Op-Ed

These days, when we're in Berkeley, Calif., Barbara Yaley and I load up Jasper, a 10-month old border collie/lab/terrier mix, and head down University, over I-80, and onto what was once a proud garbage dump, then, North Waterfront Park, and now, Cesar Chavez Park. It's one of the most beautiful vantage points in the Bay Area. Due west across the water is the Golden Gate Bridge, then, swinging one's gaze south, the towers of downtown San Francisco, the Bay Bridge, and due east, the Berkeley hills.

Seventeen acres of this pleasing expanse are available to off-leash dogs, an incredible achievement of Berkeley dog lovers who spent about seven years of delicate political maneuvering to secure, last year, "pilot project status" for the off-leash area. To win it, they had to surmount fierce opposition from the Audubon Society, the Sierra Club and the Citizens for an East Shore State Park, eager to seize the acreage of Cesar Chavez Park and add it to their domain. State parks in California have never yet held off-leash areas.

"I come to you today, two days after what would have been her seventh birthday." -- Veronica McQueen, mother of the girl who was shot to death by a 6-year-old classmate in Michigan this February, addressing Million Mom Marchers.

Slogan of the march: Enough Is Enough.

Legislative goals of the marchers:

• Licensing and registration of handguns.
• Background checks for gun buyers.
• Requiring manufacturers to put trigger locks on guns.
• A one-per-month limit on handgun purchases.

The 30,000 gun deaths a year in this country are not a consequence of our lack of common sense; they are a failure of our political system. The system does not work on this (and most other issues) -- and not because the anti-gun-control forces are stronger than the pro-gun-control forces, or because the anti-control people are more passionate about the issue, or because they are single-issue voters. It doesn't work because of money.

After the "Love Bug" virus struck millions of computer hard drives, many news outlets attributed the magnitude of the damage to overwhelming reliance on the same type of software. Suddenly, in the digital world, steep downsides of technical conformity were obvious. But such concerns should also extend to the shortage of variety in media content.

Reporting on the worst virus attack in PC history, Time blamed "the perils of living in a monoculture." The newsmagazine explained: "Security experts have long warned that Microsoft software is so widely used and so genetically interconnected that it qualifies as a monoculture -- that is, the sort of homogeneous ecosystem that makes as little sense in the business world as it does in the biological."

The practical benefits of diversity suggest a question that's long overdue: What's the sense of monoculture in mass media?

AUSTIN -- Government's not so bad when it's just deciding on those special-interest fights -- some titanic clash for turf between doctors and chiropractors or AT&T vs. Southwestern Bell. True, the side that makes the biggest political contributions almost always wins, so the rest of us frequently end up paying higher prices for whatever it is, but at least we're only getting shot down indirectly.

What's really sickening is when it's a choice involving our health, our air or our water, and the special interests still win because they make bigger contributions than we do. When lawmakers (Our Elected Representatives) are perfectly willing to sacrifice us -- literally our bodies -- in favor of campaign contributions, it's enough to gag a maggot.

Unfortunately, such cases are rarely crystal clear; and the clearer the case is, the more high-paid lobbyists you get wandering around making it as unclear as possible. Here's an interesting example of a fight between clean air and clean water and the ethanol lobby.

AUSTIN -- Now that we've recovered from Janet Reno's assault on the Branch Floridians, let's see if we can't get just a bit of attention for some outrageous cases of robbery. As usual, our friends with the white collars and the quick calculators are outrobbing the stick-up artists at the Jiffy Mart by a wide margin.

Violent crime keeps dropping, but the National White Collar Crime Center says that one in three households is now victimized by white-collar crime. This genteel robbery has increased 10 percent to 20 percent in the last five years. The Securities and Exchange Commission, which goes after investment fraud, reports a 20 percent jump in complaints from 1995 to 1999.

The Internet is an especially rich source of rip-offs, so you cutting-edge netizens need to follow the oldest rule in the book: If it sounds too good to be true, it is.

But of course what interests me most is legal crime, the rip-offs about which absolutely nothing can be done -- often because Our Elected Representatives have been bought off by the system of legalized bribery that runs American politics.

AUSTIN -- To say that my knowledge of Chinese trade issues is inadequate is a wild understatement -- it's not a hot topic in Nacogdoches. But at least I approach the subject with appropriate humbleness, instead of the damn-fool certainty that seems to afflict the other 2 percent of our countrymen who care about this issue.

And I must say it seems to me this is an area that calls for a becoming tentativeness. I have yet to find any evidence that anyone knows what all the consequences of "permanent normalization" of trade with China will be.

In some ways, this is a political no-brainer -- American business positively salivates at the prospect of Chinese markets, and the Clinton administration is siding with business, arguing that it's a bonanza. Most Republicans, responding to the siren call of their campaign contributors, favor the deal. Labor, religious, environmental and consumer groups are pressuring Democrats to vote "no."

Last fall, when Jean Kilbourne's new book Deadly Persuasion was arriving on shelves, Publishers Weekly praised it as "a wake-up call about the damaging effects of advertising in our media-saturated culture." But six months later, the mass media's fingers remain firmly on the snooze button.

It's hardly surprising that few national media outlets have reviewed the book or interviewed the author. Kilbourne's work is a publicist's nightmare. Imagine trying to get an articulate critic of ads onto TV networks that rely on commercials for their big profits.

"If you're like most people, you think that advertising has no influence on you," Kilbourne writes. "This is what advertisers want you to believe. But, if that were true, why would companies spend over $200 billion a year on advertising?"

Several of Galveston's municipal races this season are weird enough to make us all proud. God bless Texas politics.

In the mayoral race, the traditional developer-vs.-preservationist stand-off is given an added cultural je ne sais quoi by fresh developments.

A letter from a supporter on the website of challenger David Bowers, who is gay, referred to incumbent Roger "Bo" Quiroga, who is Hispanic, as the "Macho Nacho." Quiroga, no stranger to the art of insult himself, has referred to the The Galveston Daily News as "the worst disaster to hit Galveston since the 1900 storm."

The latest furor is over whether to continue Beach Party Weekend, a phenomenon that attracts young people, some of whom get all knee-walkin', commode-huggin' drunk and misbehave accordingly.

The Daily News ran a picture of one celebrator holding a puppy by the ear, which an ally of the mayor's says proves the paper has a bias against the mayor. Actually, the photo is sort of interesting on its own merit, in a way.

AUSTIN, Texas -- May I suggest that the governor of Texas get his rear back in this state long enough to call a special session to fix the mess in the prison system before the mother of all prison riots occurs?

How many times does he need to be warned? How much clearer could this possibly be? Texas prison guards are underpaid and overworked; the prisons are understaffed, and more guards walk off the job every week, leaving the prisons more dangerous for everyone in them, guards and convicts alike.

Tuesday's riot at Lamesa, with one prisoner dead and 31 injured, is the sixth time already this year that we have had violent episodes in the prisons. Twice this year guards have been taken hostage. In December, a guard was stabbed to death, and there was a riot at the Beeville unit.

The push by federal regulators to break up Microsoft is big news. Until recently, the software giant seemed untouchable -- and few people demanded effective antitrust efforts against monopoly power in the software industry. These days, a similar lack of vision is routine in looking at the media business.

Today, just six corporations have a forceful grip on America's mass media. We should consider how to break the hammerlock that huge firms currently maintain around the windpipe of the First Amendment. And we'd better hurry.

The trend lines of media ownership are steep and ominous in the United States. When The Media Monopoly first appeared on bookshelves in 1983, author Ben Bagdikian explains, "50 corporations dominated most of every mass medium." With each new edition, that number kept dropping -- to 29 media firms in 1987, 23 in 1990, 14 in 1992, and 10 in 1997.