63 percent higher than the national average. Nearly one out of three young black men is under some form of criminal justice control in Texas.

In A.D. 193, the Roman Praetorian Guard murdered the Emperor Pertinax, and proceeded to auction off the imperial throne to the highest bidder. Until this year, the most strenuous emulation of this feat by the U.S. military came in 1980, when the Joint Chiefs of Staff took bids on the White House from the ramparts of the Pentagon. Despite fierce bidding by Jimmy Carter, the Chiefs had no hesitation in accepting Republican pledges and in proclaiming that only Ronald Reagan would keep the Empire strong.

We are in the climactic moments of the 2000 auction. In mid-August, Frank Gaffney Jr., a Defense Department official in the Reagan years, relayed the Praetorians' reserve price on the imperial throne: "A nation with a projected $1.9 trillion budget surplus can afford consistently to allocate a minimum of 4 percent of its gross domestic product to ensure its security."

AUSTIN, Texas -- Texas Health Commissioner Reyn Archer. Ooops.

Maybe we should just make that a standing headline. As you know, Archer, Gov. W. Bush's pick for the job, has this tendency to put his foot in it. He's often disastrously frank, which is sort of endearing.

Last time he got into trouble was for saying Texas has a high teen-age pregnancy rate because the state's Hispanic population does not believe that "getting pregnant is a bad thing."

The Alan Guttmacher Institute says that Texas Hispanics have a higher pregnancy rate than Anglos or blacks, but that the white rate is among the highest in the nation, too.

All this upset the Mexican-American community.

Isn't the two-party system wonderful? It really works!

Every day, we hear plenty of opinions. Top Democrats and Republicans stay "on message," and usually the nation's major news outlets are in sync. The media landscape remains largely uncluttered, so most people won't get distracted by other perspectives and choices.

The symmetry is dependable and perhaps reassuring. So, at the convention in Philadelphia, the TV networks aired interviews with Democrats who critiqued the speeches by Republicans. Later, in Los Angeles, the TV networks aired interviews with Republicans who critiqued the speeches by Democrats. What variety!

These days, politicians and pundits are working hard to explain how Al Gore and George W. Bush differ. Meanwhile, journalists are apt to bypass the many points of unity. In the media zone, if the major-party candidates agree, the matter is pretty much settled.

AUSTIN, Texas -- In one week and two days, I will be finished with nine months of treatment for cancer. First they poison you; then they mutilate you; then they burn you. I've had more fun. And when it's almost over, you're so glad that you're grateful to absolutely everyone. And I am.

We've all done our best here; whether this thing comes back is out of all of our hands. My wise friend Marlyn Schwartz said that those of us who survive owe a debt -- to Carole Kneeland, Mary Sherrill, Jocelyn Gray and all the others who didn't make it. They would have given anything they owned, any part of their bodies, for the gift of life. We who survive have it, and we owe it to them to cherish it -- joyfully.

The trouble is, I'm not a better person. I was in great hopes that confronting my own mortality would make me deeper, more thoughtful. Many lovely people sent books on how to find a deeper spiritual meaning in life. My response was, "Oh, hell, I can't go on a spiritual journey -- I'm constipated."

To prepare myself spiritually for what I'm willing to wager will be the New Age of Prudery (as manifested lately in the Gore/Lieberman attack on Hollywood's debasement of the higher values), I drove to the Getty Center, in west Los Angeles, in search of cultural filth from earlier epochs.

After all, if Gore and Lieberman are going to get serious about moral cleansing, why stop with "South Park" when the museums are filled with porn and violence? Sure enough, I was hardly inside the Getty Center's gallery of classical antiquities before I was confronted by an amphora depicting satyrs with enormous genitals all set to rape a passel of wood nymphs. I can't imagine Senator Lieberman approving of that kind of thing, anymore than a pretty explicit rendition of bestiality on an adjacent vase, with Leda making halfhearted efforts to repel the swan.