Duty to Warn

        A specter is haunting America -- the specter of populism.

        Now that Patrick Buchanan has left the Republican fold to seek the Reform Party's presidential nomination, a lot of journalists will be analyzing his denunciations of the bipartisan establishment. In the months ahead, many pundits are going to throw brickbats in his direction.

        But Buchanan is largely a media creation. During the last two decades, he gained wide visibility and national clout through the good graces of CNN and other television networks. Despite his vehement biases against gays, blacks and non-European immigrants, Buchanan's colleagues on the chat shows did little to challenge his assorted bigotries.

        Helping to fuel the online trading mania is a new blitz from Ameritrade, a company that has launched a $200 million national marketing drive. "The campaign's target audience is more psychographic than demographic," says an Ameritrade news release, "cutting across all ages, races, professions and income levels."

Those cheering environmentalists should have been warned by Clinton’s means of transportation to the great event. The first great flaw in his plan is that it appears to prohibit road-building, but not logging. These days, helicopter logging is becoming increasingly common as a way of extracting the trees from the cut-over terrain to the nearest available road. Logging won’t be banned it seems. Nor will livestock grazing, mining or dirt bikes. Even on its face, the plan falls short of protecting all roadless areas.

        One of them has more than 100 colorful pages of ads packed into each issue. Brand names evoke the very good life just out of reach: Saks and Victoria's Secret, Gucci and Mercedes-Benz, Armani and Cartier.

        The articles are equally cool in this new magazine named Talk, which had its splashy premiere a couple of months ago -- making headlines with a Hillary Clinton interview that discussed the First Husband's childhood hurts and adult philandering. Now, Talk is settling into its lofty routine as trendsetter extraordinaire.

        Tina Brown, the editor in chief, describes Talk as "a new, upscale monthly magazine that provides depth, passion and context to the issues that obsess us." She adds: "Talk  tells the story of who we are. Talk  reveals us, obscures us, positions us."

The comment books were chock-full of spirited exchanges about art and its truthfulness about America's past. In other words, the uproar had content. It's harder to find much content thus far in the hullabaloo over the "Sensation" show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, beyond a glorious couple of weeks of grandstanding by Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Politicians are always at their most comical worrying about art, while simultaneously asserting the primacy of private enterprise.

"From what I've read, the exhibit besmirches religion," said George W. Bush, campaigning in the company of Gov. George Pataki. "It denigrates someone's religion. I don't think we ought to be using public monies to denigrate religion." Pataki wagged his head in agreement.

"That's right. When you use public money to denigrate someone's religion, I think it's wrong."

A little realism, please, starting with the nonsense about a $31,00 fine. This vast sum is merely what the library reckons to be the cost of replacement of all the books, irrelevant to this case, since all the books are present and accounted for.

        That's what worries the 60 psychologists and psychiatrists who have just sent a letter to the American Psychological Association. While the prestigious APA says that it seeks to "mitigate the causes of human suffering," the letter's signers contend that "a large gap has arisen between APA's mission and the drift of the profession into helping corporations influence children for the purpose of selling products to them."

        In the midst of "the sale of psychological expertise to advertisers to manipulate children for monetary gain," the signers add, "the profession does very little to protect innocent children -- the people it is supposed to help -- from the psychological cajoling and assaults that it itself helps to create."

        Lost in the media's play-by-play are some grim facts. While leading Democrats and Republicans fire off more rhetorical salvos, neither of the warring parties wants to preserve even the current (woefully inadequate) level of social spending. Neither party even has the decency to insist that federal programs for low-income Americans be adjusted for inflation.