February 2000

WE ARE ALREADY more than a week into Europe's boycott of the Austrian government, but the Sturm und Drang show no sign of blowing over.

San Jose, California

John Haines is a cautious man. Citing the sniffles, he breaks our appointment. "I can't go out," he says, though he is phoning from his office. "Besides, I don't want to spread germs." I assure John I'm stewing in germs from my own recent illness. "Then I don't want to catch any," he says. A few…

Where race is concerned -- today as yesterday the most profound but botched up and phonied over issue in our national politics -- the Republicans are bad enough. In private life, black and white Americans smile uneasily at one another across a wide divide of consciousness. In public life, the…

EACH YEAR organizations that monitor press freedom record hundreds of cases in which journalists are beaten, terrorized, or murdered in the line of duty. The motives are sometimes economic, more often political. But the incidents are usually forgotten -- regrettably, few know the names of the 40 or…

Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort

THE SCRAPBOOK is pleased to note that entries are now being accepted for the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism, which honors the memory of the New York Post editor and WEEKLY STANDARD contributor who died unexpectedly in March 1998, at the age of 42.

Congress is about to vote on two pieces of legislation with important implications for national security: the reauthorization of the Export Administration Act and permanent normal trade relations (formerly known as most-favored-nation status) for China. One would think measures of such import would…

DO HOUSE REPUBLICANS know what they're doing? Against the wishes of nearly everyone in Washington -- House Ways and Means chairman Bill Archer, Senate Republican leaders, congressional Democrats, the White House, former Republican party chairman Haley Barbour -- they passed legislation wiping out…

Religion and popular music -- yes, even rock 'n' roll -- have been close cousins for most of the century. Only in the last thirty years has rock 'n' roll put a premium on aggression and revolution, forsaking melody, harmony, and spiritual expression. Amazingly, in the last few years -- and leading…

After all the uproar about who should replace retiring James Ford as chaplain for the U.S. House of Representatives, Republican leaders have at last reached a decision: The chaplain will continue to be James Ford, who is delaying his retirement and returning for a 22nd year. This, at least, is the…

Walter Matthau, who turns eighty this year, has been appearing on screen for forty-five years. There's something shocking about that, for Matthau doesn't seem like a creature from Hollywood's past -- unlike, say, his contemporary Kirk Douglas. In part that's because Matthau didn't become a major…

Reed Hundt -- Al Gore's high school chum who oversaw telecom deregulation as head of the FCC from 1993-1997 -- used to complain about the "incredible partisanship" of the Republican Congress. Well, a fox smells its own hole. THE SCRAPBOOK can't really recommend Hundt's forthcoming memoir You Say…

Outside an August 1998 trade show in Santa Clara, Calif., a coalition of left-wing Bay Area groups denounced Silicon Valley for failing to share its wealth with minority consumers and employees. "Intel, Intel you're no good, / bring computers to the 'hood," the protesters chanted. An Intel…

Civil War historian Bruce Catton once said, "Whatever we are looking for, we come to Washington in millions to stand in silence and try to find it." When I moved to Washington last June, I'm not sure I was looking for anything specific. I'd just spent my undergraduate years trying to ignore dorm…

On Feb. 5, the New York Times gave a 160-word "brief" on page A20 to one of the bizarre moments in the case of 6-year-old Cuban refugee Elian Gonzalez. The Times noted that his two grandmothers had admitted to "playfully biting the boy's tongue and unzipping his pants" during their reunion with…

Who is John McCain, and what is his magic? Traditional terms don't explain the stampede. He does not fit neatly in the right-to-left spectrum, but is de facto head of the Patriot party -- a dominant force in American politics, though one that is not easy to explain. It is an idea, but not an…

Sarajevo

Shows about Nothing

This turned out not to be Steve Forbes's election cycle. The indefatigable campaigner for flat taxes, medical savings accounts, and many other sensible conservative reforms pulled out of the race for the Republican nomination last week. Maybe, if he's not too sick of the grind, he will now consider…

The politicization of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum proceeds apace. Two years ago, the Clinton administration roiled the administrative ranks of the museum by enlisting it for use as a prop for Middle East diplomacy, specifically for a photoop tour of the facility by PLO leader Yasser…

After New Hampshire, W. decides imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

WHAT HAPPENED to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln's birthdays? Oh sure, they're still noted on the calendar, February 22 and February 12, respectively. But we as a nation have been giving these two historical dates short shrift of late. And it's all because of Presidents' Day.

An epic poem writ small.

I WANT HILLARY CLINTON to get that New York senatorship -- the one Pat Moynihan had for years until he misplaced it after a long lunch. I'm sending $ 5 to Hillary's campaign fund. Make that $ 10, because she got gouged on the $ 1.7 million house in Chappaqua. Chappaqua? From Whitewater to Castle…

When it comes to showing Austria that its right-wing coalition government will not be tolerated, the European Union doesn't hold a candle to Hollywood. "Austrians in Hollywood," a dinner to be held this month by Austrian consul general Werner Brandstetter and his wife, is facing a few no-shows.…

IF AMERICANS do things his way, President Clinton vowed in his State of the Union, "We will pay off our national debt for the first time since 1835." This promise is now being treated as an unequivocally good thing. Alan Greenspan has endorsed it. Republican John McCain has adopted the Clinton…

The Betrayal of Liberalism

Iron Triangle, D.C.

Bill Clinton certainly got a lot of mileage out of cheap wordplay with the name of his hometown, Hope, Arkansas. So what could Hillary Clinton have been thinking, THE SCRAPBOOK wonders, when she kicked off her official candidacy for the Senate last week in the town of Purchase, New York?

THERE'S A SIMPLE EXPLANATION for virtually all the political trends of 2000, including the declining appeal of tax cuts, the rising support for government programs, the popularity of the Democratic agenda, the less conservative than usual cast of the Republican presidential front-runners and the…

We've had our first baby boomer president. McCain wants to save us from another

There are times when things are good and "societies rest and the human race seems to take breath," Tocqueville wrote. In such times, as in the American 1830s he was describing, a nation's civic affairs appear "firmly settled on certain fundamentals" and its people lose interest in the risk or…

By the time this appears in print I will be -- my fingers freeze at the thought of typing the word -- a non-smoker. Someone who doesn't smoke. A smoke-free person. The guy who used to chain at his desk all day but doesn't anymore.

Man on the Flying Trapeze

Once upon a time, there was a "scholarly journal" called -- would THE SCRAPBOOK make this up? -- The Insurgent Sociologist. If you were an engage assistant professor convinced that mainstream sociology wasn't wool-headedly "relevant" enough, this is what you read. Then, in 1988, the whole…

Not Whether But When, The U.S. Decision to Enlarge, NATO, by James M. Goldgeier, Brookings, 218 pp. $ 42.95

WHAT IF THE Christian Coalition were fighting to return a little refugee boy to the right-wing military dictatorship from which he and his mother had fled -- she having lost her life in the process? Imagine the howls of protest. How odd, then, that the National Council of Churches (NCC) has…

Enduring Liberalism, American Political Thought Since the 1960s, by Robert Booth Fowler, Univ. Press of Kansas, 336 pp., $ 35

Just in time for Valentine's Day, Amy and Leon Kass of the University of Chicago have produced an anthology of classic readings on courtship and marriage. Ranging from Homer and the Song of Songs to Allan Bloom and Miss Manners, Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar is their constructive response to what they…

Senior year in college, I lived on a run-down street in Somerville, Massachusetts. One Sunday night, my roommate called me to the front window and said, Look! There was some kind of riot going on in front of Studley's bar. We drank there a lot, since it was really cheap: 75 cents for a bottle of…

I think that the way a candidate for president communicates with the voters is directly relevant to the way a president communicates with the American people after the election.

A CLASSMATE OF MINE at Harvard Law School recently spurned a job offer from the prestigious New York law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell despite the $ 120,000 starting salary. Instead, he'll head to the greener pastures of investment banking, where first-year associates can earn upwards of $ 160,000.…

A TALKING POINT dispatched to allies of George W. Bush after his defeat in the New Hampshire primary touches directly on what's ailing the Bush campaign. To counter John McCain's suggestion that he alone is ready to be commander in chief, Bush backers were urged to cite the endorsement of their man…

Over THE SCRAPBOOK's fax machine last Tuesday came the latest press release from the Republican National Committee. No, check that -- it was a press release the RNC hoped THE SCRAPBOOK would soon receive from any number of interchangeable "Republican activists" around the country. It was a "sample…

Has there ever been an American subculture as benign as that shared by the fans of the 1960s television series Star Trek? Its members don't hurt anybody, they don't make a mess, and they pay their taxes. And yet for twenty-five years now, they have been the objects of merciless sport because they…

Greenville, South Carolina

CROWING ABOUT his record on crime at a community center in Boston the other day, President Clinton unveiled a proposal to spend $ 10 million on research into "smart gun" technology. This hightech approach to gun safety is the newest weapon in the fight to bring down gun manufacturers.

Macao, Portugal's 400-year-old colony across the Pearl River estuary from Hong Kong, returned to Chinese sovereignty at midnight last December 19. Considering that the place is tiny (eight miles from end to end, with a population of 450,000), that it has no discernible economy beyond gambling and…

The Definition of Death, Contemporary Controversies, edited by Stuart J. Youngner, Robert, M. Arnold, and Renie Schapiro. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 346 pp., $ 54

Good news. The Federal Communications Commission has reversed itself and withdrawn a Dec. 29 censorship edict directed against religious broadcasters.

The public-schools lobby loves to prattle on about how students must learn to "respect differences" in our multicultural society. But when it comes to really important things -- like money -- tolerance, it seems, is the first thing to fly right out the window.

ON NOVEMBER 6, 1987, Al Gore was in the middle of his first campaign for president, seeking the support of a black political group in Montgomery, Alabama, when he was asked a simple question: Had he ever used marijuana? "Have I ever smoked it as an adult? The answer is no. Did I try it when I was a…

It's not fair that Bill Bradley should have to single-handedly keep Al Gore honest. That's too much work for any man alone. Two Gore whoppers in particular struck THE SCRAPBOOK this week.

PRESIDENT CLINTON gave his final State of the Union address last week. Watching it and then reading it, one couldn't help but recall that many, many years ago, in the dimly remembered recesses of time that historians call the pre-Clinton era, presidential speechwriters faced an annual dilemma.…

When our daughter Faith was born, my wife Lorena and I lived in New York, in a two-bedroom apartment on the lower East Side. In fact, it was much more New Yorky than that. What we actually had was a pair of one-bedroom apartments, side by side. To throw a dinner party was to lead our guests from…

The late American journalist Claire Sterling won international fame with her 1981 book The Terror Network, in which she demonstrated that many of the world's spontaneous-looking local terrorist outfits actually took their marching orders and got their ammo and training from the Kremlin.

Elian Gonzalez's meeting last week in Miami Beach with his visiting Cuban grandmothers produced a surprise defection: Sister Jeanne O'Laughlin, a Miami eminence in her own right besides being a pal of attorney general Janet Reno, decided after hosting the meeting at her home that Elian should stay…

IT MAY NOT RIVAL Quemoy and Matsu or even Willie Horton in the annals of campaign sensations, but rarely has such an incomprehensible issue been raised during a presidential debate. Midway through last week's Republican set-to in New Hampshire, Gary Bauer turned to Alan Keyes and asked a…

If the good of the body -- hygiene, comfort, longevity, protection from illness, relief from pain, and availability of pleasure -- is the standard by which we judge, then the past doesn't stand a chance against modern times. Whatever nobility, magnificence, or wisdom previous ages might have had,…

Yongyi Song, the Dickinson College librarian whose plight was recounted on this page last week, was released by Beijing on Friday. Song had been imprisoned since a trumped-up arrest last August for "smuggling" research material on the Cultural Revolution. Does this mean there's a thaw in Beijing?…

We're almost an hour into The Vagina Monologues, but so far, for some reason, I'm not really connecting with it. Eve Ensler has already performed many of the most popular vignettes from her one-woman play -- the gynecological exam bit, the lesbian prostitute bit, the feminist onanism workshop bit.…

Des Moines, Iowa

Preston Sturges's career stands as one of the most successful -- and curious -- in the history of Hollywood. From 1940 to 1944, Sturges was among Hollywood's highest paid directors, producing a remarkable run of hits, including The Great McGinty, The Lady Eve, and Sullivan's Travels, winning an…

It is curious indeed when a president can review the state of our nation for nearly 90 minutes, propose dozens of new ways for the government to spend billions of dollars, yet fail to utter a single word about the need for an increase in defense spending.

Glass, glass everywhere: That's what travelers saw when they entered Washington's new Dulles International Airport in 1959. Under a concrete roof that curved like the takeoff trajectory of a jet hung four vast windows without a retaining wall in sight. And beyond the glass, there was only the sky…

PRESIDENT CLINTON has given George W. Bush (or whoever wins the Republican presidential nomination) a taste of what's to come. Now it can be told, Clinton informed a crowd of Democrats in Los Angeles on January 22. Bush "doesn't believe in Roe v. Wade," and thus if he's elected, legalized abortion…