Salon.com > Jacques Leslie

High noon at the Ogallala aquifer

Thu, 01 Feb 2001 20:00:00 +0000

The citizens of Roberts County, Texas, will be interested to know that T. Boone Pickens, the noted corporate takeover artist and fellow resident, considers himself the county's "No. 1 steward of the land," as he proclaimed in a recent phone conversation with me. Why then, they might ask, is he trying to sell their water out from under them?

The mere fact that Pickens can do that, in a hauntingly literal way, is the beginning of a parable about regulation and the environment that starts in the Texas Panhandle, winds its way through Austin and resonates in post-inaugural Washington. It's a cautionary tale suggesting that even in a certain recent governor's home state, whose laissez-faire mind-set he'd like to see replicated nationally, free enterprise is fine, as long as it's not your resources that it exploits.

In the 1980s, Pickens, a kind of entrepreneurial equivalent of his namesake, frontiersman Daniel Boone, became wealthy by launching daring takeover bids against oil companies -- Gulf Oil, Phillips and Unocal were among his targets. Even though his bids didn't always succeed, they provoked terror in corporate boardrooms and usually left Pickens enriched, sometimes by many tens of millions of dollars. Now, at 72, he has shifted his attention to another scarce liquid, just as it's emerging as a valuable commodity.

We want our SUVs

Wed, 21 Jun 2000 19:00:00 +0000

Oil prices are climbing again, at the gas pump and as an issue in public opinion polls. Congressional Democrats are warning that rising gas prices could cost the party its chances to recapture the House and Senate, and now Vice President Al Gore has joined the debate, attacking the oil industry's huge profits and calling for an investigation into antitrust violations and price gouging.

On Monday, Gore told reporters he'd only just learned of the big profit hike most major oil companies enjoyed in the first quarter of this year. "Now you put two and two together and look at the huge price increases that they say they can't explain and look at the 500 percent increase in profits and look at the way they've been getting bigger," Gore told CNN.

"I think that all adds up to a need for investigation of collusion, antitrust violations and price gouging."

Price gouging is certainly deplorable, but as a self-described environmentalist, Gore might see a silver lining in higher gas prices: They could help achieve what Congress has been loath to promote with legislation -- reduced gas consumption by consumers, and hastened development of alternative-fuel vehicles that could cut emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants.

Smirk from the past

Wed, 01 Mar 2000 11:34:00 +0000

I have just realized, with equal parts horror and glee, that George W. Bush and I were once mirror images, linked and yet opposite. The links are quite specific: Bush and I were members of the Yale Class of 1968, and we were both asked to join Skull and Bones, the most renowned (and strangest) of Yale's nine senior societies. The opposites are everything else: Bush was a WASP from a prominent Connecticut Republican family who attended Andover; I was a Jew from an actively Democratic California family who went to a public high school. Bush joined Skull and Bones; I didn't.

None of this would be worth mentioning, of course, except that Skull and Bones is the unofficial subject of "The Skulls," a movie to be released this month, and Bush has a leading role in the quadrennial national melodrama.

take my tv

Tue, 17 Aug 1999 16:00:00 +0000

My 12-year-old daughter Sarah, who does not watch much TV, can instantly pick out the kids who do: They're the ones, she says, who look expressionless, the "boring" ones. She's fortunate in attending one of the nation's 140 Waldorf schools, where families are encouraged to keep the TV off, for that means her friends have watched as little TV as she has. I take pleasure in the sort of people they've become. They're curious and genuine, not cynical. They haven't learned from TV that life is treacherous, that the bad guys sometimes win, that sex is paramount and that ridicule lurks around every corner. They haven't absorbed the lesson that consumerism is the only possible avenue to satisfaction. And they read, with voluminous, gleeful appetites.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has been widely criticized -- most recently by the New York Times' Gina Kolata, among others -- for declaring on Aug. 3 that pediatricians should tell parents to keep children under 2 from watching TV.

My response to the recommendation is that it's right-on. Why would any parent want to subject a 2-year-old to TV? Certainly nothing good will come of the experience, and a growing literature indicates that the impact will be negative.

Media Circus: The Gray Lady as hipster

Mon, 17 Mar 1997 20:00:00 +0000

it may be absurd to argue that everything was better back in the '60s, but if the New York Times Magazine is your only specimen for comparison, you can probably make a case. As a Yale student of that era, I'd open my dorm room door each Sunday morning in dread and anticipation to confront the five-pound Times that lay in all its gravitas at my feet. The Magazine was then the Times' showcase, gray and ponderous like the newspaper itself, but suffused with an unquestionable Establishment authority. It seemed intended, like an English meal, not necessarily to be enjoyed but certainly ingested. Over the course of the day I'd earnestly tuck away at least three or four Magazine stories, all the while persuaded that reading them was a prerequisite to taking sides in the political and cultural wars of the time.

These days, however, the Magazine is more likely to inspire neither anticipation nor dread, but indifference. It is a thinner and smaller product whose advances are overwhelmingly cosmetic: the advent of color, more white space, only one story per issue that jumps pages. However, while that one story may run 7,000 or 8,000 words, no other story is longer than 2,000. Some, like historian Jonathan Spence's recent piece on China's Three Gorges Dam, read as if truncated in mid-thought. And whereas the Magazine once routinely carried seven or eight feature stories of several thousand words each, it now typically runs only four, including all the stunted ones.