Duty to Warn

AUSTIN, Texas -- As I write, the most riveting television drama imaginable is being played out on C-Span, of all places.

The U.S. House of Representatives is debating campaign finance reform, and it's one of those days when all citizens should be political junkies. It doesn't get better than this -- the stakes couldn't be higher, the tension couldn't be thicker, the theater is superb. Passion, drama, comedy, hypocrisy, devious plot devices, splendid villains, noble heroes ... this is just the best. The casting director has a spectacular imagination: Tom DeLay and Dick Armey alternating in the role of Iago -- wow.

Speaker Dennis Hastert himself called the innocuous-sounding Shays-Meehan bill "Armageddon" for the Republican Party. Actually, it's more like "The Perils of Pauline," in which the dastardly villain keeps tying the helpless heroine (in this case, the Shays-Meehan bill) to the railroad tracks again. They've tried to kill this poor bill so many times and in so many ways, it's become slightly ludicrous.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Enron, the biggest financial failure in U.S. history, is bigger than Enron. It's also bigger than Global Crossing and all the earn ings restatements headed our way, too.

"Systemic," "structural" and "epidemic" are the key words here. Take, for example, the gladsome tidings that Enron paid no taxes whatever during four of the past five years by cleverly transferring its assets to 881 subsidiaries in tax-shelter countries. (Also take the item that Enron would have gotten a $254 million tax rebate under the Republican "economic stimulus" package -- please. The bill is now mercifully defunct.)

Enron's tax practices are so common that the Center for Public Integrity estimates they cost the country $195 billion a year, which means the rest of us have to make up that missing tax money. That comes to $1,600 per taxpayer. See? Your very own stake in the Enron fiasco.

LANSING, Mich -- Here in the home of the Lansing Lugnuts, the local baseball team named after the town's premier product, is also to be found a unique work of art -- a statue of a lugnut on a tall column. Just further evidence of America's greatness.

Speaking of Americana, you can't have a scandal in this country without some special input from Texas, that famous je ne sais quoi for which we are so noted. We offer the following delicious details for your delectation.

Last June, Gov. Rick "Goodhair" Perry (he has very good hair) appointed an Enron executive to be chairman of the state Public Utilities Commission, because this is Texas and whom else would you put on the commission that regulates energy companies but an energy company executive?

AUSTIN, Texas -- Excuse me, but the Bush administration's "internal contradictions," as the communists used to say, are showing like a dirty slip. On Jan. 25, the administration ordered federal agencies to review their contracts with Arthur Andersen and Enron, saying the scandal swirling around the companies raise doubts about whether they should continue to receive taxpayer money.

This would be well and good if the same administration had not, on Dec. 27, repealed a Clinton-era rule that prevents the government from awarding federal contracts to businesses that have broken environmental, labor, tax, civil rights or other laws. What we have here is not so much hypocrisy as complete incoherence. Shouldn't they have to wait at least a month before they contradict themselves? Or maybe the Bush doctrine is that you can give government contacts to chronic lawbreakers as long as they're not in the headlines.

A new media tic -- likening George W. Bush to Franklin D. Roosevelt -- is already so widespread that it's apt to become a conditioned reflex of American journalism.

By now, countless reporters and pundits have proclaimed GWB and FDR to be kindred inspirational leaders -- wildly inflating the current president's media stature in the process.

Hammering on the comparison until it seems like a truism, the Washington press corps is providing the kind of puffery for the man in the Oval Office that no ad budget could supply. But the oft-repeated analogy doesn't only give a monumental boost to Bush's image. It also -- subtly but surely -- chips away at FDR's historic greatness, cutting him down to GWB's size.

Ever since Roosevelt's death in April 1945 after more than 12 years as president, many Republican leaders have sought to move the United States out from under the enormous political umbrella created by the New Deal -- bitterly opposed by most wealthy interests and the well-heeled press.

AUSTIN -- The State of the Union was fairly surreal Tuesday night. We won the war against Afghanistan, but we're still at war with Al Qaeda, so we have to go attack North Korea.

The big paper-shredders at Enron are finally coming to a halt, so we should go ahead and pass huge corporate tax cuts to help all the other companies that use aggressive accounting practices and need the dough. They especially need the rebates on the taxes they didn't pay. We're a better people than we were on Sept. 10, so let's all donate 4,000 hours to the country, except for those who are too busy stashing their loot in offshore banks so they won't have to pay taxes.

To further this noble scheme, the taxpayers will pony up to fund volunteers with religious groups. Does this mean Mormon missionaries will get paid to knock on our doors and persuade us that Joseph Smith and Brigham Young are the light and the way?

AUSTIN -- The seminal historic event always affects the language. Already we can see that Enron is of this shattering magnitude. A stick-up artist goes into the Jiffy Mart to pull a heist. He whips his heater and says to the clerk, "Put 'em up, this is an aggressive accounting practice."

Or, you take your car to Ralph's Rip-Off Garage to get a 50 buck problem fixed and, sure enough, he bills you $600. You say, "What an aggressive accounting practice!"

Euphemism of the Year, and not even February yet.

The single most distinguishing feature of the Enron collapse is that no one is yet sure the company did anything illegal. (Aside from destroying documents, which arguably falls in the "seriously ill-advised" category.) As we gyre and gimble in the wabe of Enron, we run across such delightful items. Did you know that Enron's board twice voted to suspend its own ethics code in order to create private partnerships? But how thoughtful of them to suspend the ethics code first! Otherwise, they might have violated it.

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."