Duty to Warn

AUSTIN, Texas -- My friend Linda Aaker recently visited Europe and came back talking, as Americans so often do, about the great public transportation in this country, the terrific child-care system in that country and the wonderful public housing in another. "Face it," said Aaker, "the United States is the Texas of the advanced countries."

The Texas. We all know what that means -- crude, backward and having miserable social services.

In this festive election year, our governor has put us once again in the national spotlight, and it's not flattering. Texas, where three white guys out looking for a good time decide to drag a black man to death behind a pickup. Where the retarded and the insane are executed to barbaric yowps from drunken frat boys in Huntsville. Where the guv's response to the dirtiest air in the nation is to politely ask polluters if they will please volunteer to quit polluting instead of making them do it.

AUSTIN -- Well, isn't that special? The governor has granted a 30-day stay to a man on death row so we can figure out from DNA evidence whether the guy should be on Death Row. He may well be, but it'll be nice to be certain for a change.

It took Bush only 131 executions to find a case where he thought there might be some doubt about the matter. No, I take that back. He did once grant a pardon: He had to. That was the memorable case of Henry Lee Lucas, the serial liar, who confessed to 150 murders before our brighter law-enforcement minds started to wonder if he was telling the truth.

The impeccable Texas criminal justice system -- about which the governor is so certain he has repeatedly said he has never had a shred a doubt about any of the 131 executions on his watch -- managed to convict Lucas of a murder that rather demonstrably occurred while Lucas was in another state entirely. Ooops.

It is particularly entertaining to watch Bush on national television solemnly explaining that those on Texas' Death Row have "full access to the courts."

Every four years, when summer begins, the national media curtain rises on an overheated stage of presidential politics. Like drama critics clutching their programs, thousands of journalists are keenly alert to the feverish orchestration for the Republican and Democratic conventions later in the season. The political show must go on -- no matter how phony it may be.

This time around, reporters and commentators seem to be straining extra hard to fan the flames of interest in the race for the White House. After all, George W. Bush and Al Gore are among the most boring political leaders in the country. And that's saying something.

George Orwell seems to have anticipated the genre of politics that prevails in the United States today, a half-century after his death: "When one watches some tired hack on the platform, mechanically repeating the familiar phrases...one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy."

Personal note to George W. Bush: Wasn't that a great graduation ceremony last Thursday night? I know you are terribly proud of your daughters, Barbara and Jenna.

You probably remember Kristy Reyna -- she was the only one of the 400 Austin High graduates who was in a wheelchair. Kristy was the young woman with the million-dollar smile -- always reminds me of Magic Johnson's. That smile and the big thumbs up as she rolled across the stage lit up the whole Erwin Center. I think she got a bigger hand than your daughters. It was a lot harder for her. The entire Reyna clan was there, on their feet, cheering madly.

Kristy was born 21 years ago with spina bifida and has been through 10 operations to correct some of the effects of that birth defect. So it took her a little longer to get through school. Her mother is Hope Reyna, single mother of five, who supports her children by working as a housekeeper. (Let's hear it for Big Rudy, who kept up the child support and who was there to see their second-oldest child graduate.)

Someone made the odd, maybe malicious, certainly rash decision to put Tom Wolfe on the right-hand side of the cover of Harper's new 150th anniversary issue, facing Mark Twain, a leonine, earthy, dignified old devil, sitting in alert repose, apparently listening. A man to whose energetic image the white suit is incidental. Over on the right-hand side, Wolfe's white suit is dominant, looking just a shade too big for its shriveled occupant, who gazes nowhere in particular with a smirk of wooden self-satisfaction.

The bizarre juxtaposition of Wolfe with Twain consummates 30 years' inflation of the former's modest talents. To read his breathless prose, shrill with yaps and self-importance, is like having a small dog attack one's leg. Wolfe's anniversary essay is called, "In the Land of the Rococo Marxists. Why No One is Celebrating the Second American Century." As Jan.

AUSTIN, Texas -- We are having one of those brief but glorious moments when our attention is focused on foreign affairs, so let's hare right after the sucker.

Much in the news is the charmingly misleading headline that says, "Bush Proposes Deep Cuts in U.S. Nuclear Arsenal." If true, that would be welcome news indeed, but that ain't what his proposal is about. What George W. Bush actually said was: "To heck with the ABM treaty -- we're going to build Star Wars."

The one Bush proposal with no downside is to "take as many weapons as Possible" (all Bush's proposals have this maddeningly vague lack of detail) off high-alert, hair-trigger status. Let's hear it for Bush on that one.

Unilateral reductions in the number of missiles also sounds like a peace proposal, but it doesn't work out that way. Because he is also proposing to build the infamous Star Wars, the Russians, who now want to cut their nukes, are not going to agree to missile reductions.

Here we are, on the edge of yet another one, but I don't particularly care for summer myself. At least as compared with spring and fall. My clock started ticking when the Germans were trying to figure out a cross-channel invasion schedule. I was born in the north of Scotland on what was regarded popularly, though not with complete astronomical precision, as a summer's day, June 6, 1941, three years before D-Day, with my father far away in London where the Luftwaffe's bombs and rockets were falling. My mother had evacuated to the large house of an American friend, just north of Inverness. She felt the pangs come on that Sunday morning, and the doctor arrived with kilt and fishing rod, mightily displeased to be called from his fly-casting.

Down in London and denied access to the north of Scotland because he was a Red, my father went down the street to the shop to get a Sunday paper. Down came one of Hitler's rockets, up went 5, Acacia Road and St. Johns Wood. My father returned to find a lot of rubble and the cat with its fur blown off. The cat thought my father had done it, had a nervous breakdown, and never did forgive. So much for seasonal precedent.

One phrase -- "security zone" -- sums up an entire era of media spin about Israel's 22-year occupation of southern Lebanon.

When Israel completed its pullout in late May, most U.S. news outlets remained in sync with the kind of coverage that they've provided for more than two decades. In March 1978, the U.N. Security Council demanded unconditional Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon. Ever since, the flagrantly illegal -- and brutal -- military occupation has been shrouded by a thick media haze in the United States.

All through history, of course, occupiers have come up with benign-sounding buzzwords to put a lofty gloss on their iron boots. But journalists aren't supposed to adopt the lexicon of propaganda as their own.

Unfortunately, dozens of major American newspapers and networks have continued to matter-of-factly use the preferred Israeli fog words -- "security zone," "buffer zone" and "buffer strip" -- to identify the area in Lebanon long occupied by Israel.

No sane person believes in the "War on Drugs" anymore. This implies, of course, that our nation's affairs are being directed by madmen, but you knew that anyway. Besides, there are signs that sanity may be seeping slowly through the halls of Congress. Three times the Clinton-Gore administration has tried to push through a billion-plus aid package for the Colombian military and security forces. Twice Congress has rejected the White House request. Reports from the Hill this week suggest that there's more than an even chance the Senate may once again deliver a rebuff to White House drug czar Barry McCaffrey.

McCaffrey, recently accused by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker of having been involved in war crimes in 1991 at the end of the war in Iraq, has been the most conspicuous advocate for deepening U.S. military involvement in Colombia. In the general's comic-book scenario, the cocaine and opium that undermine America is being cultivated by Colombian peasants under the supervision of communist narco-traffickers, who use their drug profits to buy guns to undermine Colombia's government.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Remember the saying, "Don't shoot 'til you see the whites of their eyes"? In the matter of privatizing Social Security, this translates to, "Don't sign on until you've seen the details in ink."

Of course, if we had any details of George W. Bush's plan to partially privatize Social Security, this would be an easier column to write. Which is exactly why you won't see him filling in the blanks anytime soon.

Our first consideration is: Is this move necessary?

The much-ballyhooed bankruptcy of the Social Security system is based on the unlikely premise that the economy will grow no faster than 1.7 percent a year. (It did better than that during the Great Depression.) For the past three decades, the economy has grown at twice that rate.

But let's assume the laws of economic gravity have not been repealed, the "new economy" is not the discovery of perpetual motion and capitalism will behave like capitalism. We need to do something about Social Security, particularly given the demographic bulge of the baby boomers, who will begin retiring in 2011.