Duty to Warn

To: George, Dick and John

Re: Counteracting the Media Evildoers

Damage control efforts are on track after those rough days in mid-May.

First, let's note a silver lining. John's move to prosecute Arthur Andersen pushed Enron off a lot of front pages, and the recent media commotion about "advance warnings" has helped too. However, complacency would be unwise. For instance, George's mash letters to Ken Lay are posted on Internet sites. Reporters could get tired of the raw meat thrown from the Andersen case. Fortunately, they're more like kitty-cats than lions.

To facilitate the purring, stroke as desired. Do what works. Avoid foot in mouth. Friendly pundits will float trial-balloon excuses. What doesn't get shot down is worth repeating.

Dick, you've been magnificent on the Sunday shows. That grim Edgar Bergen look is a knockout -- just don't tell anyone George is your Charlie McCarthy. (Joke.) The main thing is, stay on message. Change the subject whenever necessary. At this point, do FDR one better: The only thing to fear is not enough fear.

AUSTIN, Texas -- The financial industry has always been anathema to populists. "Bankers all have hearts like caraway seeds," is one of the mildest populist pronouncements on the breed, and the pugnacious populist William Brann used to denounce life insurance companies as "vampire bats." So I thought it was just me when reading the financial pages caused me to wonder, "Is there anybody in this business who is not a crook?"

I don't think it's just me.

"Republicans lead by Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas and the accounting industry's trade group are working to kill a Democratic measure that would impose new rules on auditors, companies and investment banks in the wake of Enron's collapse," reports The New York Times. That would be the same Phil Gramm who got $101,350 in contributions from Enron and $927,055 from the financial industry while chairman of the banking committee. (By way of contrast, the late Henry B. Gonzalez of Texas, a populist, accepted no contributions from the financial industry while serving as chair of the House banking committee.)

Politicians are often eager to outdo their foes with media images of greater patriotism or piety. But in recent days, Republican and Democratic leaders have also vied to appear more offended than their opponents.

The catalyst was a GOP effort to boost campaign donations by offering the faithful a Sept. 11 photo taken as President Bush spoke on a phone aboard Air Force One. At the Democratic National Committee, rainmaker-in-chief Terry McAuliffe called the move "grotesque" and declared: "We know it's the Republicans' strategy to use the war for political gain, but I would hope that even the most cynical partisan operative would have cowered at the notion of exploiting the Sept. 11 tragedy in this way."

A Republican spokesman quickly defended hawking the Sept. 11 picture, which is part of a "limited edition series" that includes a pair of photos from Bush's inaugural and his speech to the joint session of Congress soon after 9-11. "These pictures are of historic moments from the president's first year and are living testimony of his courage under fire, and leadership," said Carl Forti. "It is frankly offensive that anyone would suggest otherwise."

EL PASO, Texas -- This is one of those stories, like drought, that happens quietly over a long period, so no one quite notices how horrible it is ... except those directly affected. Those who pay attention to the Texas-Mexican border have known for years now about the murder of women in Juarez.

Mexican and American feminists have tried to draw attention to what at first seemed just an extraordinary case, or series of cases. There was one arrest that looked good (and a bunch of cases of guys who confessed after the cops beat the crap out of them -- this has now become a standard claim), and for a time it seemed the police might have the right guy in custody. But the killing continued.

The newspaper Norte of Juarez bannered the story again last week under the headline, "State Justice Fails." Above it on the front page were the numbers: "More than 250 women murdered, 19 arrests, no one sentenced." The bodies of 274 women who fit the pattern have been found since 1993.

AUSTIN, Texas -- President George Bush's foreign policy is starting to look like a running gag on "Saturday Night Live." How inept can he get?

On Tuesday, Bush teed off on Castro of Cuba, saying he "ought to have free elections," "ought to have a free press" and "ought to free his political prisoners." All of which is dandy, except Bush was standing right next to one of our more questionable allies in the "war on terrorism," the prime minister of Malaysia.

Malaysia is also in serious need of free elections, a free press and freed political prisoners. Mahathir Mohamad is a far more brutal ruler than Castro ever dreamed of being. His party has been in power since 1957 (love those free elections). He's been in office since 1981 and the subject of denunciations by human-rights groups the entire time. His ruling faction is far ahead of Castro on bloodshed points. And we're offering Mohamad whatever he wants.

A basic principle of democracy is that every person's vote should have equal weight. So we might expect some public discourse about the fact that the U.S. Senate is fundamentally undemocratic. But it's a complete non-issue among politicians and journalists alike.

One of the key roles of news media should be to raise important questions that powerful people in government don't want to ask -- or answer. However, while thousands of reporters and pundits stay busy with all kinds of stories about politics, they keep detouring around a central tilt of the national legislature's upper chamber.

Like the "purloined letter" openly displayed in a famous tale by Edgar Allan Poe, the Senate's huge structural flaw is right in front of us all the time -- but we don't see it as anything more than an eternal legacy of the nation's political heritage.

The past has ways of enduring. Today, in the 100-member Senate, cattle may be more equitably represented than people.

For instance, Montana -- with a total of 902,195 residents, according to the 2000 census -- has a pair of U.S. senators. So does California, with a population of 33,871,648.

AUSTIN, Texas -- We seem to be having a hail of news that fails to amaze.

Israel has been attacked by another suicide bomber. Ariel Sharon, so memorably described by President Bush as "a man of peace," had to rush home to continue his policy of tit-for-tat, which he has so brilliantly demonstrated does not work.

Of course, Sharon is also demanding that Yasser Arafat Do Something about the terrorists. This adds an even more surreal element of black comedy to the tragedy. Assuming Arafat is not himself the head terrorist, as Sharon claims, with what, exactly, is he supposed to do about anything? Sharon has been destroying Arafat's Palestinian Authority piece by piece for months now and has just finished an attack that demolished the last elements. Even assuming he had the will, Arafat has no way. Sharon has put Hamas and Hezbollah in charge. Anyone who is surprised by the result probably thinks Sharon IS a man of peace.

AUSTIN, Texas -- In 1901, a Henry T. Finch, writing in The Independent, reported: "Women's participation in political life would involve the domestic calamity of a deserted home and the loss of the womanly qualities for which refined men adore women and marry them. ... Doctors tell us, too, that thousands of children would be harmed or killed before birth by the injurious effect of untimely political excitement on their mothers."

I'm trying to imagine an Al Gore speech that would provoke "untimely political excitement."

Actually, what I'm trying to do is remind y'all of the fine American tradition of everybody and his hamster feeling free to make vast, sweeping prescriptions for the entire female gender. We have just been through a modest little media orgy over both Karen Hughes' decision to resign from the White House and Sylvia Hewlett's book pointing out that it gets harder to have babies as we get older.

In a twist of fate, obituaries appeared for the inventor of the Barbie doll just as a $50 million advertising campaign got underway for an anti-wrinkle drug with a name that memorably combines the words "botulism" and "toxin." Expensive injections of Botox are already popular among women eager to remove lines from their faces. The ad blitz of mid-2002 is certain to boost the practice.

American women between the ages of 30 and 64 are the prime targets, and 90 percent of them will be hit with Botox pitches a minimum of 10 times. Launched with a paid layout in People magazine the first week of May ("It's not magic, it's Botox Cosmetic"), the print ads use before-and-after pictures. Network TV commercials are also part of the campaign.

To many minds, we live in a post-feminist era when denouncing sexist strictures is anachronistic. People who complain loudly about media images of women are apt to be derided for "political correctness." But another sort of PC -- what might be called "patriarchal correctness" -- continues to flourish today as a media mainstay, and not only in the realms of advertising and mass entertainment.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Great, now everyone who thinks Ariel Sharon is a screaming disaster for Israel has been read out of the pro-Israeli camp. This excommunication comes not from Israel -- where quite a few people think exactly that -- but from William Safire and his fellow grandees of the journalistic right, who apparently have no doubt about their own authority to decide who is for Israel and who is not. Some of us who think Sharon is a walking catastrophe have been under the apparently misguided impression that we, too, were devoted to Israel's best interests.

But ever since Attorney General John Ashcroft informed me that worrying about cancellation of the Constitution was the same thing as aiding terrorists, it has been clear to me that I mustn't think what I think. I need to be instructed what to think by people who think the way he does. This is the same attorney general who spent $8,000 to cover up the tits on a statue and who believes calico cats are a sign of the Devil, but I am not allowed to conclude that the attorney general is something of a nincompoop because that would aid terrorists.