Op-Ed

Even by Washington's standards, the ability of John Ashcroft to reinvent himself has been a wonder to behold. Just a year ago, squeaking through Senate confirmation as attorney general, Ashcroft found himself shadowed by his own praise for leaders of the Confederacy. Now he's able to tout himself as a disciple of Martin Luther King Jr.

It's quite a scam, and Ashcroft couldn't have pulled it off without major help from news media. Mainstream journalists have declined to subject the attorney general to the most elementary comparisons between present and past stances on race-related issues.

With scant challenge from journalists, Ashcroft is presenting himself as someone with a fervent commitment to racial equality. His lofty pronouncements -- floating like overinflated beach balls in dire need of sharp pins -- are held aloft by the prevailing media winds.

AUSTIN -- Why do they hate us? Well, scope out the deal at Guantanamo, and see what you think.

We go along for months having a war -- the war in Afghanistan, the war on terrorism, the war to get Osama bin Laden dead or alive, troops on the ground, bombs in the air ... in other words, war. Those of us who suggested that maybe war was not the right rhetoric for this situation were booed down for being insufficiently bloodthirsty, and the caissons went rolling along.

Now we've won the war It's not clear what we've won, but we've definitely won, which is better than losing. So we take the prisoners we've captured off to our base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and suddenly announce that they are not prisoners of war after all, because this isn't really a war we've been fighting. Therefore the prisoners are "illegal combatants," and we don't have to treat them in accord with the Geneva Convention on POWs.

I see that I'm damn near legendary now; and since I died long ago, that's safe for all concerned.

The other day, with calendars showing January 2002, a radio was having its usual effect -- until suddenly my eyelids popped open. A young fella named Ken Burns was talking about me. I listened attentively in case I might, at last, learn the meaning of my glorious and wretched life.

Weighing me on literary scales, his thumb was heavy on the glory side. I will not object, though I might quibble a tad.

On the program (NPR's "Morning Edition"), filmmaker Burns brought me into the present. "Of all the historical characters that I've tried to size up over the last 25 years," he said, "Twain is the only person that I think you could drop down into today and within about 15 minutes everybody would want him. He'd be on your show. He'd be on all the cable channels."

Well, that depends. The man's own film briefly describes what happened when I wrote an extended attack on King Leopold's murderous plunder in the Congo: "No American publisher dared print it."

There's something happening here

What it is ain't exactly clear ...

It's time we stop, children, what's that sound

Everybody look what's goin' down.

-- Buffalo Springfield

AUSTIN, Texas -- In New York City last year, about 3,000 people died in the attack on the World Trade Center. In New York City last year, 30,000 people came to the new federal limits on welfare. Another 19,000 will lose assistance this year. New York has lost 95,000 jobs since Sept. 11. It lost 75,000 jobs in the year before that. There are now 30,000 people in the city shelters.

Now find the numbers for your town. In Austin, the only organization that provides help to women with breast cancer and no health insurance has just cut its staff from 30 to six, with an equal impact on the help that can be offered. Homelessness is up, shelter populations are up, food distribution centers and soup kitchens are overwhelmed.

AUSTIN -- And a happy New Year to all the friendly folks at the Henry Cisneros' special prosecutor's office, now coming up on its seventh year. Cisneros, who left office five ago as Clinton's housing secretary, is back in San Antonio doing good works in the area of affordable housing. But his special prosecutor David Barrett, like Ol' Man River, he just keeps rolling along.

Cisneros, having long since pleaded to a misdemeanor and paid a $10,000 fine, is no longer a target of investigation, but Barrett is reportedly still investigating someone who did or did not tell him something about Cisneros. It's bound to be a high crime, since the entire flap was over whether Cisneros had lied to the FBI -- not about whether he had given money to his ex-mistress (an affair that was both over and public knowledge well before Cisneros ever went to Washington) -- but about how much he had paid her.

AUSTIN -- The president has taken to saying peculiar things again. "There are no shades of gray in our war on terrorism," he announced the other day. Excuse me, but if you've ever seen anything grayer than some of our warlord allies in the Northern Alliance, please write at once.

I especially like the reports that the warlords are now calling in American air strikes on one another. "A City, Free of Taliban, Returns to the Thieves," reports The New York Times. "Jalalabad, a city in the hands of thugs and crooks." I'd say that's grayish.

If my memory is correct, it was a Jerry Lewis movie. More than 40 years later, I still remember the scenes of a grown man so gullible that he believed his television. What a laugh riot! The guy dashed out to shop every time a commercial told him exactly what to buy. Then he'd sit in front of the TV set, dyeing his hair and smoking cigars, awaiting further instructions.

It was quite funny -- to a 10-year-old, anyway. Even back then, it seemed incontrovertibly absurd to think that someone would be so credulous about televised messages.

Today, print journalists may roll their eyes at the mention of television. Those of us who write for newspapers are (ahem) rather more sophisticated and nuanced. But even someone who sticks to reading the news has probably gotten the authoritative word that Sept. 11 changed "everything."

AUSTIN -- Here comes everyone's favorite season: The tree is down, the bills are due, January, February, Ry-Krisp and cottage cheese.

T'is the festive season for one of our nation's leading industries -- dispensers of diet advice. Since we all spent a couple of months home with mac and cheese even before the holidays, it could be a growth year for the stationary bicycle.

Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda are still out there somewhere, with Judge Crater and Chandra Levy. Now that we've won the war, all the king's horses and all the king's men have to put Afghanistan back together again --- warlords and all. OPEC just cut production by 6.5 percent.

Looking on the bright side, as we are wont to do at this stand, privatization of Social Security is a dead letter and at least Congress didn't pass the economic stimulus package.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Ecuador recently moved to the dollar standard for its economy in an effort to bail itself out of one of those credit-flight crises that seems to afflict countries like a case of flu going around the globe. The dollarization of that economy has touched off a flurry of commentary among economists, who are on-the-one-handing with even more vigor than usual.

The alternative to the Ecuadorean move is something like what Singapore tried to do, a little late, during the collapse of most of the Asian economy two years ago. Basically, what Singapore did was to freeze foreign capital and say, "Sorry, buddy, but you can't take your money out of here for a while." This naturally upset all those geniuses at the International Monetary Fund, who are wedded to the "we had to destroy the village in order to save it" school of economic repair.

There's a wonderful word, "iatrogenic," describing an illness that you get from going to the hospital to have another illness treated. I always think of the IMF as a dispenser of iatrogenic ills.

The last pages of a calendar remind us that life is fleeting. All we have at any moment is the present, filtered with memory.

Meanwhile, music -- capable of powerfully evoking what's past but not quite gone -- can be a catalyst for transcending what has been. "Music is a higher revelation than philosophy," Ludwig van Beethoven asserted. Later in the 19th century, some writers praised music as the ultimate creative medium. "All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music," Walter Pater contended. Joseph Conrad referred to music as "the art of arts."

Musicians open doors to realms of perception that might otherwise remain ineffable. And music can be a dynamic force for resistance when dominant institutions discount the experiences of people suffering from imbalances of power.