“But he is the president” survived Nixon’s presidency, and it took on various new permutations over the years: “But he is a master of foreign policy,” “But he is a commanding intellect,” and, finally, “But he is dead.” A great sick joke if it weren’t such an appalling spectacle, Nixon’s funeral was an extraordinary feat of posthumous ass-kissing. Not just by the cronies you’d expect — Bob Dole, Henry Kissinger, Billy Graham — but by Bill Clinton, flanked by his wife, who had worked on the staff of the House Judiciary Committee during Nixon’s impeachment hearings. The only journalist who avoided the sickening piety that carried the day was Hunter S. Thompson. Writing in Rolling Stone, Thompson spared no one’s feelings; he wrote to draw blood. His obituary for Nixon descended directly from a line of American journalism that included H.L. Mencken’s obit for William Jennings Bryan, a piece whose words could have easily applied to Nixon: “a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses.” Those who deigned to acknowledge Thompson’s piece tut-tutted about its inappropriate tone. “After all,” more than one person said to me, “the man is dead.”

But is he? Will Richard Nixon ever be dead? He rose from losing the presidential election in 1960 and the California gubernatorial election in 1962. He even recovered from being the only president to resign from office, rising to the level of elder statesman, thus joining whores and ugly buildings as one of the three things that gets respectable with age. On “Saturday Night Live” Dan Aykroyd played Nixon as an impossibly oily ghoul, rising again and again, vulnerable only to a wooden stake driven through his memoirs.

We should be thankful then to the British journalist Anthony Summers, who, in his new “The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon,” tramps the grave dirt down. Simply by telling us, in his prologue, who attended Nixon’s funeral and who didn’t, Summers ties Nixon to: huge payoffs from Howard Hughes, the laundering of the profits of a Bahamian casino, illegal campaign contributions from the likes of Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi and the military junta that took over Greece in 1967, access to U.S. arms given to the Shah of Iran without the consultation of the American government, the illegal derailing of the Paris peace talks, and, of course, the host of crimes contained under the umbrella of Watergate.

Summers offers a wealth of skulduggery and deceit that, you might imagine, would keep journalists busy for weeks. But instead the advance reports on Summers’ book illustrate the debased nature of what currently passes for political journalism. They have almost all focused on just one of his allegations: that Nixon beat his wife, Pat. “The most provocative charge in the book,” reported the New York Times last Sunday. More provocative than Nixon’s almost-certain interference with the Paris peace talks? Than his probable involvement in schemes to assassinate Castro that predated the Bay of Pigs? More provocative than the charge, confirmed by Nixon’s Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, that the president was so unstable during the final days of his administration that Schlesinger instructed the Joint Chiefs of Staff not to react to any military orders from the White House unless they were first cleared with him? Even Vanity Fair, in the excerpt it ran from Summers’ book, went with the section on the Paris peace talks. What kind of alternate universe are we living in, where Vanity Fair understands what the important news is better than the New York Times?

As it turns out, the wife-beating charges are the least substantiated in the book. The abuse may very well have happened, but Summers can’t do better than “The doctor who treated [Mrs. Nixon], [Seymour] Hersh told the author, corroborated the story.” An endnote informs us that Woodward and Bernstein also heard the story but were unable to corroborate it for inclusion in “The Final Days.” Perhaps Summers simply couldn’t resist relaying it, but it’s certainly not his fault that the reports on “The Arrogance of Power” have barely scratched the surface of the intrigues that Summers corroborates so damningly.

The challenge facing the biographer who takes on Richard Nixon, Summers writes, is having to chart “a careful passage through a minefield of lies.” There’s another challenge: the unacknowledged seductiveness of Richard Nixon. That notion may sound funny to those of us who hear the name Nixon and see the familiar caricature of sweaty jowls, stooped gait, beady eyes and ski-slope nose. But Nixon, perhaps more than any other reviled figure, was always remarkably adroit at getting his observers to see him in his terms.

Nixon’s hatred for the privileged Ivy League tenor of the Eastern establishment was real despite, Summers demonstrates, the fact that Nixon’s own upbringing was nowhere near as deprived as he liked to paint it. But some writers have seen Nixon’s feelings of class resentment sympathetically, rather than as the root of a pathology. Perhaps they have been swayed by the opening cadences of Nixon’s autobiography (“I was born in the house my father built”), promising a story of greatness rising from humble origins and deliberately invoking the myth of Lincoln raised in a log cabin. Or they may be moved by the lack of affection in Nixon’s family. “Can you imagine,” Kissinger is quoted as saying, “what this man could have been had somebody loved him?”

In the years following Watergate, as dirty tricks that Nixon’s political opponents used against him have come to light, some observers have stooped to the rationale used to justify Nixon’s own dirty tricks during Watergate: Everybody does it. Tom Wicker called his Nixon book “One of Us” and claimed that the reason Nixon repels us is that we see our own failings in him. But how many among us can say that our everyday failings include needlessly prolonging and illegally expanding a war and provoking a constitutional crisis?

The most laughable of Nixon’s apologists is Oliver Stone. In his film “Nixon,” he re-created Nixon’s famous predawn trek to the Washington Monument to speak with antiwar protestors, but with one significant addition. Confronted by a girl who asks him why he doesn’t simply end the war, Nixon hesitates and the horrorstruck girl realizes the truth. “My God,” she says, “you can’t stop it, can you? It’s out of your control.” Hustled away by Secret Service agents, Anthony Hopkins’ Nixon says that this girl knows what it took him years to learn about politics. Of all the times that the movies have rewritten history, there is no more ludicrous claim than that the commander in chief is powerless to end American involvement in a war.

Witnessing such justifications coming from people who are not stupid is something akin to seeing a man raised on Shakespeare weep over “The Waltons.” They are the intellectual equivalent of Nixon’s peerless manipulations, the Checkers speech or the use of his dead mother (“My mother was a saint”) in the moments before he left the White House in disgrace. Falling prey to Nixon’s transparent sentimentality they shrink queasily at the prospect of confronting him for what he is, as if to do so would make them the schoolyard bully picking on the kid who never fit in.

Over and over since his death, Nixon’s biographers have told us that he was a very complex man. Bunk. Lying and deviousness are not the same thing as complexity. Nixon was not Macbeth, or even Iago. He was too puny. As Norman Mailer so brilliantly put it, remarking on the 1960 presidential nomination, Nixon’s ascension was “the apocalyptic hour of Uriah Heep.”

Summers doesn’t fall for the complexity argument. The strongest aspect of “The Arrogance of Power” is the case it makes for Nixon as the most consistent of men. Seen in the context of the lying, cheating and lawbreaking that characterized every aspect of his political career, Watergate was not Nixon’s self-destruction but his fulfillment, the essence of everything he stood for. Nixon’s apparent mental breakdown toward the end of his presidency, likely exacerbated by his abuse of the anti-epileptic drug Dilantin as a tranquilizer and his drinking problem (which accounts for his frequent slurred speech and disassociated demeanor), reads here as a moment of self-definition.

Nixon had been stripped down to his motivating essence, his self-serving lust for power. So much so, Summers writes, that in a visit to the Joint Chiefs of Staff as Watergate revelations traced the misdeeds ever closer to him, Nixon said, “We gentleman here are the last hope, the last chance to resist.” Chief of naval operations Adm. Elmo Zumwalt said, “One could come to the conclusion that here was the commander in chief trying to see what the reaction of the chiefs might be if he did something unconstitutional … He was trying to find out whether in a crunch there was enough support to keep him in power.”

As frightening as it is to think of Nixon’s floating the idea of a military coup, the notion is the logical extreme of the scheming he had already orchestrated following the break-in and throughout the Senate hearings. In her “The Mask of State: Watergate Portraits,” Mary McCarthy writes of Nixon as so accomplished a manipulator that he was able even to find the weak spot of Sen. Sam Ervin, playing off his fear of increasing pressure on the president during the looming international crisis of the 1973 Middle East War. Perhaps Ervin wouldn’t have worried so much had he known what Summers reveals here. On Oct. 23, 1973, Kissinger was told by Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin that the Soviets could very well be sending troops to the conflict. Kissinger, attempting to get in touch with Nixon, was told by chief of staff Alexander Haig that Nixon had “retired for the night.” While the United States went to DEFCON III, preparation to launch a nuclear attack, the president of the United States was passed out, drunk. (Haig still denies this. Kissinger’s aide, Roger Morris, has quoted Kissinger’s assistant Lawrence Eagleburger saying that it did happen.) Kissinger handled the crisis and the Soviets backed down.

That’s the most frightening of Summers’ revelations. It is not the most nefarious. Some of the episodes described here have already been well-documented, like the 1950 California Senate campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas that earned Nixon the nickname Tricky Dick. In the campaign, Douglas was smeared as a Communist (the “Pink Lady” she was called) and anonymous calls were placed to voters asking if they knew she was Jewish (she was married to the actor Melvyn Douglas). But others, some of which have been hinted at for years, are detailed more convincingly by Summers than they have ever been before.

Taking the advice that Deep Throat gave to Bob Woodward, “Follow the money,” Summers is able to chart much of Nixon’s dirty dealings by laying out who bankrolled him. He makes a very convincing case that Nixon received millions of dollars from organized crime, much of channeled through his friend Bebe Rebozo. Money may also explain why Nixon chose Spiro Agnew as his running mate. (The announcement had caused gasps from the floor of the 1968 Republican Convention and prompted a famous Hubert Humphrey ad in which hysterical laughter is heard over the image of a TV screen bearing the legend “Agnew for Vice President.”) Thomas Pappas, an immigrant Greek millionaire who passed on $549,000 in contributions for Nixon’s 1968 campaign from the military junta that overthrew the Greek government, had “put in a good word for Spiro” with Nixon, who later admitted Pappas influenced the selection.

Summers is equally convincing when arguing that the reverberations of Nixon’s preoccupation with Fidel Castro may have extended to the Watergate break-in itself. It’s likely that Nixon (whom Haig describes as “Eisenhower’s point man [on Cuba]“) was in on Operation Pluto, the Eisenhower-approved CIA plan to get rid of Castro. Nixon had good reason to fear that, if these plots became public, he along with JFK would be disgraced. There are several instances on the Watergate tapes where he frets about what the FBI investigation of Watergate will uncover about CIA plots to kill Castro. Howard Hunt, one of the Watergate burglars, was involved in those plots as well. At the time of the Watergate break-in, Democratic National Committee chairman Larry O’Brien was working as a consultant for Howard Hughes, and Nixon may well have feared that O’Brien had information on Nixon’s knowledge of CIA plots against Castro, or at least of the hundreds of thousands of dollars Hughes had been funneling to Nixon going back to the ’50s.

For sheer rottenness, though, none of Summers’ revelations can touch his new information that Nixon was probably involved in a scheme to derail the Paris peace talks in 1968. In my opinion, no revelation about anyone who has ever held public office in this country equals it. Nixon’s plot to keep South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu away from the talks has been rumored for years. LBJ had FBI information on it which he passed on to Humphrey in the days leading up to the 1968 election. Fearing that it wasn’t solid enough, and that it would look like a last minute attempt to sway the election, Humphrey backed off.

That must be counted among the most tragic miscalculations in American politics because only a fool would doubt Nixon’s involvement. Some writers, most recently Robert Dallek in the second volume of his LBJ biography, have made strong cases for it. Summers’ is the strongest, not just because of recently declassified FBI files but because of his interviews with Anna Chennault, a well-known lobbyist for the Nationalist Chinese. Nixon and John Mitchell instructed Chennault to tell Thieu he should hold off on joining the talks to help Nixon get elected to the presidency, after which he would get a much better deal. Nixon’s public stance during all this was one of committed patriot, refusing to make political capital by commenting on Vietnam during LBJ’s announced bombing halt which, Johnson hoped, could lead to a break in the war.

Of course, there were plenty of reasons for Thieu to back out of the peace talks even without Nixon’s encouragement — most of all, the fear of his government’s collapse. And even had he agreed to the talks, there was no guarantee that the talks would have led to an end to the war or even to a Humphrey victory. All that is irrelevant. What is relevant is that Nixon, as a private citizen, conspired to affect the course of American foreign policy by sabotaging peace talks that could have prevented the deaths of thousands of American soldiers (not to mention hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, civilians as well as combatants). In other words, Nixon committed treason. And it’s a pity — for the nation as well as for the families of the soldiers who were killed during the four subsequent years of the war (nearly a third of all Americans killed in Vietnam) that the son of a bitch didn’t swing for it.

This is a revelation that diminishes even Watergate. And it may lead someday to the book that has yet to be written about the farcical notion of Nixon as a master of foreign policy. This was Nixon’s foreign policy: prolonging Vietnam and illegally expanding it into Laos and Cambodia, not to mention his support for the Greek military junta and his almost-certain support for the CIA-backed coup that installed Pinochet in Chile. Someone may even ask what no one has asked about what is still regarded as Nixon’s indisputable moment of glory: his opening of relations with China. If China has been opened to the West, why does it now routinely ignore, even refuse to consider, the complaints of Western governments?

Nixon’s real legacy is the cynicism toward government that has become a mainstay of American political discourse since Watergate. Even Summers ends the book by saying “Because of what they learned at Watergate, Americans are perhaps less ready to trust blindly in their leaders … The downside, however, is that Richard Nixon’s abuses and deceptions may have led many citizens not to trust their leaders at all.”

It didn’t have to be so. Post-Watergate cynicism has become such an accepted part of life for more than a quarter-century now that it’s easy to forget the exhilaration of Watergate itself. Mary McCarthy compared it to a national town meeting. As McCarthy wrote, “Everybody has been fully participating, and nobody, in principle, given the equality of opportunity available, is more of an expert than the next person.” That’s a definition of the democratic ideal, people behaving as if the fate of the republic depends on their participation.

So the cynicism that resulted is immeasurably sad. And it must be said that the press has to bear some responsibility. Watergate elevated the investigative reporter to almost mythic status, but the reporting that followed has often shown an inability to distinguish between nefarious acts that are truly newsworthy and the minutiae of everyday corruption. That’s why the accusations of wife beating in Summers’ book are getting the most coverage. The logical conclusion of that kind of scandalmongering is to treat Whitewater and Monicagate as if they were serious stories.

Clinton’s impeachment saga was the negative image of Watergate, not only in its demonstration that the democratic process could be used to subvert the very meaning of democracy, but in the spectacle of a press corps so hungry for dirt that they failed to do their job as reporters. We have gone from the Washington Post bravely backing Woodward and Bernstein when few other press outlets cared about Watergate, to the Post’s Susan Schmidt running unchecked allegations that were probably leaks from Kenneth Starr’s office.

Summers trades a little bit in this with his reports of Nixon’s wife beating and drug abuse. But he is blessed with a sense of proportion. He knows where the real story lies. In detailing his findings, I have perhaps given short shrift to the verifications he provides. Some of these allegations may never be nailed down beyond all doubt. But that doesn’t mean that Summers is trafficking in a type of journalism he disdains, in which vague connections are offered as proof of guilt. There is a world of difference in triangulating responsibility based on chains of commands and who met with whom on what dates, on making reasonable, substantiated supposition, and spinning conspiracy yarns.

But even if Summers were an unscrupulous journalist, what could he or anyone else possibly do to defame Richard Nixon? What obscene fantasy could make Nixon’s hands any more blood-stained, his mind any more a cesspool of deviousness and prejudice, his actions any more the product of conscienceless cunning? Summers’ book is an example of how the revelations of investigative journalism can awaken rather than inure. It suggests that to be wary of Nixon’s ability to rise again and again and again, even from the dead, is a form of patriotism. We haven’t seen the last of Dick Nixon. And we should be waiting with garlic and crosses — and most of all the stake.

As in the ’30s stories penned by Cleveland teenagers Jerome Siegel and Joe Shuster, the Fleischers’ Superman is never boringly invincible. He keeps alert and stays on his toes. His hands curl naturally into fists. He’s always ready to trade punches, even in midair — and even with death rays.

It’s a far bigger kick to see this out-of-the-inkwell icon soar than it is to watch a live-action Superman fly. There’s more exertion portrayed here, and thus more elation. When this Superman leaps tall buildings with a single bound, you feel he actually jumps. (As in the comics, he became less of a leaper and more of a human jet as time went on.)

The animators decided to create this hero (and his villains and sidekicks) out of blocks instead of the circles and ovals they generally used to form farcical figures. The result is a sinewy tautness rarely achieved in cartoons. They also exploited a patented “Stereoptical” process for vibrant 3-D effects: During Superman’s prodigious flights, the Earth falls away dizzyingly beneath him or seems to come up to meet him with a crash.

The rudimentary plots merge into a two-hour-and-15-minute marathon as Superman battles crime, disaster and America’s Second World War enemies. Comic books and movies always have feasted on each other, and this series contains plot hooks ripped both from headlines and from every fantasy genre, with mad scientists, hooded bandits, mechanical monsters and even a tyrannosaurus Rex running amok. As Superman aficionados know, the catch phrases “Up in the sky — look!” and “Faster than a speeding bullet” came from the cartoons. (In one issue of the comic book, Kent took Lois Lane to see a Superman short and had to distract her every time it revealed his secret identity as the orphan from Krypton.)

You giddily anticipate the ritual turns: Lane cheating Kent out of scoops and falling in harm’s way; Kent heading for the nearest phone booth or stockroom (his profile visible through frosted-glass windows!), stripping to his supersuit and sweeping to the rescue. Technicolor has rarely been more glorious than in the prints used for this DVD. Best of all, thanks to the Fleischers, the animation puts the Man back into the Man of Steel.

In seven years under Gorshow’s management, the foundation collected at least $7 million in donations and in-kind services, and spent nearly all of it, but never even established a Web site. The money went toward salaries, travel, fund-raising and furniture, according to Gorshow.

In February, Gorshow was fired.

The struggle has since moved to court, where Gorshow claims she was fired unfairly, while the foundation accuses her of mismanagement, misuse of funds and resume fraud. Both sides are seeking unspecified damages.

Amid the claims and counterclaims, Clancy has scrapped the foundation.

“He’s trying to do a good thing here, and now unfortunately he’s embroiled in this litigation,” said Clancy’s lawyer, John Palmeri.

Gorshow’s lawyer, Sheldon Friedman, said the allegations against her are groundless. “We have documentation that shows the work she’s accomplished for the foundation,” he said. “We’re anxious for our day in court.”

The foundation was named after Kyle Haydock, a precocious Clancy fan and cancer patient who had died at age 8. Kyle had written Clancy after his grandfather read the author ‘s first novel to him. Clancy befriended the dying boy, spending time at his bedside and taking him to Disney World.

The organization’s board of directors has included such celebrities as Sumner Redstone self, and records show gifts from donors such as MCA founder Lew Wasserman and Viacom.

Last year, Clancy sent an accountant and then a retired Navy vice admiral, William McCauley, to look into the foundation’s progress.

“When I got there, it was pretty clear that it was not ready to roll out anything,” said McCauley, who met Clancy when the author was doing research for “The Hunt for Red October” and “Red Storm Rising.”

McCauley said the foundation has been overtaken by other Web sites with similar purposes.

According to court documents and lawyers, Clancy summoned Gorshow to his Maryland home, placed her on probation and demanded her resignation. That same day, he hired a security firm to change the locks on the foundation’s office in Englewood to thwart any attempt to destroy documents. Later, at Clancy’s request, the board voted to fire Gorshow.

Gorshow claims she was making serious progress with the foundation and accuses Clancy of sabotaging it by discrediting her and falling behind in his pledge payments.

Clancy has found a new way to use the $700,000 left in the organization’s coffers to honor Kyle: A professorship in pediatric oncology at Johns Hopkins University medical school was set up in the boy’s name this month, and Clancy has pledged $2 million over four years.

– Richard Vigesaa

“From Hell”
BY CURT HOLMAN
(10/26/99)

While it’s nice to see Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell get some mainstream
credit for their fantastic work, I was dismayed to see a few elementary errors. Two that leap to mind are the author’s assertion that the “Love and
Death” issue of Swamp Thing was the first mainstream book to be published
without the Comics Code Authority seal (leaving aside Dell/Gold Key
publishing — who never used the seal — two issues of Amazing Spider Man still
beat Swamp Thing out by over a decade) and that Moore left DC because “For
Mature Readers” was included on “Watchmen” (the real break being caused by
royalty and merchandising disagreements).

This is, in fact, Moore’s
best work since “V For Vendetta” (I’ve always found “Watchmen,” though a
good story, to be highly overrated) and Campbell’s best work ever, which is
saying a great deal.

I must say, though, that I am somewhat relieved that Moore has gone back to
writing comics that are meant to be simply fun, like “Tom Strong” and
“Tomorrow Stories.” To a great extent, Moore’s element is playing with
convention, only slightly twisting it to show us a different light, as with
his Superman and Swamp Thing stories. And of course, “From Hell,” where he
twists the basic concepts of history.

Possibly the most dismaying thing about your review, though, is the almost
total lack of mention of Eddie Campbell, himself an artistic genius with a
fairly broad oeuvre. I mean, he only drew the book; surely he rates more than
a paragraph or two. Or is it possible that your author is not familiar
enough with his work to write about it?

– Jonathan Miller

For too long, Alan Moore’s genius has been appreciated only by those lucky enough to
have a well-stocked local comic book store — and brave enough to not be
self-conscious about reading books with pictures.
Moore has the piercing social insight of William Burroughs combined
with Scheherazade’s abilty to keep the reader enthralled from one
chapter to the next. His characters literally come to life, because he
understands the human heart and what motivates it.

– McCamy Taylor

Microsoft flip-flop
BY ANDREW LEONARD

(10/26/99)

Does Microsoft understand the software business? I wonder at times. Their recent abandonment of support to their financial newsgroups in favor of their buggy, slow, confusing “Web Communities” has caused at least one person (me) to go elsewhere for financial information.

– Richard Sanchez

I did not mourn the end of the MVP program. I think it could use some
thinning out, actually, because the program has become less about
community support and more about a few people getting free software and a
cliquish designation. The problem is, Microsoft primarily gets feedback
about MVPs from MVPs.

Though I think there are excellent MVPs for Frontpage and IIS, there are
some horrible, self-serving ones for HTML Help and Office. Some MVPs have
developed a cult of personality. Others campaign to get the MVP
designation, then you never hear from them again. I think it’s high time
they thinned the herd.

– Tracey Attwood

The information laundromat
BY MARK GIMEIN

(10/26/99)

Whispernumber.com is using a straightforward application of the Delphi
Method, published by the Rand Corp. in the 1960s. This is a group
consensus and decision-making method using structured communication,
anonymity and feedback. The method is specially useful for areas where
lack of information renders traditional planning imprecise (such as
predicting the future). Hence the reference to the oracle at Delphi.

If the group can keep their egos under control, anonymity is not necessary,
in my experience. I’ve used the method for project scheduling, for a
project involving new software methodology for which there was such a severe
time constraint that traditional planning methods wouldn’t be appropriate.

– Conrad Clark

Eating Iberia
BY DOUGLAS CRUICKSHANK
(10/23/99)

A decade ago, while editing a glossy magazine, I took advantage of an
absurd-sounding junket opportunity: free airfare from San Francisco to
London, followed by a two-day excursion to Scotland and back on the
refurbished Royal Scotsman railroad line. (More precisely, the line was its
old furbished self, but the railcars had been spruced up a bit.) Then
instantly back to San Francisco, for four days of constant motion all told. The
Scotsman got stuck in the snow somewhere outside Glasgow — note to
self: Avoid junkets to Northern Europe in February — and I got so whipsawed
by jet lag in both directions that I can recall further details today only
with the greatest difficulty. The food, needless to say, did not approach
Cruickshank’s Iberian excesses in terms of either quantity or quality.
There’s more than Gibraltar separating his octopus from my haddock, believe
me.

– Jonathan F. King

Senior editor, Mother Jones

San Francisco

Disease parties
BY JON BOWEN
(10/26/99)

Jon Bowen does his readers a disservice by giving equal weight to
anti-vaccine advocates and medical authorities; he fails to make
clear that there is literally no debate within the medical community
about the desirability of vaccination. “Cost-effective, maybe, but
are vaccines always safe?” he writes. I answer, as an
epidemiologist who studies vaccine safety: cost-effective
definitely, and yes, vaccines are always safe, since withholding them
places a child at enormous risk for infection. One child in a
million healthy, immunized children will develop reactions to
vaccines, but no medical procedure is perfectly safe. This is the
tradeoff we must make to live in a society where the majority of
children make it to adulthood.

What happens when ill-informed parents focus on the possiblity of a rare reaction to rather than
the giant benefits of vaccination? There is no better example of
this than in Britain, where some years ago fears about the whooping
cough vaccine led to a drop in vaccination rates — followed,
predictably, by a huge surge in whooping cough.

– Logan Spector

Department of Epidemiology

Emory University

I‘m a chicken pox party parent. In general, my wife and I believe American medicine is a little vaccine-crazy. Recent actions by vaccine producers to stop using
Thimerisol as a vaccine preservative to prevent significant mercury
exposures to infants getting the full course of shots point out the
distressing lack of research and consideration given to the cumulative
effect of multiple vaccinations. If the doctors have forgotten to
consider something obvious, like accumulating amount of intravenous
mercury, what else may they have missed regarding subtle effects of
multiplied assaults to an infantile immune system?

Specific to chicken pox, we have serious doubts about a vaccine that
provides temporary immunity to a disease that is relatively minor in
childhood, but wears off just in time to make patients subject to life-
and fertility-threatening adult infections. The main selling point of
the chicken pox vaccine is the hours of parental work time saved by
delaying infection. We decided to take the time necessary to give our
son permanent immunity.

When the first child in our community got the pox, we brought our boy,
Coyote, over for a limited time. One of the contributing factors in
chicken pox is the intimacy and duration of exposure to infection, so by
limiting Coyote’s exposure, we reduced the severity of his illness. Now he’s
got permanent immunity, without a dose of mercury, and without dumping a
whole host of antibody producing agents directly into his bloodstream.

– Ken Erfourth

Mount Horeb, Wis.

Publisher halts George W. Bush bio
BY DARYL LINDSEY

(10/21/99)

As character assassins go, J.H. Hatfield is maybe an L.H. Oswald — a guy
who looks kind of like a commie, but who might be something else entirely –
like perhaps the fall guy for a right-wing operation.

It’s really amazing that the mainstream press paid little attention to this
“biography” of George W. Bush until the elder Bush denounced it on national TV. That
saved George W. from having to do it himself, which would have only brought
down an avalanche of questions from reporters about his true relationship
with cocaine.

How serendipitous! A paroled felon in Arkansas writes a demonstrably
false book about George W. Bush and cocaine, then dad steps forward and points out
the errors in the book, and all the unanswered questions about the younger Bush and
drug use suddenly evaporate! Count on newsrooms cracking down on
reporters who bug George W. about drugs (or anything else) now that
“publishers” are on the hot seat for checking facts.

– Mark Kind

Gee, isn’t it interesting? A book about George W. Bush has info that is or
is not true; the author is smeared and the books are, quick as
lightning, taken off the shelves. What happens when the books with
hateful lies are published about the Clintons?

– L. Sparks

Orlando, Fla.

Though its bio of George W. Bush was given the green light by two groups of
lawyers, St. Martin’s Press, a hitherto respected publisher, has chosen to
suppress a book that lists negative charges about the man most likely,
according to all polls and political cash registers, to become our next
president.

If there is a lesson to be learned from the still ongoing
Clinton-Starr encounter, it is that in a system like ours, where politics has
become the year-round national sport, the charges against Bush will never
disappear, and that they should be investigated thoroughly before the GOP
nominations are in full swing. Once he takes office, who can doubt that till
the end of his term, foes will provoke the sort of nonstop investigation that
soiled the Clinton administration and deprived the nation of a full-time
president?

Right now, Gov. Bush can best serve the country by calling for the
establishment of a respected nonpartisan group that could investigate the
allegations in the book by J.H. Hatfield. Hatfield appears to have been
convicted 11 years ago of hiring a hit man to kill his boss. I can’t excuse
his crime, but I have read enough news stories to know that, at least with
politicians, imprisonment always leads to born-again Christianity and a
rededication to truth and American values.

– Hy Brett

Launched in 1997, when winemakers funded several ad and marketing campaigns geared toward snagging younger wine connoisseurs, Wine X is unabashed about its purpose. The front page of its Web site is loaded with links like, “If you market wine, Read This!” or “Marketing Wine to Generation X.” The gist? Sure, these leather-clad pipsqueaks may only be able to afford a $5 bottle of Merlot now, but think of the cellar they’ll build when those stock options vest! Addict them while they are young!

So here I am, the target demographic — under 30 and into visiting wineries, no less! — with $3.95 to spare. I buy a copy of Wine X, the magazine that’s made for people like me, and I read it. I read it while drinking wine on a Burgundy-colored sofa.

Is there a smart, well-written, bullshit-free wine zine out there for wine-drinkers of modest means, but discerning tastes? Wine X isn’t it. First off, Jason Priestley (never was cool) is on the cover talking about the Barenaked Ladies (a blip on the cool screen two years ago), alien abductions (whatever, dude) and — pay close attention, folks — “getting’ hooked on wine.” “Getting’”? I think they meant “gettin’.” Apparently, Wine X’s plan to win the hearts and palates of “Generation X” is to provide them with an abundance of excess apostrophes. Take this sentence from Publisher Darryl Roberts’ intro to this issue: “Well, here it is late June goin’ on September.” Or this one: “Has the coming of fall got you thinkin’ ’bout headin’ to wine country?”

It’s downhill from there, with a horoscope that tells me what I should drink this month and reviews of chick flicks (“The Gyno-American cinema movement”). Wine X tells me far more about what the people who market wine think of me than about wine itself. I apparently have a low income, like to cook for my friends, find Jason Priestley fascinating and don’t flinch when a Duke Ellington tribute is in the section “Sex, Wine and Rock N’ Roll.” Frankly, I don’t know how these folks have made it to Volume 3, Issue 5. Who reads this swill?

To be fair, I agree with Wine X that wine (and food, and travel) writing could be infused with some fruity style and down-to-earthy flavors. Apparently, Wine X started as a clunky black-and-white ‘zine that dared to fulfill that mission. But, like so many good things, it’s been co-opted by an industry, given the phony stamp of corporate America and sent out not to demystify a beverage that brings pleasure to millions, young and old, but to crassly hawk a product. Whatever, dude.

The Stranger, Sept. 30-Oct. 7

“Fuck New York, Paris, Milan and London” by Adrian Ryan

In this wickedly funny take on New York’s Fashion Week, Adrian Ryan boils Seattle’s fashion philosophy down to the essentials: “Seattle is blessedly free of label whores and name-droppers, and its style-savvy natives have boiled the true essence of fashion down to its simplest and most effective elements: A) Do I look like I just got fucked? B) Does it look like I care that I look like I just got fucked? and C) Will this look get me fucked again?”

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Detroit Metro Times, Sept. 29-Oct. 6

“Comic Booked!” by Devin O’Leary

For Banned Books Week, Devin O’Leary looks at how censorship has hurt the comic-book industry. His description of Mike Diana’s 1994 conviction on obscenity charges (upheld by the Supreme Court in 1998) is an eye-opening example of how free speech is being stifled.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Missoula Independent, Sept. 23-29

“Celebrating Censorship” by Blake de Pastino

Also in honor of Banned Books Week, this little essay is not an exciting read, but it does mention something that is: the American Library Association’s newly published “Books Challenged or Banned in 1998-’99,” which chronicles a year’s worth of attempts to ban books.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

For reasons unfathomable to this staid unbeliever, an excess of stories about the paranormal, conspiracies and other “X-Files”-inspired madness seem to be gracing the pages of the weeklies this season. For you, a summary.

Ghost hunters! They work very, very hard to see dead people. Learn about “intelligent haunting” vs. “residual haunting,” and what cats see when they spaz for no apparent cause. Intelligent ghosts repeatedly crashed my browser as I attempted to read this article. (Philadelphia City Paper, Sept. 30-Oct. 6)

UFO theorists Who cares if the truth is out there? What does it mean? Several men convene in a small western Washington town to hash it out. (Seattle Weekly, Sept. 23-Oct. 6)

Gamers A moment of your time, please. I have a confession to make. During my unglamorous early college years, I was a gamer. Not a devoted, fanatical gamer, mind you. But I spent my share of sunny Saturdays hunched over a game board in somebody’s kitchen. Civilization? Eight action-packed hours of plagues, territory skirmishes and resin trading! Axis and Allies? Oh, honey! I sucked at Diplomacy, but survived several rounds of Nuclear War. And Rail Baron, sweet Rail Baron … Then came bigger, faster computers with all their fancy-ass software versions of the games I loved. I became too busy to play my beloved games, but lamented the seemingly certain demise of the dice and cardboard medium. But no, sweet Jesus, no! Jamais Cascio takes a look at how the Internet has revived old-fashioned gaming. (Seattle Weekly, Sept. 23-Oct. 6)

Unnatural disasters Does Mother Nature cause hurricanes? Or do people? A cheery look at the latest in global warming theories. (Orlando Weekly, Sept. 22-28)