Bait and Switch:
There is a moment in every successful con game when the victim thinks that he or she has gotten the better of the deal. Thus, going into the 2000 elections, Democrats congratulated themselves on having become the party of fiscal responsibility. Urged on by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Bill Clinton had made eliminating the…
Where’s Bill?
Former president Bill Clinton was enjoying a holiday break in Mexico with his wife and daughter when an SUV killed his chocolate lab, Buddy, near his home in Chappaqua, New York. If the dog had not died, few would have known that Clinton was on vacation. A year earlier, he could not travel a city…
State of the Debate:
The Truth of Power: Intellectual Affairs in the Clinton WhiteHouse By Benjamin R. Barber. W.W. Norton and Company, 320 pages, $26.95 The Best of Times: America in the Clinton Years By Haynes Johnson. Harcourt, 610 pages, $27.00 From the Center to the Edge: The Politics and Policies of the ClintonPresidency By William C. Berman. Rowman…
Tupac against the World
Holler If You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur By Michael Eric Dyson. Basic Books, 292 pages, $24.00 I’ll never forget the one and only time I saw TupacAmaru Shakur, meanderingdown Michigan Avenue, Chicago’s main strip, with two thug homies. It wasmidsummer 1993, yet all wore enough winter garments to shock the sun, despite the94-degree…
Parade to Oblivion
When employees at the steel manufacturer LTV cheered the resignation last November of the corporation’s chief executive–he had been brought in only a year earlier to save the company–it was a telling sign. Steelworkers, who bristled at CEO William Bricker’s continuing campaign to slash their wages and cut off health insurance for retirees, had become…
Toxic Haste:
After the World Trade Center fell, many shaken New Yorkers took unexpected comfort in numbers. As the mayor’s initial order for 10,000 body bags was gradually displaced by an increasingly verifiable estimated body count, the calamity began, strangely, to feel almost fathomable. But in recent months, new figures have come to define more enduring fears…
Beyond Kyoto Lite:
At the end of the hottest October on record, delegates from 165 countries met in Marrakech last fall to finalize the Kyoto Protocol on global climate change. At first glance, the Kyoto goals seem negligible: By 2012, greenhouse gases must be cut to slightly below 1990 levels–a reduction to be realized through a loophole-ridden system…
Getting Lay:
Sometime in mid-January, the worm turned for Enron executives. You could see it in the way George W. Bush raced to distance himself from his friend Kenneth L. Lay, like Prince Hal denouncing Falstaff: “I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers.” And it’s beginning to look as if Lay, the recently resigned…
The Great Recusal
The Enron scandal should ring down the curtain on a whole philosophy of free-market capitalism and a whole style of government-corporate cronyism. It should launch a national movement to leash the corrupt power of money in politics so that legislators and regulators can serve the public interest. We have been here before, most recently when…
Stop the Press:
As Argentina sank into its worst economic crisis ever, a January 9, Associated Press story blamed “the greed of international investors and bad timing by the International Monetary Fund and the U.S. Treasury.” The New York Times was equally scathing: “The Argentine economic miracle of the 1990s was a mirage created by foreign creditors enamored…
Raw Loathing
I suspect filmmaker Todd Solondz of being the sort of man who has difficulties with public transport. I imagine him staggering gray-faced off the bus with his sense of self almost erased by the stink and proximity of his fellow man; or hanging grim as a bat in the far corner of a subway car,…
Fantasia: The Gospel According to C.S. Lewis
Last June, before Hobbits and Harry Potter began crowding out all other arts coverage, The New York Times ran a front-page story about The Chronicles of Narnia, the seven-volume series of children’s fantasy books written by the English novelist C.S. Lewis in the 1950s. The article was called “Marketing ‘Narnia’ without a Christian Lion” –…
A Scandal for our Time:
The Enron affair is shaping up as quite possibly the largest political and financial scandal in American history. Untold billions of dollars have vanished down the drain in the biggest bankruptcy filing ever. Political connections ensnare every level of the Bush administration. Even more fearsomely than in the past, Americans will learn some hard lessons:…
Why Is the Right So Happy about Ted Kennedy?
According to press reports, Republican interest groups are “salivating” over a proposal by Senator Edward Kennedy to reduce the size of the Bush tax cuts. The Massachusetts Democrat wants to eliminate about $280 billion of the $1.35 trillion in tax reductions enacted last year. Kennedy calls for scrapping the cuts in the top three income-tax…
Heavy Lifting
Plagiarism charges against pop historian Stephen Ambrose are mounting; as I write this column, as many as six of his books have been found to include passages lifted from other writers without attribution. Scandals like this erupt periodically: Gail Sheehy ceded 10 percent of her royalties from the 1976 best-seller Passages to UCLA psychiatrist Roger…
