But now it’s time to wrap up the show. The American people have spoken — again and again, in poll after poll — and their decision remains the same post-speech: He committed no offense worth impeachment, his folly is between him and his wife, Ken Starr has overstayed his welcome on the national stage, let’s move on.

But Starr and his prosecutors will not move on, nor will the country’s political and media elites — all of whom remain defiantly at odds with the will of the people. Public opinion be damned, the barons of the Beltway are bent on a palace coup! For years now, Washington’s permanent government — its puffed-up caste of pundits and politicos — has been veering more and more out of touch with American sentiment. The Clinton sex crisis — for that is what it really is, despite all the blather about perjury and obstruction of justice — brings this extreme disconnect between the elite and the people into its sharpest focus yet.

And so we have today’s bizarre spectacle. While Starr’s minions collected samples of Clinton’s DNA — a bureaucratic invasion of the president’s body so grotesque it would make Kafka shudder — U.S. fighter planes struck back at the terrorist compounds that have declared war on the U.S. The world has clearly moved on, even if Starr refuses to.

And yet this peculiarly American inquisitor — a cross between Comstock and McCarthy — plows on, now seeking to trap Clinton with apparent inconsistencies and bring down a presidency on legal technicalities. Clinton has made his confession and offered his apologies. But this all just leaves Starr panting for more.

At the 1992 GOP convention in Houston, Patrick Buchanan famously committed Republicans to a “cultural war” against the values they detest, values embodied by the 1960s-shaped Bill Clinton. Ken Starr has become the point man in this cultural crusade — prim, doughy and bespectacled, but an avenging warrior nonetheless. He will not rest until Clinton’s head is on his pole — no matter how much collateral damage he wreaks on the American political and judicial systems in the process.

This is why it was deeply proper for Clinton to strike back at Starr in his Monday night speech. The Republican talking heads and professional commentators have scolded the president all week for angrily saying “enough” to his tormentor. But most Americans heartily agree — they too have had enough. This week, as Starr keeps dragging his victims and accomplices before his grand jury, unassuaged by Clinton’s admission, the independent prosecutor seems more out of control than ever. He clearly cannot restrain himself. So it is high time for the forces of fairness and moderation within the American system to do the job for him. Starr himself must come under intense review, before he does any more harm to the country and the institutions he professes to revere.

In recent weeks, Starr’s largely unaccountable investigation has finally come under official scrutiny. Because of Steven Brill’s explosive report in Content magazine on the unethical relationships between Starr’s office and favored members of the Washington press corps, federal judge Norma Holloway Johnson has turned a sharp eye on Starr’s prosecute-by-leaks strategy. And as a result of Salon magazine’s investigative stories on alleged payoffs to Starr’s leading Whitewater witness, David Hale, this matter is now under federal investigation by a team led by former Justice Department watchdog Michael Shaheen. Shaheen is summoning many of the key figures in Salon’s stories to testify.

It is vitally important that these investigations of Starr’s operation proceed quickly and fully. And it is equally important for the national media, which has so far ignored the Shaheen probe, to report on what these investigations reveal about Starr.

After Sen. Joseph McCarthy was finally censured by his Senate colleagues and the vicious drama of McCarthyism came to an end, legendary CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow reflected on how McCarthy had come to wield so much power and inflict so much harm before he was finally stopped. “McCarthy was in a real sense the creature of the mass media,” said Murrow, whose TV program “See It Now” was a solitary anti-McCarthy voice in the media wilderness. The media “made him. They gave nationwide circulation to his mouthings. They defended their actions on the grounds that what he said was news, when they knew he lied … He polluted the channels of communication, and every radio and television network, every newspaper and magazine publisher who did not speak out against him, contributed to his evil work and must share part of the responsibility for what he did, not only to our fellow citizens but to our self-respect.”

While Starr is not of the same menacing stature as McCarthy, the same observation can be made today of his use of the press. It is the national media that created Ken Starr, by giving credence to his Whitewater investigation even after he himself had lost faith in it and was seeking escape to Malibu’s Pepperdine University. They kept him going by elevating the Paula Jones case to a vital national matter, and then by helping him link it to the Monica Lewinsky affair. They offered no murmur of protest when the prosecutor took his inquiry in a jarring new direction, abandoning his costly and lengthy Whitewater probe to invade the president’s private life and now even his body. No one in the mainstream media has had the courage and dignity to say, in defense attorney Joseph Welch’s famous words to McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” — because the media itself has become shameless.

If the media made Starr, it can — and must — now unmake him. The New York Times and Washington Post — the two great news institutions that are virtual branches of American government — can begin to do the right thing by turning their considerable investigative powers on the independent prosecutor’s office. New York Times editorial page czar Howell Raines and columnists like Maureen Dowd are famously disgusted by Clinton’s character flaws. But, as even Dowd herself wrote this week, you can hate Clinton’s flaws and still “think Mr. Starr’s investigation has been scary.”

The Times and the Post invested a lot of money and institutional credibility in Ken Starr’s version of Whitewater. But significant reporting in various other publications — including Murray Waas’ investigative work for Salon — has at the very least damaged Starr’s Whitewater case, the origin of this entire national nightmare. Now that an official federal investigation is following in the wake of this revisionist reporting, the Times and Post have a pressing responsibility to re-report Whitewater and examine how Starr built his case. They owe it to the country and to themselves. Newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post are grand enough to acknowledge their mistakes, if they do indeed find fault with their earlier coverage. Their editors should not let pride stand in the way of that quaint-sounding old media value, national duty.

Instead of fulminating against the polls and trying to explain them away, it’s time for the country’s elites to begin taking to heart what the public is urgently telling them about Ken Starr and the national ordeal he seems bent on prolonging.

But this time, the Journalistas are onto much bigger game. Following hard on the heels of such illustrious Salon critics as the Moonie-owned Washington Times, the far-right Landmark Legal Foundation and the litigation-mad Larry Klayman, the man who once sued his own mother, the Wall Street Journal lashes us for having among our investors a fund formerly chaired by William Hambrecht, the pioneering Silicon Valley venture capitalist. It seems that Hambrecht, who has bankrolled such high-tech institutions as Adobe, Apple, Genentech and Sybase, once hosted a party for Bill Clinton and has donated money to Democratic candidates. This is proof positive, we gather, that we’re dancing on the puppet strings of the president and his vast left-wing conspiracy.

These sorts of deterministic, connect-the-dots theories can be fun. We remember our days in college, when Marxist sociology students would spend hours in the campus library, poring over interlocking corporate directorates and spinning out theories of Who Owns America. The trouble, as these angry young scholars learned upon graduation, is that reality is not so neat. And so it is with Salon and its corporate directorate.

The truth is that while Bill Hambrecht once genially shook the hand of this editor, he has had nothing more to do with Salon’s management than that. He does not sit on our board. He does not, alas, invite us to his parties. And he most certainly does not use Salon to carry out his political vendettas the way Richard Mellon Scaife used the Wall Street Journal editorial czars’ beloved American Spectator magazine.

In fact, Salon’s board is a hodgepodge of political affiliations, from Libertarian to Democrat to Republican to Independent. Their only common passion is money, and the fervent hope that Salon makes lots of it.

The Wall Street Journal’s extreme-right editorial board, on the other hand, is driven by more ideological passions. This is why little Salon, paid circulation zip, continues to rouse its mighty ire. Our investigative reporting has drawn blood. Because of our stories on Hale, a former Justice Department watchdog has been appointed to investigate Whitewater’s star witness. Provoked by coverage in Salon and Steven Brill’s new gadfly magazine, Content, the spotlight is at last beginning to fall on Starr’s permanent inquisition.

Now that some of the right questions are finally being asked about Starr and his chums in the media, it’s time to return to a question we asked when the Journal editorial page first declared war on Salon. How is it that the nation’s leading business news publication has allowed its editorial pages to be usurped by such crackpots as Robert Bartley and John Fund, men who have steered the paper resolutely away from the mainstream of business thinking into the misty shores of anti-Clinton lunacy? It’s as if the New York Times had handed over its religious coverage to Marshall Applewhite of Heaven’s Gate or the Economist had named Ted Kaczynski its business and technology editor. Has the Journal decided that combining its sober reporting with a madman-in-the-attic editorial perspective makes for a compelling circulation strategy? Or is a Marxist study group led by Noam Chomsky stealthily boring from within at the Journal, preparing for the revolution in the most unlikely of places?

Our critics’ anxiety is certainly understandable. As a result of Salon’s reporting, the Justice Department has decided that the alleged payments to Hale must be thoroughly investigated, a probe that could strike at the heart of Starr’s massive Whitewater inquiry. Starr and the Justice Department are now involved in a momentous tug of war over who will control the Hale investigation.

The lead editorial in Friday’s Wall Street Journal took the most pointed aim at Salon. The Journal tried heroically to shore up the tattered reputation of the American Spectator, a publication that allowed itself to be used as a money laundering machine for Scaife’s anti-Clinton propaganda operation. So distressed was the Spectator’s publisher about this misuse of the magazine that he protested vehemently, only to be fired by editor R. Emmett Tyrrell. Despite this, and a barrage of other bad publicity about the Spectator (including former Spectator writer David Brock’s recent repudiation of his own “Troopergate” story), the Journal still champions it (albeit somewhat faintly) as a “bona fide publication.”

Salon, on the other hand, is disparaged as an “Internet magazine … (paid circulation zip).” We plead guilty to both charges. Because Salon is free and because of our commitment to publishing important and overlooked stories, our circulation has grown to nearly 8 million page views a month and over a half million individual users. Our reporting on the Clinton-Starr national drama has not only been more enterprising than the Wall Street Journal’s, it has been more reliable. Let’s not forget the Journal’s only “scoop” to date — that a White House steward had caught the president and Monica Lewinsky alone together. Unfortunately, this shocking exclusive proved to be untrue, which the Journal was forced to concede a few days later.

The Journal’s editorialist also implies, in a particularly garbled passage, that Salon has a sinister relationship of sorts with White House spinmeister Sidney Blumenthal. This is a smear, pure and simple, of the kind that the Journal’s editorial pages have long been masters. When facts fail the Journal’s editorial hit team, as they so often do, they resort to party-line invective.

For the record, Salon is a thoroughly independent publication that has published a wide and vibrant range of reporting and opinion during its two-and-a-half-year history. As a scroll through our archives will clearly attest, we have attacked President Clinton from the left, right and center — taking him to task for everything from his failed health-care reforms to his show of tears over the Rwanda holocaust, an epic tragedy he could have brought to a quicker conclusion. Throughout the Lewinsky affair, we have published scathing attacks on his character from regular columnists such as David Horowitz and Camille Paglia, as well as contributors such as Barbara Ehrenreich.

But we have also grown concerned, as have many Americans, about how Clinton’s most obsessive critics seem so intent on advancing their own political agenda that they have resorted to covert and anti-democratic tactics to bring down his presidency. This secret campaign against Clinton, and its connections to the Starr investigation, is a story of far greater importance, in our opinion, than the Lewinsky saga.

The most pressing question, then, is not about Salon’s demonstrably independent journalism, but about major journalistic institutions like the Wall Street Journal. How did a great national newspaper allow its editorial pages to be hijacked, for many years now, by far-right propagandists? During the Clinton presidency, these propagandists have turned the Journal’s pages over to some of the most noxious sludge that has ever been dredged up in American politics, including dark charges about Vincent Foster’s death and Clinton’s “connections” to Arkansas cocaine smuggling.

Who is on watch at the Wall Street Journal while this rot corrupts the newspaper’s good name? When will someone in authority at this venerable publication finally step forward and say, “enough” to this subversion of the Journal’s reputation?

The air has been filled of late with much somber commentary about the damaged reputation of the presidency. But we feel even more concern about the credibility of America’s media institutions. While the public looks on with puzzlement and disgust, too much of the press has sunk to the level of that “bona fide” publication, the American Spectator. It’s time for some deep and fearless media soul-searching.

In the most jagged moments of anguish during his two-year stay, Harris was
even driven to declare, “I refuse to be black.” One such moment
occurred in the middle of the night, when Harris was shaken from this sleep
by the sounds of a man beating a woman in the street below his apartment.

“In the few moments of my indecision I told myself that enough was enough,
told myself that I wanted no longer to be black if this is how black men
behaved, told myself that I wanted nothing more to do with a world without
beauty in it, and that cared not for beauty. It had been beautiful and
joyful once, but this  this man beating a woman  this is what
we’ve let it all come down to: this man beating this woman, the drug
dealers lining too many streets in the neighborhood, women willing to sell
themselves for a pittance and men willing to buy them, the rats and the
roaches, the joblessness, the fatherless children and the mothers who do
not care, the far too many people who do not seem to care.”

Then Harris slipped on his jeans and T-shirt and went downstairs to confront the woman’s attacker. “Perhaps in time I can indeed refuse to be black … but not this
night. This night I am here. This night I am black and I am in Harlem and I
have no choice but to be in this moment and make of it what I can.”

We spoke recently with Harris by phone in Baltimore, where he was stopping
over during his book tour.

When you were 10, your family moved out of the St. Louis ghetto and into
the suburbs. Later you went to Stanford, traveled far and wide, lived in
Europe, became a writer, someone who fairly easily crosses the color
barrier. Then you decided to move to Harlem, to the heart of black America.
To find out, in a way, in what sense are you black. So what did you
discover? What is it about you that is black, other than your skin
pigmentation?

I still don’t have an answer. I think it’s wholly absurd, the notion that I
am who I am because of the color of my skin. If you come up to me at a
cocktail party, I want it to be impossible for you to make assumptions
about me because my skin is black and I’m tall and I wear a beard. I could
be the meanest guy; I could be the sweetest guy. If you want to know who I
am, I want you to have to talk with me. To find out who is the whole
person. So that’s what I’m trying to explore in this book  what does
it mean to be black in America, apart from the fact that white people, and
black people too, expect something from me because of my skin color.

All right, so what does it mean to be black?

Well, apart from skin color, there is a rich cultural heritage. It comes
from the historical treatment of black people. There is blues and jazz and
gospel; there is barbeque, black-eyed peas. There is so much that is
emblematic of being black. But does that mean that a white person can’t
enjoy black-eyed peas?

Yes, as Stanley Crouch has said, to a large extent black culture
is American culture.

Look at Michael Jordan and see how black athletes have changed this
American pastime, basketball  they’re not playing Bob Cousey
basketball anymore. We’re playing a different brand of basketball and
football and baseball, which then, because it’s so inspiring, makes white
athletes want to play it. We are a part of this culture, another rich piece
of the fabric. We all need to recognize this and to stop trying to limit
ourselves based on our skin colors.

So if you feel that blackness is essentially just skin tone, why do you
encourage professionals, middle-class blacks such as yourself, to move back
to Harlem? Why “give back” something to a community if that community is
based only on such a superficial thing as skin color?

Well, in my ideal world, it wouldn’t be only black professionals who move
back, it would be every stripe of middle-class person. Neighborhoods should
have more variety, period. I did a book reading in Seattle and some white
kid asked me, “Could I move to Harlem?” I would love to find a way
for her to do that, a way that would be no more dangerous than moving into
any urban neighborhood.

Do you really think that’s realistic?

No I don’t. But I think it ought to be. I think anyone who wants to live in
Harlem should be able to.

In your book, you draw a stark contrast between the world of your father
and the world of today. What went wrong with urban black America, between
your dad’s generation of strivers and freedom fighters and the ’90s?

Communities like Harlem sowed the seeds of their own destruction by
succeeding so well. My father’s generation tried its best to deliver their
sons and daughters from the ghetto, by ending segregation. And because we
no longer have to live in a segregated neighborhood, those of us who can
have moved away from the black community. Even if we still live in the
Harlems, if we can afford to, we send our kids to private schools downtown,
take our trips to Europe, spend our money in fancy French restaurants
instead of the corner soul food place. So all of those institutions that
were underlying the black community in the days of segregation just
disappear, as people like my father climbed up and out and took his kids
with him.

You write about how when you were growing up in the inner city, you
lived across the hallway from a young up and coming St. Louis pitcher named
Bob Gibson and down the street from other impressive role models.

Yes, I looked out my window and could see the dentist who lived on the
corner, the piano teacher, a whole range of people I could grow up to be or
not be. I had all these choices. Now when you look at the black community,
at least what we consider the black community  the hard-core urban
centers  all these role models have disappeared. It leaves only the
gangster and the drug dealer for kids to see. There are no decent jobs
there anymore, no factories, nothing but the guy on the corner selling
drugs.

And without legitimate male authority figures around to help guide them,
these young men grow up thinking the way of the gun is the only way. One
day, while walking in Harlem, you had occasion to meet one such young man
and it could have ended very badly for you.

Yes, I was just trying to tell this guy that he had options, that he didn’t
have to automatically resort to violence. On this particular day, as I was
walking down the street, my way was blocked by this young man who who was
taking up all the room on the sidewalk, talking to his girlfriend who was
sitting on the stoop. In order to be who I am, I almost had no choice but
to brush by this guy, or otherwise I would have had to step off the
sidewalk into the gutter. I wasn’t looking for a fight, but in order to be
me I had to intrude on his territory, and in order to be him, he had to
show me his gun and threaten me. And when he did, I turned to talk with him
and tried to show him that he had a choice, that he didn’t have to use the
gun, he didn’t have to shoot me. Somebody should have told this to the guy
years ago. All too often, because people in places in Harlem think they
don’t have choices, they just fall in line, they pull the trigger. So it
fell to me, in this moment of terror, to explain this to the guy.

How much of Harlem’s trouble is self-inflicted?

A lot of it. Because of what I mentioned earlier, all of the successful
people who left it and turned their backs on it. And also because of this
crazy disregard for education you see in black schools. Instead of saying
education is a good thing, you need to learn white English to infiltrate
the mainstream culture, kids are getting this message that if you’re smart,
you’re a traitor. So in that sense, it’s totally self-inflicted.

Do you think the ebonics controversy is an example of that?

When I first heard about it, I just shook my head and said, “Well,
America’s fucked. It’s going right down the tubes into the realm of Bosnia,
where everybody is claiming his cultural quarter.” But then I heard a woman
on NPR the other day saying that ebonics is actually a way to bring these
kids into the world of standard English. So in that sense it may not be so
harmful.

The sad thing is that it’s come to the point where we have to divide the
culture this way. Instead of retreating to our own corner, black people
should be saying we want ownership of all the country, we want to be able
to share in every aspect of this society. I can’t stand it when I hear
people say that black culture is distinct from the general American
culture. We’re all part of this culture.

When it comes to filling out the census questionnaire and you’re asked
what are you  black, white, yellow, brown  do you think
people should be able to check “none of the above”?

I would like for people to check that box.

Would you be able to check that box at this point in your life?

Yes, if I weren’t trying to get some advantage from checking the black box.
To get a scholarship or something like that.

But I mean for you personally, at this point in your life. You have a
career as a writer, you’re not a kid anymore.

Yes, but in a sense I’m capitalizing on being black  by writing these books
that have an underlying theme of race.

So you’re saying that’s the only reason you identify as black, because
it’s of some use to your career?

No, but it’s a genuine concern. And I wish that the need for that wasn’t
there. But it doesn’t do anyone any harm for me to check the black box.

What about those opponents of affirmative action who would say that
claiming special privilege based on your skin color does in fact do harm.
If you want a genuinely color-blind society, should everyone drop these
special claims to privilege?

Yes, when we get to a certain point, I agree we should drop all such claims
to privilege. But no one’s dropping these claims now, whether it’s a black
kid filling out his college application or a white suburbanite using his
father’s connections.

But Colby in 1984 was still the same trim, cold, owlish man who had run the CIA’s infamous Phoenix program in Vietnam, which claimed the lives of more than 20,000 Viet Cong suspects. Though he was sharing the stage in these years with nuclear freeze activists and pacifists, he never renounced his past. There was a chilling pride in his monotone voice when he told me that by the North Vietnamese leadership’s own admission, Phoenix was “the single most effective thing that was ever done against them.”

But if this devout Catholic refused to make a confession, there was a sense that he was doing penance by going before peace rallies and being yelled at again and again for running “death squads” in Vietnam. He would sit on stage, calmly taking the verbal lashing, and just as calmly replying that yes, there had been some “excesses,” but no, it was not a death-squad program. “We were arresting people, because obviously they were of more value to us alive than dead.”

On the ground, though, like so much else in Vietnam, Phoenix was not as clean as the wise men would have liked. CIA renegade Frank Snepp would later write in his book, “Decent Interval,” that no one “ever decided who was to be considered a Viet Cong cadreman…For lack of finite guidance, the Phoenix strike teams opted for a scattershot approach, picking up anyone who might be a suspect; and eventually, when the jails were filled to overflowing, they began simply taking the law, such as it was, into their own hands.”

One of Colby’s own daughters was rumored to be another casualty of his war. In 1973, Catherine Colby, who had lived with her father in Saigon in the early ’60s, died of epilepsy and anorexia nervosa. But he denied that she was a psychological victim of the war. “She had physical and psychiatric problems,” Colby told People magazine, “but on that subject (Vietnam) she was always very supportive of me.”

If Colby outraged peace audiences during his ban-the-bomb years, he provoked murderous hatred from his colleagues in the espionage establishment when he directed the CIA during the tumultuous post-Watergate years of 1973-76. While predecessor Richard Helms was “the man who kept the secrets,” Colby was the man who let them out and the spy priesthood never forgave him for this or for firing the strange, obsessed mole-hunter James Jesus Angleton. But in Colby’s mind, he was, again, simply doing the rational thing, cooperating with Congressional investigators in order to restore public trust in the agency.

He had begun his spying career as “the traditional gray man, so inconspicuous that he can never catch the waiter’s eye in a restaurant,” as he described himself in his 1978 memoir, “Honorable Man: My Life in the CIA.” But by the time Colby was dismissed by President Ford, he was notorious, a man reviled both inside and outside governing circles.

In the final two decades of his life, he worked in Washington as an attorney and consultant. Last year, he and a retired Soviet agent portrayed themselves in a computer game called “Spycraft.” But he will not be remembered for any of this. William Colby was a former executioner who could not win the peace movement’s love, a former company man condemned as a traitor by his own firm.

Gringos go home!

U.S. expats not so welcome in decades-old Mexican paradise.

By SAM QUINONES

SAN MIGUEL DE ALLENDE, MEXICO
America’s crackdown on illegal immigrants is finding an odd echo in this picture-postcard town in central Mexico. The local citizenry are up in arms over the growing number of “illegal” Americans living here.
Last month, just after the videotape of Riverside County sheriffs beating Mexican immigrants aired nationwide, the town vented its feelings in an anti-U.S. immigrant march. About 150 residents — mainly farmworkers and people with relatives in the U.S. — demanded the ouster of Americans they claim are renting out homes without paying taxes on the proceeds, as required by law. Others, they say, work without visas or exploit Mexican workers by not paying them overtime.
“They’re treated well here,” says Eric Ramirez, one of the march’s organizers. “What we’d like is that our people be treated the same way over there.”
All this has ruffled feathers in this idyllic town, whose cobblestone streets are lined with restaurants, craft stores and brightly painted homes, and where the main activities seem to be shopping and sipping coffee.

Americans who live here dispute the claims. “Nobody will hire us without proper documentation,” says Sareda Milosz,
who moved here from California 20 years ago and now edits the town’s English-language newspaper, Atencio San Miguel. “There may be two or three. But most everybody around here who’s working is definitely documented.”
San Miguel — pop. 80,000 — has perhaps the largest number of U.S. immigrants per capita of any town in Mexico. Attracted to its laid-back charms, Americans started migrating here in the 1940s, when the town was a hangout for artists and bohemians of various stripes. Neal Casady, the model for the central character in Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” died in San Miguel in 1968.
Now, about 2,500 foreigners live here year-round, most of them U.S. retirees. They are joined by several thousand more during the winter — mostly snowbirds and art and language students. The mayor’s mother is American. Americans are moving forces behind a variety of organizations serving old people and children. Some now own businesses. Many own homes. The fact that Americans own some of the nicest, oldest homes in San Miguel rankles a number of residents.
Meanwhile, the buying power of the Americans has made life in San Miguel expensive by Mexican standards. Prices for real estate and cars are in dollars. “Some people have been here 20, 25 years and still don’t speak Spanish,” complains Eduardo Lera, owner of a computer store and a member of the San Miguel Citizens Forum, which sponsored last month’s march.
The march left Americans feeling uneasy, according to Milosz, the newspaper editor. “I felt embarrassed and threatened at the same time,” she says.
Currently the march’s organizers are gathering documentation on illegal American immigrants but they’re not sure what they will do with it. The Mexican government has as much interest in keeping illegal Americans out of the country as it does in keeping Mexicans in, which is to say very little.

) Pacific News Service

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Quote of the day

Doing hard time

“I went to Tennessee Women’s Correctional Facility and got locked down on a life-sentence death-row pod, and left there.
For how long?
“Just a half an hour. It was so intense to be there….”

– Actress Sharon Stone, in a San Francisco Chronicle interview, on how she prepared for the role of a death row inmate in “Last Dance.”