Tilting at Windmills - Column

Washington Monthly, July, 2000 by Charles Peters

Fleeing Fort Detrick * Dancing at Fort Blossom * Sir John and Lady Bracknell New Perspectives on 10 Percent * The Flush Factor * Prime Time Pataki

IS 10 PERCENT 10 PERCENT? It all depends, as our leader has pointed out, on how you define it. Among the more creative definers are Texas public school officials. Confronted with a requirement that students must rank in the top 10 percent of their graduating class to be automatically admitted to a state university, Westlake High School in Austin has decided that 10 percent really means 12.8 percent. But Lyndon Baines Johnson High School found that definition too narrow. With an imaginative approach to fact worthy of the man for whom it is named, Johnson High School decided that 15 percent captures the essence of 10 percent even better.

AS MANY OF YOU KNOW, I THINK history will be kinder to Bill Clinton than the pundits of today are. This would not be unusual. In my lifetime, only Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy left office highly esteemed. Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Ford, Carter, Reagan--even Nixon--are more valued today than at the end of their presidencies. Truman and Reagan are close to canonization.

ONE OF MY HOMETOWN'S truly great sons died in May. Dr. Bert Bradford was not only an excellent physician, he was a community leader, a hero in World War II, and a man of infinite kindness. He lived for 90 years. "I have loved helping people over the years and I feel that has contributed to my good health," he once told a group of medical students. "Staying active through gardening, fishing, cooking, hunting, and tennis has given me great joy. I have found myself much more content in these activities than in driving fancy cars and living in expensive homes."

GEORCE W. BUSH has proposed deeply cutting the number of U.S. nuclear warheads and removing some missiles from hair-trigger status and said that he would do this unilaterally if necessary. Sounds bold but there's a slight catch. It seems that in 1995 his fellow Republicans in Congress enacted legislation prohibiting the president from removing more missiles from constant alert or from unilaterally eliminating nuclear warheads below the 6,000 level set by the START treaty.

So here we have another area like education where whatever good ideas the governor may have are unlikely to be supported by congressional Republicans. They are not going to be happy with him until he hairs over and reverts to his Bob Jones self.

As I READ A REVIEW BY ANNA Kisselgoff that appeared in The New York Times of June 3, it occurred to me that I may have been insufficiently attentive to recent developments in the world of dance. In case you too have been guilty of not following this art form as closely as you might, let me bring you up to speed with a quote from the review:

"Thus a provocative image of fully clothed men pulling their penises and women jiggling their breasts to the beat of James Los score suddenly looks playful."

That sentence described a piece called "Excessories" Next comes "Fort Blossom," of which Kisselgoff writes:

"The contrast between the clothed women and nude men is furthered by the delineated movement of the women and the more spontaneous look of the men's wrestling style. In their implied coupling, the men sandwich a plastic pillow between their bodies as they lie on top of each other. The women's courtship is more subtle: they lie face down and one woman's foot imperceptibly crosses over the other's calf. The merging of the two pairs in a martial arts finale results in an abrupt ending. `Fort Blossom' suggests an uninhibited search for a new direction, not yet defined."

I WAS TROUBLED TO LEARN that The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal had all agreed to a deal offered them by a United Airlines publicist that did not, to put it gently, seem to be in the public interest. The three papers were to get exclusive details on the $5 billion merger with US Airways so long as they agreed not to seek comment from outsiders. This virtually guaranteed that the initial stories would be free of the negative comment that might come from consumer groups and competitors. I'm sure the news organizations would have ultimately printed these critical comments but the first impression is important and it was going to be positive to neutral and definitely not negative under this deal.

This is, unfortunately, not an isolated case of a misjudgment in favor of business. According to a study by the Pew Research Center, one-third of journalists say they have sometimes let their news judgment be affected by the business interest of their organization or an advertiser.

IN CASE YOU HAVEN'T BEEN following the low-flow toilet debate, on one side are the dedicated water conservers who favor the 1.6-gallon flush and on the other are those who object to the increase in stopped-up toilets that low-flow flushing produces.

There is a neoliberal solution to this problem recognized by one of our readers who recently visited Australia. Down Under, he reports, "All the toilets I saw had a two-stage pull handle that when pulled to the first stop flushed at low-flow the liquids and light stuff. There was also a second pull stop available that gave a big flush to the really big loads. Thus, water was conserved 90 percent of the time."