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A mostly forgotten labor tale of 19th century

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.

When watchdogs have a blind spot - for themselves

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."

Before Texas spends more on prisons, let's think

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.

The Pentagon auctions the presidency

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."

Oral arguments

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.

Paying homage to the Two-Party Media System

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.

Story of a survivor

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."

The new age of prudery

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.

Humanizing Al Gore

AUSTIN, Texas -- Humanizing Al Gore is the topic du jour, so let me contribute my mite.

In the summer of '92, the Clintons and Gores were on a bus trip in East Texas having a whale of time. As they rolled through the small towns, when there weren't enough people to justify getting out and forming a rope line, the bus would go into a "slow roll" while Bill and Al stood on the steps leading down to the glass doorway, waving at people and letting them get a good look.

At one point, Clinton went to the back of the bus and Gore was left in the doorway by himself, waving and smiling genially at the folks while muttering something like: "Hi there. Bill Clinton wants your vote very much. Right now he's in the bathroom, but he still wants your vote. Hi there."

Of course, it wouldn't seem so improbable to see headlines about "Fun Al Gore" if the media hadn't created the Wooden Al stereotype in the first place (with a little help from Gore in his Mr. Rogers mode).

Meanwhile, we continue to enjoy the faux-naif routine offered by Republicans and their media flunkies: What could Gore mean by "the people against the powerful"?

Democratic steak and Republican pink clouds

AUSTIN, Texas -- Yup, Al Gore wrote his own speech, all right. Don't you love the instant cliches? "He did what he had to do."

The conventional wisdom decided not to be knocked out of the park by it (mandatory cliche) but agreed that he did what he had to do. But how will the American people respond to the news that he did what he had to do?

The American people, perversely paying no attention at all to any of this, preferred "The Daily Show" take on all this on Comedy Central, a shrewd programming choice.

My favorite line of the convention was from Jim Miklaszewski of MSNBC. Sitting in the midst of the California delegation on the first night, he looked around pop-eyed and said: "You know, I have to say, there's more diversity in this one state's delegation than there was at the whole Republican convention."

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