Tuesday, on his old pal Oprah Winfrey’s show, Ebert made a rare television appearance and “spoke” for the first time in almost four years — about cancer, about childhood memories, and about the best movies of the year. Though multiple surgeries have robbed him of his power of speech and his ability to eat and drink (he gets his nutrition via a feeding tube now) – the 67-year-old remains as opinionated – and overscheduled – as ever.

Opening her pre-Oscar show with a prerecorded tour through a day in the life of the world’s best-known critic, Winfrey followed Ebert through a schedule that could wipe out a man a third his age – three movie screenings, banging out his column, working out and hanging with his devoted wife Chaz.

He then took the couch – looking frail and strange, a radical departure from the big, talkative gadfly who’s been a television fixture for nearly 30 years. Toting his Mac laptop, Ebert proceeded to answer Oprah’s questions in a slow, computer-generated voice. But his words were as engaging as ever. “In my dreams I’m talking all the time,” he explained. And amazingly, thanks to a career spent talking all the time, a company in Scotland has been working with him to construct a computer voice program based on clips of his real voice. Trying it out for the first time, his laptop intoned in pretty passable Ebert-ese: “In first grade they said I talked too much — and now I still can.” But though he’s ebullient as ever, he insists there will be “no more surgery … We have to find peace with the way we look and get on with life.”

The critic then offered his Oscar picks – he’s going with Bigelow and “Hurt Locker” – but he offered something much more. Toward the end of his segment, Ebert’s wife read a statement that first appeared in the intense, fascinating portrait of him in the March Esquire.  The man who’s spent his life answering to a job title with such negative connotations – critic — issued as positive a review on life as anyone could ever give. “We must try to contribute joy to the world,” she read. “That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.”

Thanks for including the Chicago Sun-Times on your exclusive list of newspapers on your “Hall of Shame.” To be in an O’Reilly Hall of Fame would be a cruel blow to any newspaper. It would place us in the favor of a man who turns red and starts screaming when anyone disagrees with him. My grade-school teacher, wise Sister Nathan, would have called in your parents and recommended counseling with Father Hogben.

Yes, the Sun-Times is liberal, having recently endorsed our first Democrat for President since LBJ. We were founded by Marshall Field one week before Pearl Harbor to provide a liberal voice in Chicago to counter the Tribune, which opposed an American war against Hitler. I’m sure you would have sided with the Trib at the time.

I understand you believe one of the Sun-Times misdemeanors was dropping your syndicated column. My editor informs me that “very few” readers complained about the disappearance of your column, adding, “many more complained about Nancy.” I know I did. That was the famous Ernie Bushmiller comic strip in which Sluggo explained that “wow” was “mom” spelled upside-down.

When I called to interview him for Salon, listed on his site as an “apparatchik far-left” publication practically in league with Islamists, the former Salon columnist was strangely eager to appease me. Famous for breathing fire in public before admiring college Republicans, he scampered when I confronted him about his site’s claims, even promising to rewrite some of them.

Purportedly a serious counterbalance to liberal sites that track conservatives, Horowitz’s online “Guide to the Political Left” lays out what he considers the extensive connections between liberals and terrorists. Its controversial picture gallery of “leftists” runs the gamut from movie critic Roger Ebert and Omar Abdel Rahman, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, to crushed Holy Land protester Rachel Corrie and even Sen. John Kerry.

You just can’t separate Ebert from a terrorist like the blind sheik Rahman, Horowitz told me. Chalk it up to the limits of presenting information on a two-dimensional computer screen. “It’s a limitation of — what? Of language? The human mind?” mused Horowitz. “The two-dimensional, three-dimensional, four-dimensional universe?”

The human minds with limitations, of course, belong to his critics. But Horowitz’s latest venture has his critics asking if the right-wing provocateur has finally flipped in his long-running battle with the left.

Columbia journalism professor and longtime liberal activist Todd Gitlin calls the site the “venomous” product of Horowitz’s 1950s childhood as the son of Stalinists, and of his lasting guilt over the killing of a friend by his former allies, the Black Panthers. “The psychodynamics here are not pretty” says Gitlin, whose squashed face appears on the site. As No. 376 on the list, he’s accused of “harboring the belief that his country is ultimately unworthy of his respect and even allegiance.” The Web site, Gitlin says, reflects “a demonology that’s about as unsubtle as the one [Horowitz] pursued when he was a Marxist in the ’60s, except the terms are inverted.”

The Horowitz files at Discover the Network, at last count, span 948 people and 552 organizations, from America Coming Together to the Pearl Jam fan club to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades. Horowitz says that his critics have fixated excessively on his Web site’s “picture grid” — Paul Begala diagnosed it as “stark raving mad” — and refuse to answer the weightier accusation implicit in Horowitz’s database: that the political left has forged an “unholy alliance” with terrorists. His critics, Horowitz wrote on FrontPageMag.com, “squeal about putting radical Islamists in the same database … as Michael Moore, Ward Churchill and Barbra Streisand.”

“It may seem extreme to some people to have John Kerry in the same database as [Sept. 11 hijacker] Mohammed Atta,” he told me, yet he was at a loss for a way to separate them on his site. It was “an infinite regress,” he said: Toss out Stanley Cohen, lawyer for Hamas, and he’d have to remove the allegedly similarly minded ACLU. Take out the ACLU, and the next thing you know you have to delete Democrats from the “network.”

The searchable site, with a staff of two, opened to the public in February after about two years in development, at a cost of about $500,000 by Horowitz’s estimate. It has met with scattered applause from the right as an educational tool. Conservative blogger “Jeff Blogworthy” declared that the “leftist attack strategy” has been laid bare by Horowitz’s site. “Few people understand the Left like David,” he wrote.

Horowitz offers his A-to-Z master list of leftists as a gift of wisdom through experience — i.e., his transformation from a radical to a repentant, hard-line anti-Communist. But is he the right man to build a cool-headed research database that uses accuracy as a weapon?

Horowitz hopes to outdo progressive watchdog sites like the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, which tracks white supremacists, Holocaust deniers and Horowitz himself (whom it labels a bearer of “radical ideas”); Media Matters for America, a site run by Republican turned liberal David Brock (whom Horowitz calls a “snake and liar and a backstabber”); and Media Transparency, a handy database that links Horowitz’s college groups to hundreds of thousands of dollars in support from the conservative coffers of Richard Mellon Scaife and the Bradley Foundation.

Media Transparency’s Rob Levine calls Horowitz’s site a “comic cartoon imitation” of the Minnesota-based liberal site, which Horowitz acknowledged was an inspiration for Discover the Network. “One reason,” Levine says, “is that there just isn’t the same kind of progressive infrastructure and coordination on the left as there is on the right, so in some sense he’s swatting at a chimera.”

The mission statement of Horowitz’s site is to “identify the individuals and organizations that make up the left and also the institutions that fund and sustain it.” For instance, Discover the Network identifies the Ford Foundation as a supporter of “communist front groups” and the Tides Foundation as the “nerve center of the left,” asserting that Teresa Heinz Kerry has funneled $8 million through the foundation “to further her radical environmentalist agenda” (a claim that’s debunked at Snopes.com).

In 1989 Horowitz confessed to Sun Myung Moon’s Insight magazine that fate had bound him, like Ahab, to pursue his “white whale” forever — a quest “to stigmatize the Left and separate it.” But he presents his new project as a fountain of data, not stigma. “I want to make it clear at the outset that I have striven to make an informational database, and not … a ‘tar and feather the left’ database,” he told Salon.

He’s sick of what the other side does, he says, surfing the Web while we talk for examples of anti-Horowitz rants. “It’s like, ‘Is Horowitz a lunatic?’” he says. He ends up at Media Transparency and points to a headline: “David Horowitz’s imagined supporters speak out.” In comparison to that language, Horowitz says, “I feel I set a standard here … I don’t think there’s another site that’s as responsible” as Discover the Network.

Adds staffer Genesio Zenone, the site is an “electronically overdue other side of the argument.”

But many Discover the Network entries run hotter than the ones on Media Transparency. Hillary Clinton’s dossier soars into a many-paragraphed rumination on Clinton loyalists, explaining what one can learn from their “sordid, criminal means” about the evil nature of progressives, whose idealism is skin-deep: “They hate you because you are killers of their dream … Since the redeemed future that justifies their existence and rationalizes their hypocrisy can never be realized, what really motivates progressives is a modern idolatry: their limitless passion for the continuance of Them.”

Confronted with this vitriolic passage, Horowitz concedes it was excerpted from a 2000 piece of his published on FrontPageMag.com, “Progressive Narcissism,” but says his overly reverent staff improperly cut-and-pasted a polemic as an entry in a strictly nonpolemical data source. “I have this problem with my staff,” Horowitz says, “and that is, they won’t touch my words.” He says that while his writings have formed the basis for many entries, they’re supposed to be edited down to just the facts. His editor is going to have to fix that one, he says.

One man who won’t be removed from the database is Ebert, No. 298. “I was surprised to find myself linked to a terrorist I have never heard of,” Ebert said, facetiously. “I was not curious enough about him to Google him, but perhaps he will Google me and, having discovered my wonderful reviews, will renounce terrorism and spend more time at the movies.” (What earned Ebert his spot, the site says, was his criticizing “runaway corporations,” accusing the U.S. death penalty system of inequity, and making an unflattering reference to former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris.)

“The one link Discover the Network seems to be missing is ‘David Horowitz and Sen. Joseph McCarthy,’” Ebert says. “David was a respected journalist. He could be a respected conservative commentator. Why does he lower himself to rabble-rousing?”

Told of Ebert’s criticism, Horowitz began to call the movie critic “an a — ,” but stopped and settled for calling him “probably ignorant of everything I’ve ever written.”

In fact, it’s Horowitz’s past work that explains his method of lumping together the individuals and organizations on his site into one vast left-wing conspiracy — including last year’s book, “Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left,” praised by former CIA director James Woolsey for revealing the enemy within. “This is the left that I see,” Horowitz says. “The background for this, for 20 years I’ve had in my head.” With a burning fuse on its cover, “Unholy Alliance” argues that groups who despise one another might actually be working closely together, maybe without even knowing it. This philosophy forms the backbone of Discover the Network, which digitizes theories of Horowitz’s that are long in the making.

You can’t simply connect the dots from Ebert to, say, Marwan Barghouti, leader of the Palestinian faction Fatah, on Horowitz’s site. His precariously programmed Java engine puts an interactive graphic on the screen that ostensibly links isolated conspiracies of the “political left,” but a recent attempt to find the link between Ebert and terrorists came to an early dead end at the listing for the International Association of Democratic Lawyers in Brussels, Belgium. Then the program crashed.

Horowitz initially defended the organization of his database, saying that seemingly disparate people are all linked by anti-Americanism. “They [would] probably say that 9/11 or the [Iraq] beheadings were the wrong way to carry out a right cause,” he says. “They come together when it comes to opposing America’s wars, America” — he laughs — “and seeing America as the Great Satan.” And he says “they,” including Michael Moore, must be purged from the Democratic Party for the good of the country.

But later Horowitz announced some revisions to his site. Some of the members of the picture grid, he wrote on FrontPageMag.com, are “patriotic Americans.” So are the editors of Salon, he added. “If you visit the individuals search page [of the site], you will see that we have separated the individuals into five columns, which we identify as ‘totalitarian radicals,’ ‘anti-American radicals,’ ‘leftists,’ ‘moderate leftists’ and ‘affective leftists’ … We have arranged the grid this way, even though we think it feeds certain illusions, to accommodate those who expressed anguish over the grid in its original format.”

He also fixed the description for No. 819, media critic Norman Solomon. He was listed not only as an “anti-American writer” but as a University of California at Berkeley professor, when he isn’t, in fact, a professor of any kind. Recently checking his entry, Solomon said of Horowitz: “Imagine Joe McCarthy with a Web site, proudly stuck in a time warp … Horowitz strains to throw as much mud as he can, evidently with the fervent belief that some of it is bound to harm his targets. Along the way, his material is riddled with demagogic smears, weird leaps of semi-logic and factual errors.”

Days later, the clarifications and changes kept coming. “I’ve modified the descriptive text on the Individuals search page to make clearer that the [database] obviously includes moderates who don’t think America is an imperialist power or the Great Satan,” Horowitz wrote in an e-mail subsequent to our interview.

Still not off the hook, however, are his eternal enemies — college professors — whom he considers the most closely enmeshed with terror. As he explained it to Salon, Washington Democrats are products of the university “feeder system,” an underworld where “40,000 professors have signed antiwar letters.” And that’s the impetus for his “Academic Bill of Rights” crusade in various state Senates, which among other things would outlaw “indoctrination” by liberal professors in classrooms. Defeated in Colorado last year, a similar law is resurfacing in the California Senate this month and is making some progress in the Florida Assembly.

But Horowitz’s crusade is clearly driven by more than a push for diversity; he believes those he disagrees with not only are overrepresented in academia but represent threats to national security. For him, much anti-Bush rhetoric seems to be interchangeable with collaboration with the enemy. He likens Islamic fervor to “Western radicals’ efforts to purify their tainted souls of ‘racism, sexism and homophobia,” saying that the two movements “reflect parallel inclinations … Both are exacting in the justice they administer and the loyalty they demand.”

Is Horowitz concerned that people might read his site the wrong way and believe that Mohammed Atta and a local college professor are literally co-workers? “I can’t be accountable for people who misread what’s here,” he says. The professors he has criticized, he says, complain, “‘I’m getting death threats or whatever.’ I get death threats all the time. The level of our political rhetoric is horrible, and I don’t think very much can be done about it.” He adds: “I treat people the way they treat me.”

This is not a shining moment for American democracy because, in the end, Americans have opted to preserve the institutions rather than to preserve democracy. Vice President Gore was pushed into a wall. From every side they urged him to be gracious and to come out and concede defeat. But the truth, which we all know, was that this election was won by Gore, and that President-elect Bush is usurping the position of the presidency. He has stolen the presidency from Gore. I think a lot of people are frightened and too cautious of using plain English. The American media is afraid to use the word “fraud.” Why? It is important for Americans who believe in democracy, its principles and independent legal institutions to speak up.

Electoral reform is imperative, but that comes after. Why are we not talking about today? Why are Americans so willing to accept an election that is fraudulent?

George W. Bush will never have respect or legitimacy. I do hope that someone — a newspaper or institution — will under the Freedom of Information Act count the votes so that there will be no doubt that Gore was the winner, and that Gore’s victory was stolen from him and that a president who did not win the race is in place in America. America has to address and face up to that because the rest of the world is already speaking about it.

In America, people are using conciliatory language about how we need to unite the country. But no matter how conciliatory the language is, you cannot erase the fact that these elections were fraudulent, that there was intimidation and that the vote of minorities was constrained. In any other place where I have been an observer to the elections and have seen that, we have cried foul.

The time will come when this travesty will have to end and people will face up to the fact that the will of the people was not respected in America, and that the president-elect is not the president that the voters wanted in place.

Roger Ebert is a film critic.

For me the great symbol of the Florida recount does not involve Bush or Gore, Daley or Baker. It involves the three election commissioners of Palm Beach County, holding open meetings in the bright Florida sunshine. Their names were Judge Charles Burton, Carol Roberts and Theresa LePore.

It was possible, we thought at the time, that they held the outcome of the election in their hands. Yet the world could see them debating the issues and taking their votes, right there on live television. There were no commissars or dictators lurking in the shadows. No jail cells or exile in their future–not even for Ms. LePore, who designed the ill-fated ballot. Meanwhile, our current president, far from planning a coup, was on the other side of the world, visiting our former enemy Vietnam.

These three citizens, plucked from obscurity by the chance of a close vote, performed their civic duty as if they were born to it. Like all Americans, they were. They assumed they had the right to try their best to figure out this thing.

Later, we had the sight of hundreds of citizens performing the hand count. The sight of ordinary people, holding a ballot up to the light, trying to ascertain the will of every single individual voter, was a powerful image in the service of democracy. How much light is allowed to fall on the ballots in many of the world’s elections, and how much scrutiny does each one ever receive?

The Florida affair also dramatized the role that women play in our democracy. In many nations women do not have the vote, and in some they essentially have no rights as all, except to be property. At times during the Florida recount process the whole struggle seemed to come down to two women: Secretary of State Katherine Harris, hell-bent to stop the recount, and Election Commissioner Carol Roberts, steel-willed that it continue. Roberts told her fellow commissioners, “There are three remedies under the law for us to choose from,” and in her voice you heard democracy speaking from the people up, not from the top down. As the process entered its endgame, a third woman appeared: Judge Nikki Clark, calm, firm and sane as she guided two overheated legal teams through the Seminole County case.

There was a lot of talk among the pundits about how impatient the people were getting, questions about how long the process could or should be drawn out. I heard none of that talk. Did you? The average citizen, fascinated by the process, wanted it to continue until a winner was made clear.

Of course a winner was not made clear. One was selected by judicial default rather than elected. But to stubbornly look on the bright side, even this was done in the full light of day: Anyone who cared enough could figure out, in the words of the immortal limerick, who did what, and with which, and to whom. The Florida episode may have shaken my faith in a lot of things, but I still believe it concealed no conspiracies or plots: What was done, for good or ill, was seen to be done.

We should take that image of an election volunteer peering intently at a single ballot, and put it on a postage stamp. A stamp with the correct postage for international mail.

Todd Gitlin is professor of culture, journalism and sociology at New York University and the author of “The Sixties,” “The Twilight of Common Dreams” and a new novel, “Sacrifice.”

These felt to me like high-school-level consolation talks in which each tries to persuade the followers of the other that the result isn’t so bad. The term “presidentiality,” which has spread like an ooze to cover the emptiness of what mainstream politics has to offer, has deservedly been invoked to describe what these men had to offer, demonstrating nothing more than the reasons why so much of America was not ignited by either of them.

There’s not much that I have to say about these talks as such. They were written for the pundits as rituals to soothe, but I doubt that they will deliver much soothing — nor do they deserve to — to those who doubted the stature and merits of the candidates in the first place.

Once again we were treated to the spectacle of the commentary chorus heralding the forthcoming “bringing us together” theme. I thought the pundits outdid themselves in blather. Chris Matthews [of MSNBC] spoke of Al Gore’s “sublime masculinity.” I think we need more investigation of what that might have meant.

I heard that Al Gore made a beautiful speech. I don’t know where I was when that speech was delivered. I heard a labored and forced incantation, vastly less eloquent than the look on Joe Lieberman’s face, which in its gravity spoke of social consequences that will likely be considerable.

To me this was a grave anticlimax. The country has been subjected to an appalling abuse of democratic rights, in particular the right to vote. It’s a trauma that has to be faced squarely and not smothered in empty unity talk, and I profoundly hope that Democrats will not forget why they received 50 percent of the vote.

David Horowitz is a Salon columnist.

Gore’s concession was as good as it could be. I can’t say he redeemed himself, but he certainly positioned himself for the next run. I think it was what was needed. For the moment, he’s effectively isolated Jesse Jackson, which is a good thing.

Bush was a lot more relaxed than he has been. People are going to be very surprised. He has it in him to be a great president. It’s going to be hard to resist the charm. His agendas are very much where the American people are. He’s been tremendously underestimated, and I’m looking forward to this presidency.

Bush should take steps on Social Security, education and healthcare. He needs to do a few bipartisan things. This was a brutal campaign. He’s been attacked as a moron and a racist — both of which are ridiculous. He’s going to have to take some time to establish himself. In the sense that he’s a people person, he’s a true leader. He has the ability and the patience to bring people along with him.

He’s going to give the African-American community a chance to take a look at their absurd voting postures and their absurd attacks on him. For the African-Americans of the inner city, I sure hope that the leadership gives him a chance and reciprocates his gestures.

I’d like to see them reform the electoral system. I don’t care how much money they spend to get the decent machines. They need to ensure that people don’t vote two and three times and to make sure that the voting procedures are standardized and that the counting is more objective and not subjective.

Larry Flynt is the publisher of Hustler.

Bush is going to be a one-term president with a popularity rating that will fall below 30 percent. It’s going to be a disaster.

Arianna Huffington is a political columnist and the author of “How to Overthrow the Government”

The morning after Al Gore’s “perfect” concession and George W. Bush’s humble acceptance, I was flipping through a magazine when an ad for an investment company caught my eye. It featured a smiling, gray-haired couple playing on a swing. An equally toothy representative of the investment firm named Pamela was pictured glancing in the direction of the swinging seniors. The ad copy was a transcript of a conversation between an “Investor” and a Company “Rep” (the grinning oldsters and Pam, I assume). There is even a time and date: “August 17th, 2000, 1:21 p.m.” Here’s the exchange:

INVESTOR: We’re calling for no other reason than to say thank you.
COMPANY REP: That’s a wonderful reason to call. Thank you.
INVESTOR: My wife and I are truly enjoying our retirement and want to thank you for your wonderful assistance throughout the years.
REP: Well … that makes me feel great. And I’ll pass that message along to everyone here.
INVESTOR: Especially a Mr. David Coyne. Is he still with the company?
REP: Oh, yes David’s been with us for close to 30 years.
INVESTOR: Well, he’s a gem. He really is. He’s the one that got us started.
REP: He’s a very good man.
INVESTOR: Well, I just want to you to know that we feel very fortunate.
REP: Thank you.
INVESTOR: No. Thank you!

End of copy.

Sure, it’s a little mushy, I thought — but heartfelt. Then my eyes drifted down to the bottom of the ad. In the tiniest of print were the words: “Dramatization, may not be representative of the experience of actual customers.”

That’s how I felt listening to the speeches of Gore and Bush. I mean, there was Gore waxing poetic: “In the words of our great hymn ‘America, America’: ‘Let us crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea’.” When what he really wanted to say was: “I wuz robbed. I won the popular vote! Popular vote!!” Bush, meanwhile, praised Gore’s “distinguished record of service to our country as a congressman, a senator, and as vice president” — a radical departure from the Bush campaign’s familiar theme of “Liar, liar, pants on fire!”

Too bad the networks didn’t add a small print disclaimer: “May not be representative of the feelings of these two actual politicians.”

Diana Furchgott-Roth is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Insitute. She formerly served as the associate director of the White House Office of Policy Planning under the Bush administration.

Bush should step forward and name his Cabinet — the people who are going to be in power and create his policies. He’s had huge success bringing the parties together behind his Republican legislation [in Texas]. I think that economic circumstances, not love for Bush or love for a united United States, are going to require the Democrats to fall behind certain things that Gov. Bush wants to do.

The economy is slowing down. There’s already pressure for tax cuts from some Democrats. It’s clear that Social Security needs to be reformed. The idea of private accounts is popular — so popular that when Bush announced it, Gore, after attacking it for two weeks, felt a need to have his own private account program to match it. Many of the things Bush wants to do are so popular that the Democrats are going to be cutting their own noses off their own faces by opposing them.

Douglas Brinkley is director of the Eisenhower Center and professor of history at University of New Orleans; he is also the author of “The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter’s Journey Beyond the White House.”

Bush took the first step [toward conciliation] last evening by making the bipartisan gesture at the state Capitol of Texas in front of the bipartisan legislators. The problem is that Democrats in Texas are so conservative that they are essentially Republican. So he had an easier audience than when he is going to start having to listen to the shrill rantings of Rep. Barney Frank, [D-Mass.].

He is going to need to appoint a couple of leading Democrats in his Cabinet, but not necessarily at major posts. It could be the head of Veteran’s Affairs or the Department of Energy, but a couple of Democrats would show symbolism. Then I think he’s going to need to do a couple of what I would call celebrity Democrat appointments to ambassadorships — just like Ronald Reagan sent Walter Mondale to Japan.

My hunch is that you will see Bush doing a lot of consulting with Bill Clinton, who will be willing to mug for the cameras and do it. There will gestures of bringing Jimmy Carter and Clinton, the former Democratic presidents to the White House. Then he’ll do some highly visible things with Sens. Bob Graham of Florida and John Breaux of Louisiana, who are his friends. He needs to give the perception that he’s listening to what the Democrats think.

But mainly, he can no longer tackle any major issues that were on the campaign trail — be it Social Security or HMO reform or education. He’s going to need to do something like focus on election reform, which might be even too bitter right now — or start worrying about foreign affairs. The strength of Bush is that he has people like Powell and Cheney surrounding him, and that to suddenly talk about the U.S. military and take some trips abroad to Russia or China. He’s somebody who’s spent virtually no time outside of the United States. He’s got to break the provincial yoke that surrounds him, get out there and talk to some world leaders and start at least seeming presidential on the nightly news before he becomes a puppet of “Saturday Night Live.”

Linda Chavez is a syndicated columnist and former director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (1983-’85).

The first and most visible thing Bush is going to do is name a Cabinet, and I think you are going to see good nominees and people who have reputations for reaching across party lines and across ideological divides.

I would be very surprised if he doesn’t name a Democrat to a high-level post. I think he will do that, and I think that the convention that George W. Bush held was a bridge builder, an attempt to reach out. I suspect you will see brown and black faces in that Cabinet — more than what one normally associates with a Republican administration. He will do some things in education early on. He cares a lot about education for the disadvantaged and he might have a different set of policy prescriptions, but his focus is very much where a liberal focus is in trying to help the kids who are most disadvantaged. You are going to see a lot of that kind of outreach.

Bush is a really likable guy, and he is somebody who people are comfortable with. I think in that sense he’s going to be a lot like Reagan. As much as people disagreed with Reagan’s policies, at least liberal Democrats, from [Speaker of the House] Tip O’Neill on down, they found him somebody that they could talk to and who was warm. Bush has that going for him, as well. It’s not just rhetoric that he is a uniter. If you look at his history with the Legislature in Texas, particularly when it was controlled by the Democrats, you’ve got him reaching across party lines and working with the Democrats, and I think you are going to see that again.

Ralph Neas is president of People for the American Way.

I thought Gore’s was a classy performance, which is exactly what those who have supported him would have expected all along. He took the high road with considerable grace, dignity and humor.

That aside, I want everyone to know that the progressive community will remember November. There are still a lot of questions about this election that need to be answered, and we will not stop pursuing them.

Bush sounded fine, moderate and soothing. But it’s not the first time he’s sounded like that, and there’s often been this disconnect between how he sounds and what he stands for. I’m wary because he’s been totally dependent on the right wing to get him where he is, whether it’s Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell in South Carolina, or Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court.

He will be the president, and we’re going to support him when he’s right, but we’ll correct him when he’s wrong.

Noam Chomsky is a professor at MIT.

To be frank, I find it hard to understand the attention given to this topic. The election was a statistical tie. Whatever the numbers are (if that’s even a meaningful question), the difference is surely overwhelmed by the inherent noise in the system. Since someone has to be picked, the sensible way would have been to flip a coin. There are interesting questions: e.g., why was the election a tie? There are also some plausible models that would yield that conclusion, and are probably close to accurate. But that’s another topic.

Robert George is a New York Post editorial page writer.

I have to admit, I was very impressed with Al Gore’s speech. I think he hit every graceful note that even some of his hardest critics on the conservative side were demanding or insisting on.

I thought it was particularly appropriate that he was the first American to call George W. Bush “president-elect,” which was a good, appropriate gesture. He used the word “concession.” There was a lot of talk about whether he would actually use that word, and he did.

One of the most interesting things is he was probably more relaxed and, I guess, human than in almost any speech that I’d ever seen before. It’s ironic that Al Gore, who at the Democratic Convention said he was his own man, didn’t become his own man until after the elction. The past 36 days is when he emerged from President Clinton’s shadow and finally, when he’s bowing out, he arguably gives the warmest speech of his career. It was self-deprecating in places but also statesmanlike as well.

I think we’ll see him in four years, but I don’t know if he’ll actually get the nomination in four years. There has not been a Democrat who has come back to get the party’s nomination after losing the presidency since Adlai Stevenson. Hubert Humphrey ran again in ’72 but he lost [the nomination] to George McGovern.

I thought Bush’s speech was good. I think rhetorically Gore’s speech was actually better, but Bush said what he had to say. The nicest thing about Bush’s speech was the setting. Having the Texas Democratic speaker of the House introduce him — I thought that was a good, atmospheric gesture. It was good for him to list the consensus agenda that was battled over in the campaign: drugs and education and defense and so forth.

I think there’s a lot of bipartisan stuff Bush can tackle that there’s already support for, whether it’s the marriage penalty or the death tax. There’s an agenda out there for him to pick up and run with that can go a long way to assuage some of the raw feelings that came out during this campaign. But I don’t think pardoning Clinton right off the bat would sit well with his base at all.

I think Bush can pick and choose who his friends are going to be in Congress. We saw during the campaign that he wasn’t too hesitant to stiff-arm the House Republicans when it served his purpose. I think, for one thing, Dennis Hastert is going to be more of his best friend than, say, Tom DeLay is going to be. I think just in terms of temperament, Hastert is more simpatico with Bush than DeLay is. In terms of Trent Lott, that’s kind of hard to say. In a certain way, you’ve almost got three majority leaders in the Senate. You’ve got Lott, you’ve got Tom Daschle and you’ve got Dick Cheney.

The Democrats are going to work with Bush until it’s no longer in their interest. That was the mistake that George Bush Sr. made.

Ward Connerly is the author of “Creating Equal: My Fight Against Race Preferences” and the founder and chairman of the American Civil Rights Institute. A member of the University of California Board of Regents, he headed the anti-affirmative action California Civil Rights Initiative, which campaigned for the passage of the state’s Proposition 209.

America is a deeply divided nation, with events of the past five weeks exposing and accentuating some of those divisions. Tonight’s speeches to the nation by Vice President Al Gore and President-elect George W. Bush must be viewed in the context of the divided nature of the American people and the national imperative for unity. By that standard, both Gore and Bush rose to the occasion.

Each speech was gracious and fit the role that was expected. Gore conceded unequivocally and offered the hand of cooperation to the victor, while Bush glided into the role of president-elect without appearing to gloat. America demonstrated its strength tonight, thanks to Gore and Bush.

Imagine! Five weeks of counting and recounting ballots with less than a few hundred votes out of 6 million separating the two contestants. And, at the end of the day no blood was shed and the two contestants appealed to their supporters to put the interests of the nation ahead of their self-interests. In the interest of full disclosure, I am not a Gore supporter. But tonight was his finest hour.

One should not become intoxicated, however, by one night of appeals to national unity. The real question is: Will you respect me in the morning? In this vein, will Jesse Jackson and other black “leaders,” for example, follow the leadership of Gore and accept this outcome without further inflammatory rhetoric? Will further attempts be made to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Bush presidency by Democratic partisans before Bush has any chance for a honeymoon? Will Republican ideologues demand that President Bush govern more as a prototypical Republican or will they give him sufficient wiggle room to govern from a centrist perspective?

Let us pray that tonight marked a new beginning to unite our nation.

Andrew Sullivan writes the TRB column for the New Republic, essays for the New York Times Magazine and daily commentary for www.andrewsullivan.com.

Was it just me or did Al Gore look liberated tonight? Part of me thinks he never wanted to be president — he just always thought he ought to want to be president. When he put his mind to it, he tried, but it was all perspiration and very little inspiration. I so desperately wanted him to give a good speech that maybe I’m biased, but I thought it was almost perfect. Crisp, eloquent, even moving. He’s a man, I think, who is always liberated by being told what to do. That’s why he was a good vice president, that’s why he gave a good concession speech — he had no credible alternative. But give him a multiplicity of choices and he freezes, loses confidence, turns to the slickest advisors out there and comes off as completely fake.

The speech tonight helped me come to terms with my mixed feelings about him. Finally St. Albans Al doing his duty, instead of that phony, grating populist claptrap we had to endure for months. He’s a nastily effective fighter, but he is never better than when losing. I am so relieved that he has finally given up that I’m almost prepared to forgive him the five weeks of insanity he put us through — for no good reason. In a race where the margin of error was always greater than the margin of victory, it was a horrible piece of narcissistic ambition, which has done nothing but tarnish our democratic institutions and the rule of law. Maybe that was why he kept going on about law and God in his speech. Maybe he was making amends to himself and the country. But, whatever the motivation, I am grateful that this lost and clueless soul will never be president of the United States.

As for Bush, someone needs to tell the guy how to use a teleprompter. He was effective nonetheless. The word that comes to mind is “mild.” He’s a mild and human man, almost kind, and the way he wrinkles his brow when he’s trying to say something important is almost affecting. It’s kind of a tic, like the way small children stick their tongues out when they’re writing. For the first time, he looked like a president. His priorities were those of a New Democrat (remember them?), which makes him almost designed for this moment, unless the Republican nutballs and Democratic whiners chew him apart. I have a feeling we may continue to underestimate him. Gore sure did. Gore’s supporters are still going around in their smug, self-serving way, talking about how dumb W. is. If he’s so dumb, how come he’s on the verge of becoming the most powerful man in the world, after Alan Greenspan? Oh, never mind.

As to what he needs to do, it’s pretty obvious: Stroke John McCain, kick Tom DeLay in the balls and appoint Condi Rice (National Security Council), Colin Powell (State), Frank Keating (Justice), Christie Whitman (Health and Human Services), Ward Connerly (Education) and Jim Kolbe (trade representative) to his Cabinet. He should make education reform his first priority, and get a whole bunch of easy bipartisan legislation passed soon — a ban on partial-birth abortion, the end of the marriage penalty, a reduction in the estate tax. The he needs to go after school vouchers and Social Security reform. Got that? Well, we can always dream.

Deirdre English is former editor of Mother Jones.

In retrospect, it’s clearer than ever that Clinton should have resigned back at the beginning of the Lewinsky scandal, that dog. He would have spared the nation that media nightmare, and the whole impeachment mess. Gore would have been made president, untainted by Billy’s moral turpitude, as it was gradually revealed, and would have had an unbeatable advantage (all other things being equal) in the current contest.

If Clinton had really sought to promote Democratic Party fortunes, rather than his own ego, that’s what he would have done. But no, he was willing to put a future Gore presidency at risk. People should think about that when they criticize Gore for not having unleashed Clinton in the campaign. Gore knows Clinton all too well.

Patricia Williams is a professor of law at Columbia University and columnist for the Nation.

I find the decision stunning. I hope it will come to be known as a departure in Supreme Court jurisprudence rather than a signal of things to come. Even Scalia’s history as a rather activist conservative did not prepare me for this bulldozing intervention. The morning after the decision, I was standing in the kitchen listening to the news on NPR, and my son came in and said, “Mummy, you look flabber-gassed.” That does just about sum it up.

Adding to the pain and anger was the irony that Lennon had only recently emerged from several years of withdrawal to produce a new album, “Double Fantasy,” the initial track of which was titled “(Just Like) Starting Over.” The record contained a number of superlative songs, such as “Woman,” “Watching the Wheels” and “Beautiful Boy.” Lennon was still involved in a media blitz on its behalf when he was shot by Mark David Chapman at the entrance to New York’s Dakota Building at 1 W. 72nd St., where he was living with his wife, Yoko Ono, and their son, Sean.

Friday is the 20th anniversary of Lennon’s death. I asked a number of people to recall their memories of the event. Not all are Lennon fans, but their recollections reveal the significance of the former Beatle’s death as one of those mental milestones by which we measure our lives.

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Robert Altman, film director

“Nashville” was sort of a harbinger of it. When John Lennon got assassinated, I got a call from a reporter at the Washington Post, and he asked, “Do you feel responsible for this?” I said, “How do you mean?” He said, “Well because in your film ‘Nashville’ you did an assassination of a celebrity.” I told him, “That’s what the film is all about — do you feel responsible for not heeding my warning?”

Lucianne Goldberg, syndicated talk show host and publisher of lucianne.com

I live a few blocks from the Dakota on the Upper West Side. I first heard that John Lennon had been shot while I was sitting in a taxi. It was on the radio. The taxi was less than a block from the Dakota at the time. My first thought was, “Why would anyone want to kill John Lennon? He’s just a West Side househusband.” Yoko, I could have understood — her music was awful. But John, then, was just the druggie Beatle who sat around a West Side pediatrician’s office with his baby son and could be seen pushing a stroller in the park or schlumping out of the deli at West 72nd Street and Columbus Avenue. I can remember being more curious about who could have wanted to shoot him.

On the way back across town a couple of hours later, the people were lined up in the dark on both sides of West 72nd Street. They all had candles and were trying to sing “Give Peace a Chance.” I thought that was an odd thing to sing at a murder scene. I rolled down the window and smelled a lot of pot in the air. I wondered what in the world was going to happen to his kid.

Larry Flynt, publisher, Larry Flynt Publications Inc.

I was in Los Angeles, and I was shocked in the same way that I was when John Kennedy got shot. I thought, “Here’s a young man who has made such a substantial contribution to our culture, and he has been taken from us in such a senseless way.” I was pretty much numb to respond beyond that.

Catherine Zeta-Jones, actress

I was 11 years old. I was actually in London, in a musical, and I remember all the grown-up people in the cast running through the corridors, shouting, “John Lennon’s dead.” It’s funny because our apartment in New York is two buildings away from the Dakota Building and right opposite Strawberry Fields. It always chills me when I see tourists pointing their cameras up to Yoko’s apartment or photographing the gate.

Michael and I actually went there the other day for a dinner party. We were waiting for the elevator to go up to our friend’s apartment, and Michael said, “Right here.” He was standing at the elevator once, going up to see a friend, and John Lennon walked out. He said, “I know you,” in his Liverpudlian accent, and they had a quick conversation. That was the last time Michael saw him. It’s kind of eerie when you live so close. I’ve met Yoko a few times. But it always gives me a chill when I see people photographing the Dakota — it makes my stomach turn a bit.

Michael Douglas, actor

I was one block away, where my apartment was. And I was actually there at the scene soon after the tragedy. I was right there. That actually was what motivated me to begin my work in handgun control — that incident.

Lydia Lunch, writer and spoken-word artist

Look, I’m lucky if I remember what I did last week, much less 20 years ago. But the murder of John Lennon defined a turning point in American history. No longer could we deny our monomania with celebrities, our ghoulish fascination with their life and the haunting, harassing and stalking of them unto and even beyond death. Everyone becomes more popular postmortem. More heroic. Mythical. Dead men always sell more records, more newspapers. How typically American that some sicko would take it upon himself to wipe out the messenger whose mantra was “Imagine” and “Give Peace a Chance.” We were forced to finally evaluate, because of his death, how truly radical Lennon was.

Roger Ebert, film critic

At the time the news was reported, I was on the air with the 10 p.m. Monday night newscast on Channel 5 in Chicago. We finished the newscast at 10:29 p.m., and then were startled to hear the voice of the station’s booth announcer reading the Associated Press bulletin. The show’s producer had made a judgment call that there was not time to get the bulletin to the news studio before the show ended.

I felt as if a chapter of history had been closed. I drove over to the Sun-Times and wrote a column for Tuesday’s paper. The vigil had begun in Central Park.

T. Coraghessan Boyle, novelist

I was in Los Angeles and I was writing my novel “Water Music.” And since I had been a witness — not an eyewitness but a witness — to many such traumatic events of the, let’s say, 12 years that preceded that, it didn’t rock me too much. It almost seemed expected in some way.

What’s his legacy? He is a pure rocker, absolutely the pure rocker, whose gut-wrenching vocals on songs like “Money” are still ringing in my head and helped form my own appreciation of rock ‘n’ roll and my own vocal style — him to a degree, but also people like Van Morrison and Muddy Waters and all sorts of great singers. But he was one of them. Many people will say as a composer he’s most important, but for me it’s just those gut-wrenching vocals he could do.

Cary Tennis, copy chief, Salon

I was living in a tent in rural Virginia, helping my mom build a house. My mom was living in a tent, too, a bigger tent. I had had a dream the night before of Yoko Ono yelling at John, “Oh, no! Oh, no!” You know, Yoko Oh No. Then I was riding on the back of a truck with a bunch of lumber and I was listening to the radio in the afternoon and the radio said that John Lennon had been shot. And then I remarked on my dream to my mother and we agreed it was an exceedingly curious dream.

Isaac Hayes, songwriter/musician

I was at the house of a friend of mine, Perlie Biles in Atlanta, when we heard the news on the radio of John Lennon’s death. What a waste. What a loss. You know, he lives through his music. That’s the good thing.

King Kaufman, associate managing editor, Salon

The day before John Lennon got shot, I got arrested. I was sitting in the back of a car in the parking lot of a mall in Brea, Calif., smoking marijuana with two buddies before a midnight movie showing of … I forget what. So we spent several hours of Sunday morning getting processed at the local police station and waiting for our bitterly disappointed parents to come pick us up.

On Monday, as I served the first day of my grounded-for-LIFE! sentence, Lennon was killed. My friend Stacy Flanders called me up and said, “Kind of a shitter of a week so far, huh?”

Tuesday I got called out of class by the newspaper advisor, who was really the cheerleader advisor (this was post-Prop. 13 California), who wanted me to write a tearful essay about the tragic loss of John Lennon. I did write some dumb thing, but only after having spent most of the day goofing around in the library with Ellen, who a few years later wrote me that in her job as a London call girl she’d had sex with Moammar Gadhafi.

But that’s another story.

Karen Finley, performance artist and author

I was crossing the Bay Bridge leaving San Francisco, going to Oakland, as I heard the news on the radio. I was just approaching the bridge. All I thought was that tragedy affects everyone. And in time it does affect everyone. Several years later, as a waitress, I would wait on Yoko with her dark glasses and serve her espresso. All I thought of was that both Jackie Kennedy and Yoko Ono wore dark black glasses after the death of our heroes.

Mamie Van Doren, actress and blond bombshell

I was in Florida, and I was working on a musical comedy called “Making Whoopee.” I was staying at a hotel, and I turned the TV on and saw that Lennon had been killed. I remember I left the hotel and went to a place to eat by myself. It was very cold out, and very depressing. It made me very sad.

China Forbes, lead singer, Pink Martini

I don’t remember where I was when John Lennon was shot. My sister tells me I was “in the living room with Dad.” Since I was only 10 years old, it didn’t have the effect on me that it had years later when I realized how tragic it was that he wasn’t around anymore. Before his death, I remember dancing around our apartment with my sister, blasting my dad’s LPs in the living room and acting out various characters in the songs on “Sgt. Pepper’s”: Lucy, Rita, Mr. Kite, the Hendersons. When “Double Fantasy” came out, we were mostly obsessed with Yoko’s unusual singing style. But I really didn’t feel the impact of what had happened on Dec. 8, 1980, until I grew up with all the great footage and all of his great songs. And now I feel gypped.

Geddy Lee, singer/bassist, Rush

I was at Morin Heights, a recording studio an hour north of Montreal, working on the song “Witch Hunt” for the “Moving Pictures” album the night he was shot. It was a very heavy moment, I recall.

I think we were all just stunned. I remember constantly going back and forth, from working to the TV, to try to get some news. If I remember the environment, looking around the room, my memory just shows me a lot of pale faces staring at the tube.

Bob Guccione Jr., editor and publisher, “Gear,” and former editor and publisher, “Spin”

I was in New York with my then (now someone else’s) wife. We had just had dinner and saw the news report on TV. We had been near the Dakota that night and I had walked past it the evening before, I think. We lived on East 67th Street then, just the other side of Central Park.

I was stunned by the news, but unmoved per se. It was simply a big news story — I didn’t know the man. I felt in the disconnected way one does at recognizing the name and life of a victim, but no more emotion than that. I loved the Beatles — and therefore, abstractly, Lennon’s contribution to my entertainment and cultural nourishment. But I’ve always thought that the people who get emotionally upset, even disturbed, at the death of someone they never knew are a little emotionally lacking. I mean, what happens to them when someone they knew, who knew them, dies?

Lennon didn’t belong to the people (and neither did Princess Di or JFK Jr.) — his work did. And it’s still available for purchase.

My second reaction, which I insightfully imparted to my wife, was, “Well, that settles the issue of a Beatles reunion.” Lennon never wanted it anyway.

Adam Parfrey, publisher, Feral House

Around that time Darby Crash, the lead singer of the Germs, died, and that was much more important to me than John Lennon’s death. But when Lennon died, I was visiting my brother in L.A., and we were having a laugh about it with Michael Collins because people were boohoo-hoo-ing it so much.

Philip Kaufman, film director

I was in the basement of a house in St. Helena, Calif., in the wine country, watching television with a writer friend of mine named Bo Goldman, who won a couple of Oscars, for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Melvin and Howard.” I can remember it coming over the TV, and Bo and I were sitting there drinking a bottle of wine.

It was shocking and terrifying. I remember both Kennedy assassinations. I remember Martin Luther King’s. As with all of them, you felt this terror and outrage.

Virginia Vitzthum, columnist, Salon Sex

I was a sophomore in college, and it was the first public murder that mattered to me. I’d spent my adolescence buying Beatles and Dylan instead of Eagles and Frampton, wishing I’d been born 10 years earlier. Lennon’s early death wrinkled time even more: New Yorkers John and Yoko moved suddenly into the history books with the Fab Four.

About 15 girls gathered in my dorm room that night. I played “I’m So Tired” and “Rain” and “I’m Only Sleeping” and “Cry Baby Cry” and “Strawberry Fields” — all full of Lennon’s dissatisfied intelligence and pain and desire for obliteration. The death wish in those songs gave a jagged comfort that night; to hear him sing “Oh Yoko” or “In My Life” or “Twist and Shout” would have been unbearable.

John Rechy, novelist

I was in L.A. when it happened, and I was, of course, appalled. I had never been a fan of the Beatles or of John Lennon particularly. But I was an admirer of what he stood for, if not of his music. It just seemed to be one more atrocity in a string of such atrocities sweeping the country, as with the killings of the Kennedys or of Martin Luther King, where individuals of a liberal orientation were assassinated.

Jeff Stark, associate editor, Salon Arts & Entertainment

I don’t remember a thing. I was 8, and in terms of music, my parents considered Neil Diamond more important than John Lennon. We were probably listening to “The Jazz Singer” soundtrack at the time.

I can remember exactly when Kurt Cobain died, and that hurt, but I was really more angry at him than upset. I can’t imagine how unjust, how unfairly ironic, it must have been to see Lennon go. There’s really no comparison. I’d like to think that I was fortunate to be spared the hurt in 1980, but Lennon’s music — and Lennon — has meant even more to me than sad Cobain.

At the same time, Cobain was real, and I got to watch him breathe and sweat and flail. He knew people I knew; he was a guy. Lennon has always been a ghost, just another person whose work grabbed onto me from out of the past, like Mark Rothko or Shakespeare.

I guess when you get older you learn that people die and that it’s almost always unfair. And there are things that you wish you’d seen or said or even been around to witness. There wasn’t enough time and there never is. But it feels weird to have shared eight years on the same earth with someone whom I admire so much and feel absolutely no connection to — to have been essentially unaware that he even existed. I know he too was human, but he might as well not have been.

Linda Hamilton, actress

I was in New York. I sort of grew up in this funny musical family who was out of touch with the rest of the world, on classical music. But I remember how huge it was for everybody around me; it was a citywide phenomenon. It sort of felt like somebody had draped a dark cloth over the entire city for days on end, like a tinge darker.

Dr. Susan Block, author and sex therapist

I’d just left New Haven, Conn., and moved to San Francisco to go to grad school part time and try to be a hippie full time. Folks kept telling me I was a decade too late, but I didn’t believe them. I was living in a big beautiful Victorian house on Masonic Avenue near Haight Street, trying to restart the revolution with a bunch of other hippie wannabes.

We were having one of our big organic dinners when one of the members of the house came running downstairs, saying he’d just heard from a friend back East that John Lennon had been killed. At first, we didn’t believe it. We thought it was just another Beatles rumor, like Paul being dead. Then we turned on the TV, and it was all over the news. We cried and hugged and put “The White Album” on the record player. I felt numb. I realized that maybe those folks were right: John was dead, Reagan was president, the ’80s were underway and it was too late to restart the revolution — that revolution anyway.

Benicio Del Toro, actor

I know exactly where I was. It was 1980, right? I was in Puerto Rico. My brother was a big fan of the Beatles, and I was too. That album “Double Fantasy” had just come out, with Yoko Ono. I heard in school. My brother came up to me and he said, “They killed John Lennon.” I remember I cried.

Anthony York, associate editor, Salon News

I can’t pretend I knew who John Lennon was in 1980, being 6 years old as I was, but I do have a vivid memory from the period of his assassination. It was Election Day 1980. I remember my baby sitter, Tom, pulling up to the house in his Renault Le Car and dragging me off with him to his polling place, in a coffee shop at Pepperdine University. He plopped me in front of the Kiss pinball machine as he raced into line to cast his vote for Ronald Reagan.

I still remember the sounds of ELO’s “Don’t Bring Me Down” cranking from the speakers of that university coffee shop, the wild flapping of flippers and buzzing of bells from the pinball table that lit up under my watchful eye and frenetic fingers. And 20 years later, these things taken together make sense: Reagan’s triumphant sweep to office riding a crest of religious conservatism, the abnormal falsetto melody lines of ELO’s cocaine synth-pop shaking the glass top of the pinball table before me, the haunting vision of an airbrushed Gene Simmons glaring back from on high, makeup caked on, lizard tongue extended. The violent static electricity of that moment could only have been revolutionary fervor. Lennon was just among the casualties of the ancien régime. And I stood like a statue, moving only my fingers, barely breathing, a 6-year-old sponge in the hills of Malibu, Calif.

Sharon Mitchell, founder, Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation, health watchdog of the adult-film industry

I remember distinctly where I was at the time of John Lennon’s death. I was in a limousine, stuck in traffic on Central Park West about two blocks from the Dakota Building. I was with the band that I was currently in, called Neon Leon and the Bondage Babies, and I cried a deep sorrowful cry — the kind that junkies seldom get to feel but at that moment I felt.

F. Murray Abraham, actor

I was in Morocco with two of my fellow actors — Denholm Elliot was one and Tony Vogel was the other — and Tony said, “You Americans — that couldn’t happen anywhere but America, that they would kill someone like Lennon.” I remember it distinctly. I told him to drop dead. “Do you really believe there aren’t crazy people in England?”

Andrew Leonard, editor, Salon Technology and Business

I was a freshman at the University of Michigan, and I was hanging out in the room across the hall, watching “Monday Night Football.” To hear Howard Cosell announce Lennon’s death was a true introduction to the surreal.

I had been weaned on the Beatles by a father who helped organize antiwar demonstrations and a mother who had me out on street corners selling McGovern for President buttons in 1972. In high school, my long hair and glasses made me look, said my friends, like a dead ringer for Lennon. I was a walking cliché that night — like a million other college students, I retreated to my own room, got stoned and played “Imagine” about 100 times.

It was quite the bummer. But you know, for my daughter Tiana’s third birthday, I made her a tape of Beatles tunes. She’s now 6 and she has most of the songs on the tape memorized. And I’ve heard her singing along with John on “I Should Have Known Better”: “So I should have realized a lot of things before/If this is love you’ve got to give me more/give me more, hey hey hey, give me more.” And when I hear that same note of Lennon-esque gleeful exaltation crack in her voice on that last “more,” I know Lennon’s not really dead, and never will be.

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Compiled with the assistance of Eric Layton, Jeremy Rosenberg, Brent Simon and Chris Colin.