During this year's legal holiday marking the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I was invited to speak at a small, predominantly white Southern college. For decades, this school had been racially segregated, like other all-white public educational institutions. The college's first black faculty member had been hired only in the early 1980s. Nevertheless, the initial reception I received was friendly and positive, from administrators, faculty and representatives of the student government association, who had sponsored my visit. Nothing up to that point had prepared me for what I would soon encounter that evening. My lecture that night was before an audience of perhaps 500 people, consisting mostly of students and a significant number of African Americans from the surrounding community. I spoke about the enduring legacy of Martin, the necessity to achieve social justice, and the urgent need for constructive dialogue across America's racial chasm. As I concluded, most of the audience responded favorably to the message, but many sat in silence.

Major presidential candidates -- especially Democrats -- are fond of claiming to represent the interests of Americans far from the top of the economic ladder. But a new book compiled by the Center for Public Integrity, "The Buying of the President 2000," sheds bright light on the big money sources that have propelled the political careers of high-profile contenders -- two Democrats, eight Republicans and Reform Party hopeful Patrick Buchanan.

None of those candidates is closer to Wall Street, or more indebted to it, than Bill Bradley. And yet, "the politics of ambiguity" generates so much fog on the media landscape that quite a few people view him as a progressive alternative.

He doesn't like to talk about the abortion issue.

"We have a message a day," said Ms. Tucker, "and we want to stick to it. We are not going to have one big, fat news conference on our schedule where everyone can come ask questions about what you think is the news of the day."

I like that. There it is, as they used to say during an unfortunate war.

I can see where campaign strategists would assume the media have no function other than to relay a candidate's message of the day, like a giant bullhorn. ("Message: I care," Big George Bush once said, cutting right to the chase.) But this does raise, once more, the delicate matter of W. Bush's ability to function outside "the bubble" so carefully created by Karl Rove & Co.

Lo, they explained, changes of celestial magnitude were not far off. A miraculous future, swiftly approaching, would bring cornucopias of bandwidth and market share. A pair of prominent clerics named Steve Case and Gerald Levin gained ascendancy. Under bright lights, how majestic they looked!

And how they could preach! Announcing unification, they seemed to make the media world stand still. Reporters and editors gasped. Some were fearful, their smiles of fascination tight. Others bowed and scraped without hesitation.

In keeping with the dominant creeds of the era, believers in the divine right of capital asserted that separation of corporate church and state was an anachronism. A torch had been passed to a new veneration. Media monarchs would rule with unabashed fervor, while taking care to help regulate mere governments.

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.