Political Booknotes

...The large industrial nations of the world have negotiated an unprecedented series of treaties that should all but eliminate chloroflorocarbons (CFCs) by century’s end...

...the diminished appeal of wars of conquest (though the Kuwaitis might quibble with this one...

...There is no huge politically motivated call for drastic revisions of our economy and society...

...The question was not so much “How did a conventional anti-invasion force fight an unconventional internal guerrilla force...

...There are a lot of liberals, and even Republicans, in positions of power who reflexively support anything called “civil rights”-even when it goes far beyond nondiscrimination to include dubious policies like racial preferences for Asian-Indians...

...To his credit, Coates generally does not whitewash the homeless by presenting them as modern-day Okies...

...Elsewhere his indiscriminate approach gives short shrift to important reform efforts...

...He and I sometimes seem to be the only syndicated columnists not convinced that the United States is terminal, just falling apart where we stand...

...As Grant sums up the book: “Chau had become a symbol . . . of everything that had been lost in Vietnam...

...We have tried to put Vietnam behind us, particularly those parts that deal with American techniques there-and, thus, American failures there...

...When he talks to other Americans about Chau, he finds that “I, too, felt tears welling in my eyes as we spoke...

...For without social services, rehabilitation, monitoring, and counseling, homeless adults often recycle back to the shelters and the streets...

...The greenhouse effect and other problems “rule out even a doubling of energy use based on the present mix of energy sources...

...This is what Wattenberg had to say: “Students, like other humans, vote with their feet...

...I met a half-dozen guys who thought of themselves as the good guys in Vietnam,” Grant quotes Ellsberg as saying...

...But, most unfortunately, the book falls down in the area of context, in deeper explanations of what went wrong, in the absence of any analysis of what in the end made it impossible for America to form new cadres and a new culture in the same way that the communists did...

...Landing in America was a great cultural shock to Chau,” said the famous Chicago Daily News correspondent Beech, one of those valiant enough to help Chau...

...Robert Coates, an energetic San Diego municipal court judge, wants everyone to know that the homeless problem can be solved...

...The simple truth of Vietnam-and of so much of the conflict between communism and democracy in the Third World between 1945 and 1989-is that when a single-minded, fanatic, nationalistic ideology takes root in a country, our diffuse and random political efforts do not have a chance...

...Instead, he contends that rehabilitation and social services should be tailored to reflect different homeless subpopulations...

...He is especially reluctant to criticize homeless advocates, much less suggest that the behavior of the homeless themselves may contribute to the mess...

...Barring a technological miracle, burning that three centuries’ worth of coal (or even half a century’s worth) may set in motion the “ecocide” Mitchell fears...

...Detlefsen, a political scientist who is sympathetic to the administration’s self-styled “color-blind” philosophy, cites the familiar tendencies of bureaucracies to stay the course no matter who is at the helm...

...He claims that shipping technology has stagnated while production technology has surged ahead, ignoring containerization and other advances...

...So in the end, the inner confusion of this story only mirrors the inner confusion of democracythe inevitable inner confusion inherent in forming societies...

...The book outlines a vision of a society dedicated to endlessly escalating desire and acquisition as consumer demand and technology’s productive capacity leapfrog each other ever onward...

...The two works under discussion here approach a part of this problem, and in the absence of any incipient rejuvenation of our political culture on the horizon, they begin to take on a certain immediacy...

...It recounts how technological leaps, particularly in computing and communications, have quickened the pace of economic change...

...The author divides it into cities, times, and important developments: Hanoi 1945, Manila 1950, HanoiSaigon 1954...

...Of course, given the subject, one could not have hoped for tembly much...

...It’s a paradox...

...One hopes Mitchell’s primary audience will be fellow congressmen, who seem a good deal less scared about the environment than most of their constituents...

...More than that, the coal example shows the muddle you can get in if you don’t set priorities...

...Second, burning coal gives off vast amounts of carbon dioxide, the chief cause of the greenhouse effect...

...Most of what Pilzer trumpets as paradigm-shattering insight is close to commonplace, while much of what’s novel in his book is simply wrong...

...It is not enough merely to provide counseling and services to the homeless...

...How is it, Americans asked themselves, that the Czechs managed to elect this exquisitely brave and eloquent intellectual as their president on their very first try, while we, after 200 years of practice, remain fixated on flag factories and mug shots of Willie Horton...

...Still, Coates’s prescription is too muddle-headed, mostly because he fails to recognize that even good solutions to homelessness are not all created equal...

...The answer is that democracy is a much easier notion to pay tribute toand to cloak one’s partisan rhetoric in-than to put into practice...

...By creating a homelessness entitlement program, however paltry, homeless advocates implicitly encouraged thousands of struggling single mothers who were unhappily doubled up with friends, relatives, or boyfriends to head for shelters...

...Reagan had a chance to build credibility when he appointed men and women with impeccable civil rights credentials, like my friend Civil Rights Commissioner Morris Abram, a Democrat who, among other noble deeds, served as Martin Luther King Jr.’s lawyer and chaired the United Negro College Fund...

...Many of these impoverished women knew that a stay in a shelter would jump them to the top of a multiyear waiting list for inexpensive public housing...

...I am not always crazy about Ben Wattenberg’s politics, but I admire his work...

...His new book, A Street is Not a Home, could prove to be the most comprehensive, well-read entry in a burgeoning literature on how to help the homeless, since the author-with the aid of a foundation grant-has arranged to send copies to 9,000 policymakers, including every U.S...

...But acid rain can be stopped without fundamental alterations to our economywe need to buy some new hardware and get clean-burning coal from Wyoming, instead...

...That is, you could bum coal completely cleanlynot a hint of acid rain-and still destroy the environment...

...In the end, of course, something curious happened: It was “the example” that won...

...The price of a fridge may go up a bit, but it’s no big deal...

...Reevaluating affirmative action requires a leader who will challenge civil rights orthodoxy and display an equally fierce commitment to alleviating poverty...

...In New York, Philadelphia, and elsewhere, such requirements actually helped spur an explosion of homelessness in the latter half of the 1980s, especially among families...

...In one of Detlefsen’s many telling examples, he shows how, even as late as Reagan’s second term, the Office of Civil Rights was engaging in decidedly unReaganesque policies-like filing a complaint against the University of California at Berkeley, of all places, for having “sexist” language in its course catalog...

...Gotcha...

...Great points, but James Fallows made both of them more than four years ago in an essay in The New York Review of Books and threw in a few more besides...

...This is a time to mourn our dead, to stand by their monument, and to forget the interminable arguments about “What went wrong in Vietnam...

...He tells the story of Lansdale, the most original of all the American strategists, the man who beat the Huk guerrillas in the Philippines and thought he could do the same in Vietnam...

...What he’s selling instead-with a great deal of earnestness, a certain amount of flair, and a limited portion of persuasivenessis what he calls “the alchemic view of the world...

...Talking Heads: A Look at the Popular and Influential News Commentators...

...My interest in him, however, is not...

...But the remaining trio of problems, particularly global warming, offers difficulties of an entirely different nature...

...Smith provides a sophisticated analysis of many of the ideas which have animated the rise of certain kinds of think tanks, along with useful sketches of a number of the entrepreneurial personalities that lay behind them...

...Whereas Smith has written a brilliant history of think tanks, which is slightly undermined by the grandiose claims he makes for the importance of his subject, Hirsch has written an intelligent but overly modest and insufficiently ambitious examination of the role of television commentary...

...But he has done a poor job of explaining why the overall homeless aid system continues to fail, even in the face of a mountain of research that has shown for several years how it should be reformed...

...in Grant’s words) but “How can a great unstructured and miasmic culture like America’s, in times of fanaticized nationalism, create an alternate moderate nationalism that will win a fanaticized war...

...He would be an engaging seatmate on a long flight and probably a wonderful neighbor or business associate...

...Zalin Grant...

...POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Bill McKibben Public affairs books scheduled to be published this winter...

...Later in the book, however, when he starts listing recommended solutions to our problems, Mitchell has this to say about coal: “The good news is that there’s a lot of it...

...Then, just eight pages later, I found myself reading what amounted to obituaries of Theodore H. White, Henry (Scoop) Jackson, and Hubert H. Humphrey...

...To be generous, there is some truth in this neoconservative broadside...

...He tells the story of America’s own mandarin, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, and his complicity in the assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, an act that stands as the first disaster in the whole disastrous script...

...The reason the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) floundered during the eighties, apparently, was that its founder, William Baroody Sr., bequeathed the presidency of the institute to his son, Bill Jr., in 1978...

...the war waged not by bombers and ground forces but, as Daniel Ellsberg put it, by “the good guys...

...In the alchemic world, new products create their own demand by changing the way people behave...

...Coates does present one powerful counterargument to the nearsightedness of the current system...

...When American ideas sank in, they did so through example, for at the very core of American democracy is the idea that there should be no one “political culture” or set of goals similar to the communists...

...Who makes the rules, and from where do our policies truly derive...

...To be sure, it can be great fun to throw rocks at economists, but Pilzer scornfully dismisses the whole discipline, and strides off to explore on his own a vast expanse of well-mapped terrain...

...Robert Detlefsen...

...In many ways, Vietnamese-speaking correspondent Zalin Grant, who worked in Vietnam during the war for Time and The New Republic, has written the first comprehensive book to deal with the real issue of America in Vietnam: the “political war” and America’s mostly unknown and longsuffering “political warriors...

...Paul Zane Pilzer isn’t promoting Houston office tower investments as a contrarian path to instant riches...

...Smith, a former staff member of the Twentieth Century Fund in New York, has written a thoughtful intellectual history of think tanks in which he argues that “public policy has become almost entirely the preserve of the experts, with the idea of ‘public debate’ merely an anachronistic fiction...

...James Allen Smith...

...I confess a strong temptation to praise Mitchell’s book and leave it at that...

...A homeless drunk, he suggests, often requires detoxification, AA meetings, lessons in personal hygiene, help in finding a job, and perhaps a transitional stay in an alcoholfree halfway house...

...This view boils down to the proposition that “we live in a world of effectively unlimited resources-a world of unlimited wealth,” because the only resource that really matters is information, and information is becoming so plentiful that it’s vanishingly close to free...

...He charges that “conventional economists [regard] the struggle for prosperity as a zerosum game,” that “traditional economics has always treated technology as a constant,” and that while “an Alchemist creates wealth, an economist merely moves it around...

...I have to...

...While Smith’s history is first-rate and his prose admirably restrained, he doesn’t quite demonstrate the importance of his subject...

...The latter quickly embarked upon ambitious building and expansion plans but possessed not the slenderest thread of a notion of how to pay for them...

...Above all, they had a view of the way the war was going which was totally at odds with the official view...

...One of the less serious but more bizarre problems is Pilzer’s obsessive drumbeat of attacks on economists and their trade, coupled with a near-total ignorance of contemporary economic thinking...

...One example of a price tag the taxpayer rarely sees: the San Diego police spend about $300,000 a year to lock up 90 chronic alcoholicss-each of whom gets arrested an average of seven times a month...

...After all, it shows a man of considerable power to be a committed, engaged environmentalist...

...He is arrested by the South Vietnamese as a communist, imprisoned, left behind by the CIA he had helped, imprisoned by the North Vietnamese as a southern agent, released to remain an agent in the South, forced to flee as one of the boat people, and finally is settled in America...

...When was the last time a powerful conservative cian read a briefing by a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and decided that well, yes, America really should get out of the military intervention business...

...A single David Remnick profile, of “The McLaughlin Group” published in Esquire is cited 10 times in 35 pages...

...As Coates reports, about a third of urban homeless adults are severely mentally ill, another third are alcohol or drug abusers, and about 1 in 10 are ex-convicts...

...The only chance for reform, he suggests, is the Rehnquist Court...

...I have no wish to downplay any of these, but acid rain is not really in the same league as the other four...

...Smith can be great fun on some of the intraservice rivalries that plagued the conservative movement’s think tanks during the Reagan presidency...

...Thank you...

...Mitchell seems equally alarmed by each of his “five horsemen of the environmental apocalypse”-ozone destruction, overpopulation, tropical deforestation, acid rain, and global warming...

...Watch your head, Mr...

...Hirsch, writing about television news commentators, seems to suffer from a malady that is almost the mirror image of Smith’s...

...This may seem a picky point...

...But career attorneys, Detlefsen reports, would openly cheer when Reynolds, as he so often did, lost cases...

...The Japanese, conversely, are sure to stumble unless they overcome their quaintly bounded appetites for material goods...

...But its sheer quantity (at current production rates existing world reserves would last nearly three centuries) makes it imperative that we improve technologies to burn it more efficiently and cleanly...

...Nobody knew who he was...

...A president who did that might also begin to heal the racial fractures that divide the country...

...Grant uses Chau’s tragic personal story as an apt parallel to the constant attempts by American political strategists to arrive at a political solution and their constant failures...

...Detlefsen’is probably right that afirmative action and a whole host of race-conscious policies are woven into the country’s politics...

...Yet homeless advocates have often exacerbated existing flaws in the homeless aid system by promoting right-to-shelter laws...

...Still, the coal business bothers me...

...As I said, though, while you can bum coal “cleanly” with respect to acid rain, you cannot do so with regard IO global warming...

...That is a more hopeful development for the planet than a new electric car design or a quantum increase in photovoltaic efficiency...

...Richard Reeves Unlimited Wealth: The Theory and Practice of Economic Alchemy...

...Why, then, does he say some pages later, while answering President Bush’s moronic attacks on environmentalists, that “nobody is advocating extreme measures...

...But his uncompromising picture of the world we face makes his ducking and trimming over solutions more of a disappointment...

...After all, the Reagan administration steamrolled liberals on everything from defense spending to deregulation...

...That is what this book is all about...

...It would amount to ecocide...

...He has done some interviews for the book, but the research appears a bit thin...

...They had Vietnamese friends, and some of them spoke the language...

...There is a contradiction at the core of Pilzer’s alchemic approach, revealed by his assertion that “technology itself is perhaps the only store of value...

...When burned, usually to generate electricity, it causes two distinct problems...

...He was just another Vietnamese refugee...

...At the very least, we need to drastically downsize our cars (a notion defeated this fall in Mitchell’s Senate, despite Saddam Hussein’s best efforts...

...In fact...

...The culprit: a doctrinaire, liberal “civil rights ideology” that runs Washington...

...No, it failed on civil rights because even people who are wary of affirmative action couldn’t trust this administration to do the right thing...

...He wildly overestimates the net effect on the American economy of investments from abroad and-ironically, in light of his abhorrence for zero-sum reasoningsuggests that whatever the host country gains from such investments, the home country loses...

...and, in particular, the ever-increasing importance of education and training...

...As information becomes cheap and ubiquitous, what determines relative prosperity is a people’s ability to work together smoothly and efficiently, and to organize a sustainably fair pattern of distribution-in short, its capacity for community...

...He walks through each era with the major players in this political war, men like Lou Conein, John Paul Vann, Keyes Beech, Edward Lansdale, Rufe Phillips...

...If as he says, we face an “ecological holocaust,” if “the planet earth is sending out distress signals,” if what we face is a “nightmare world,” then we can change...

...The Japanese, in short, have mass-produced and mass-marketed a machine to disseminate American culture...

...By contrast, homeless women with children may need day care, counseling about abusive boyfriends, and practice opening a bank account or balancing a checkbook...

...They believed they were different from other Americans...

...It is probably the most important energy question the world faces, and it has considerable domestic repercussionsthe new Clean Air Act, whose passage is greatly to Mitchell’s credit, strongly encourages expensive clean coal technology to combat acid rain, an expenditure that may lessen the chances that we’ll soon shut down those coal-fired plants as we should to fight global warming...

...But the tears, I knew, were not so much for Chau, as for ourselves...

...Many of the columns are quite good, but who’s got the time...

...Most of Hirsch’s book is taken up with examinations of the pathetic content of political talk shows and profiles of their performers...

...Pilzer...

...Smith traces the history of public policy research from its origins at the turn of the century through the glory days of the appearance of the Heritage Foundation’s thousand-plus-page bestseller, Mandate for Leadership, in 1981...

...every shelter resident except the severely mentally ill should be immediately required to take gradual steps toward becoming more self-sufficient...

...in my words...

...Pilzer tells it as heroic epic, and it is ultimately repellent...

...Not all these changes will be unpleasant-an overhaul of our transit system so that we begin to phase out passenger cars, for instance, would help immensely, and we might learn to like bikes and buses...

...Lead and we’ll follow...

...But if the Reagan administration fell on its face, don’t blame some liberal bogyman...

...Ultimately, though, Coates’s treatise may do little to help public officials, despite its considerable common sense and massive underpinning of research...

...A hundred pages later, he assures us that “the process of innovation has been turned on its head...

...In the absence of coherent political parties, a responsible Congress, or intellectually defensible election campaigns, they are almost all we get in the way of reasoned political argument...

...And business as usual, despite his very sincere alarm, is just what Mitchell can’t bring himself to reject...

...Yet Detlefsen, who relies heavily on secondary sources instead of real-life interviews, elevates the black Republican into a savvy politico capable of great thoughts and great oration...

...of the highly sulphuric kind from West Virginia...

...In fact, most shelters still do little more than warehouse the homeless-fewer than a third of all urban shelters provide any treatment for substance abuse or mental illness, and just as few offer health care...

...And yet here is an unsettling book, somewhat of a new genre on Vietnam, telling us things we still didn’t know and forcing us to think on new levels...

...Hirsch’s problem is that both his claims and his book are overly modest...

...For instance, he acknowledges that even the most ambitious current goals for carbon dioxide reduction-20 percent sometime in the early part of the next century-are not enough to “make a notable difference...

...My view, which he seems to share, is that the doomsday scenarios are based on the assumption that 250 million people are going to roll over and play dead...

...Even if they did, however, millions of immigrants are ready to take their place...

...Coates does in passing offer some insight into why homeless aid programs go awry...

...In the long run, both stories are told, obviously as the result of a monumental research and reporting job and as the result of astonishing evenhandedness on the part of the author, who, despite his clear sympathies, gives everybody his fair say...

...Yet Hirsch sticks primarily to two points, and I quote from his conclusion: “1) today’s political talk shows contribute little, and sometimes even detract from the robust debate needed to sustain a healthy democracy and 2) television leads top commentators astray, making them celebrities or converting them into cartoon figures while diverting them from their finest and most socially useful pursuits...

...Such gruffness, Detlefsen says, was an “idiom” that “ordinary b 1 ac k s ” understood . De t 1 e f s e n ’ s account is not only patronizing but wrong...

...I ground to a halt reading Wattenberg on Charles Murray, who is still very much alive...

...World on Fire is honest, it hits hard, it should scare everyone who reads it...

...So it is a disservice for Mitchell to undercut his alarming message with soothing reassuranceswhile it may make environmentalism more palatable in the short run, it is as unwise as failing to prepare the country for a war before it begins...

...So still another such book on Vietnam would seem about as welcome as an Iraqi chemical warhead lobbed to our side in the Persian Gulf...

...One could just as easily take a cynical view of think tanks: not that they circumscribe public debate but that they simply provide cannon fodder for political positions already mapped out...

...the Not-In-MyBackyard syndrome is another...

...The bad news is that it’s a dirty fuel...

...This is a measure of the others’ magnitude, not of acid rain’s insignificance...

...Nowadays, we decide in advance what we could use and then we tell the scientists and engineers to invent it...

...Free Press, $24.95...

...In the same way, ozone depletion can be solved fairly easily by the substitution of one set of synthetic chemicals for another...

...In The Affruent Society, John Kenneth Galbraith told this tale as a combination of farce and moral fable...

...Detlefsen, though, thinks he’s found another explanation for the Reagan administration’s failure...

...He also makes what turns out to be a tactical error for a book published in early 1991 when he rests his case for the Theory of Alchemy’s superiority on the failure of economists to recognize that the boom that began in 1982 was fated to go on and on and on...

...Pilzer’s arguments are refreshingly unrooted in any single ideological camp...

...Norton, $22.50...

...Paul Zane Pilzer...

...Perhaps...

...Smith has written just about as worthwhile and provocative a book on American public policy think tanks as one could hope for...

...senator and congressman and every city manager in the country...

...The extra cot in the rectory basement sounds inexpensive, but only when the other costs of homelessnessincluding vandalism, foster care for kids, revolving-door detox for chronic alcoholics, emergency welfare assistance for homeless families, and juvenile detention for homeless runawaysare ignored...

...America is a force of nature, a global option...

...Soon AEI found itself $3 million in the hole and, to the eternal chagrin of its fellows, was forced to eliminate subsidized lunches...

...More than 360,000 foreign students are in American universities...

...There is no practical way to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide from coal combustion...

...Alan Hirsch...

...Because China has so much coal, Mitchell says, “a universally available, truly clean coal technology would be of great benefit...

...But above all he tells the story of program after program of political warfare: from Chau’s village corps, to “pacification,” to American “agitprop cadres,” to Chau’s own Phoenix program and how it went from a political program designed to win over the villagers by defeating Vietcong operatives to being perceived as winning the war...

...And after the collapses of communism in 1989, everyone in the world could see that, while communism was brilliant in those early, traumatized years of anticolonialism in forming tight-knit totalitarian movements, it was a disaster in forming working economies and long-term, viable political structures...

...Grant is generally a good judge of character (except in a small reference to me in Vietnam, he calls me “staid,” which certainly shows he did not know me), and the whole story, the new parts as well as those that have been told before, comes alive...

...He’s right that technological knowledge is increasingly abundant...

...But in front of a microphone he could be a real curmudgeon...

...He has done a commendable job of distilling examples of model programs that successfully help the homeless...

...This is, I think, an honest and forthright appraisal...

...Unlimited Wealth is, at base, a celebration of the spirit, style, and values of the 1980s...

...Assistant Attorney General William Bradford Reynolds tried to steer his Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department in a new direction...

...ICs Press, $19.95...

...Pendleton’s likening of civil rights leaders not to mistaken comrades in a shared struggle but to “charlatans’’ was widely seen as pigheaded by both blacks and whites (be they ordinary or extraordinary...

...Come to think of it, a president who did all that would be pretty temfic...

...Crown, $19.95...

...Chau becomes the victim of all of these eventually perverted hopes...

...In the United States, many of our central democratic institutions have atrophied almost to the point of nonexistence...

...It traces the parallel war of the Americans in Vietnam -the war of trying to create, impose, and cajole a different and more democratic ideology there-the war that was finally lost along with the military war...

...They were contemptuous of the French, and anxious that Americans not imitate them...

...But his advice about how to combat the NIMBY syndrome can be remarkably bloodless (“politicians and government need to take bold steps and stand up for unpopular programs”) as is his analysis of the local fears that undergird it (“the leading citizen concern is for lack of street parking...

...Each author apparently deserved the other’s subject...

...But what Russia lacks is not so much blueprints, formulas, and hardware as the institutional and cultural infrastructure for putting technology to work...

...But it would take a very different kind of president than Ronald Reagan...

...And his style is upbeat and affirmative...

...Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell does not seem to grasp this completely...

...They didn’t believe in the use of air power, but believed we should be engaged in small political operations...

...His numbers on ex-convicts and substance abusers are actually on the low side, but they all go toward making the same point: The homeless need more than roofs over their heads or cheap apartments to right their lives...

...The story is told through one of the “good guys” on the South Vietnamese political side, a man famous to those of us who served in Vietnam, but largely unknown in the United States: Tran Ngoc Chau, “Vietnamese nationalist, brave and incorruptible, one of the most imaginative strategists of the war in the field of political action and pacification . . . brought down by the venality of power politics involving his own government and the government of the United States...

...Granted, those CFCs already in the atmosphere will work their damage for a hundred years to come, but at least we’ve acted...

...When Pendleton made his notorious remark likening affirmative action to a “plantation,’’ he was, swoons Detlefsen, “acting on his belief that as a prerequisite to persuading ordinary blacks to abandon the politics of racial preference, he would first need to discredit the icons in whom that idea was embodied...

...In one numbing chapter, he enumerates in nine pages 30 successful strategies for preserving affordable housing, ranging from tax credits for low-income housing to lobbying Congress about the S&L bailout...

...Beyond the irritating neologisms, catchphrases, and unremarkable propositions dressed up as CapitalLetter Laws, there are a number of more substantial failures in this grand enterprise...

...In an extended hymn to consumption, composed of several Laws of Demand-Side Alchemy, Pilzer urges us to believe that the chief advantage of Americans in the world economy is their virtuosity as consumers...

...In fact, he all but applauds the take-noprisoners style of one of the administration’s greater embarrassments, Clarence Pendleton, the late Civil Rights Commission chairman...

...Scribner’s, $22.50...

...Never did it offer the necessary reassurance that it really cared about the plight of minorities...

...A policy like ours, with so many antagonistic actors, with so much disagreement, with such an unfocused purpose, cannot possibly win in the short run against the fatalistic, pure, sublimely anticolonialist truebelievers...

...In other words, there’s not a lot of room for compromise about coal...

...George Mitchell...

...Why didn’t this conservative administration make more headway, especially since polls show Americans leery of and even hostile towards affirmative action...

...Nor does he mealymouth the need to tighten commitment laws, which now protect the “rights” of deranged, delusional Americans to live out of garbage cans and street gutters for years on end...

...But neither one, unfortunately, brings us much closer to solving the dilemma of our current political predicament...

...Upon opening a book written by a Texasbased real estate operator, especially a book bearing a title like Unlimited Wealrh, one must struggle to suppress the instinct to guard one’s wallet...

...That shortcoming is critical, because when it comes to homeless assistance programs, public officials and nonprofit institutions continually reinvent a square wheel...

...It recognizes that we are in a potentially dire predicament...

...In fact, the ozone problem is so comparatively easy to deal with that we’ve already done so...

...David Whitman The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite...

...Most of these pollutants can be removed by burning cleaner types of coal, by “washing” the coal before it is burned, or by “scrubbing” the emissions as they leave the smokestack...

...It used to be that an inventor would come up with some new invention and then consumers would figure out whether or not they could use it...

...They can be solved only by basic changes in attitude and behavior-by rejecting business as usual...

...The American Dream is no longer American or a dream...

...That encounter sets the stage for this saga of the “other war”-the war whose buzz words were not “body count” but “civil action,” “pacification,” and “a third-force solution...

...Coates’s prescription for helping the homeless-throw everything but the kitchen sink at them-is better than it sounds...

...Matthew Cooper A Street Is Not a Home: Solving America’s Homeless Dilemma...

...The answer-both of reality and of this book-is that it cannot...

...Political pundits, particularly those on television, really do play an important role in defining the boundaries of Washington’s public debate...

...The asymmetry of these sides is too great...

...Coates ultimately shrinks from the unpleasant truth that the homeless themselves must be part of any solution...

...At one point in his new book, he says, quite correctly, that if the Third World develops using “traditional energy sources,” especially coal, “the ecosystem couldn’t stand it...

...Chau went from chief of one of the South Vietnamese provinces, to mayor of DaNang, to head of the pacification program, to secretary general of the South’s National Assembly...

...The book has a rather interesting format...

...Robert C. Coates...

...Consider coal...

...Indeed, Grant might have titled this book: “Chau’s Story: The Cost of Being a Friend of the Americans...

...To meet court-enforced mandates to shelter everyone, overwhelmed staff typically cut back social and rehabilitative services and stuffed overflow families into armories and seedy welfare hotels...

...Staff burnout is one common problem...

...Coates’s prescription for multifaceted support services would substantially alter the existing shelter regimen, now sometimes referred to by homeless advocates as the “three hots and a cot” system and known in the old days, when religious missions dominated skid row, as the “soup and salvation” method...

...He seems to face the problem squarely, and he names the source of greatest dangerxhina, which has half or more of the world’s coal reserves and is currently committed to rapid increases in coal consumption...

...But how, and why...

...He tells the story of CIA Director William Colby, who “realized the war had to be fought at the village level” and so tried valiantly “to promote the training and arming of a local militia that could combat the communists in the villages both politically and militarily...

...One grants politicians a certain amount of latitude to play pollyanna, of course, and Mitchell does not for the most part abuse this privilege...

...Georgie Anne Geyer World on Fire...

...Most important, Coates’s undifferentiated approach fails to emphasize that there are mistaken antidotes to the homeless crisis, too...

...I don’t see serious evidence that we’ve lost the ability to self-correct...

...That may be so,” the Northerner responds, “but it is also irrelevant...

...But his presence, and that of others, was often overshadowed by a cast of characters, like Ed Meese, who managed to be at once buffoonish and mean-spirited...

...The Office of Federal Contract Compliance continued to demand that federal contractors submit affirmative action plans...

...First, it gives off a variety of traditional pollutants, including the sulfur compounds that produce acid rain...

...Nobody cared...

...Hirsch, a suburban Maryland lawyer, argues instead for the centrality of TV opinion-commentators who, according to him, are “supplanting the newspaper op-ed page as the primary source of the public’s exposure to opinion commentary...

...In fact, Pilzer’s central contentionthat ingenuity and enterprise defy limits and expand possibilities-is the heart of economic logic...

...So I plunged into The First Universal Narion with the friendly enthusiasm of a swimmer in the same lake...

...As one who has been wnting and researching a book on a similar subject for the past two years (and is obviously open to charges of bias on that score), I cannot but wonder if somehow Hirsch’s argument got lost in Smith’s subject matter...

...And as he salutes the brave new world, he displays a certain confusion about what sort of world it is...

...Since the Third World nations must expand their economies, the “best thing may be for the rich nations of the world to set a goal of halving their carbon dioxide emissions by 2020...

...I loved the first 18 pages called “Thesis...

...But it’s possible, too, that the excesses of affirmative action-such as set-asides for wealthy Cubans or lower college admissions standards, which do minorities no service-could be curbed politically, through legislation, regulation, and a bully pulpit...

...Regrettably, he spends little time telling officials what they should not do...

...It was like something out of a Dickens novel,” explained one of Smith’s sources, speaking of the institute whose primary mission was to bring sound business practices to American government...

...Little wonder, then, that when the Reagan crew talked “color-blind,” many heard a less benign message: “Get the blacks...

...The book is just a disguised collection of old columns...

...Grant begins this concise book with a concise conversation between an American colonel and his North Vietnamese Army counterpart, one Colonel Tu, during a meeting in Hanoi just a week before the fall of Saigon...

...Martin’s, $I 7.95...

...He or she could begin to assemble the great populist coalition of blacks and whites that is the stuff of Democratic dreams...

...And the Education Department’s mammoth Office of Civil Rights pretty much stayed as liberal as ever...

...According to Smith, “there was no budget, grants came in for specific projects and were siphoned off to meet general operating expenses...

...But those novel ideas failed to receive sufficient backing from the likes of Sam Pierce and wound up largely moribund...

...Detlefsen seems not to consider this...

...You know you never beat us on the battlefield,” the American tells his North Vietnamese enemy...

...John D. Donahue Civil Rights Under Reagan...

...Most cities now rely on the wrong approach: a poorly coordinated system of spartan shelters with social services often located crosstown...

...During the 1980s, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission continued to file discrimination cases, much as it ever did...

...Communist ideas permeated Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East in those four decades by winning the complete confidence of an elite corps of true believers...

...For those of us who worked at the commission during the eighties, the Pendleton we knew was an instantly likable, sweet, and generous fellow...

...When Vaclav Have1 appeared before a joint session of Congress last winter to argue the Hegelian point that consciousness precedes being-not the other way around as Karl Marx had posited-he sent many patriotic and politically inspired Americans into a deep depression...

...Many of our cherished notions about mobility, about acquisition, about convenience will need to change and change quickly...

...As he notes, the Band-Aid approach to helping the homeless only seems cheaper than his reform alternative because the costs of homelessness to the taxpayer are largely hidden...

...But it’s also diminishingly proprietary...

...It draws welcome attention to some specific consequences of technical transformations, such as the heightened vulnerability of people and nations whose prosperity rests on commodities subject to creative substitution...

...There is much to like in Unlimited Wealrh...

...In the judge’s view, there isn’t “ on e so 1 uti on ” to homelessness because those living in the streets and shelters are a diverse, alienated, troubled, and extremely impoverished group...

...Detlefsen’s concise and provocative study makes a strong case that, for all its sound and fury, the Reagan administration barely altered affirmative action as it is practiced in corporations, universities, or even in the federal government...

...Eric Alterman Facing the Phoenix: The CIA and the Political Defeat of the United States in Vietnam...

...At one point he declares that “marketing philosophy has been turned on its head, for today the product often precedes the need...

...this isn’t that sort of book...

...black leaders were shunned...

...Pilzer contends that Japan is rich and the Soviet Union poor because of their relative endowments in technology...

...The Jack Kemp-style conservative empowerment agenda, with its enter prise zones and housing vouchers, might have provided some limited benefit to minorities and political benefit to an administration said to be lacking compassion...

...Specifically, if our politicians’ rhetoric is not to be believed (“Read my lips”) and Congress’s ability to deal with the many complex and politically costly issues before it is not to be trusted, then just who is minding the store...

...If we are going to cut our carbon dioxide output 50 percent, or even 20 percent, in less than 30 years, “drastic revisions of our economy and society” are precisely what we’ll need, for our economy and society are based to a remarkable degree on the consumption of cheap fossil fuel...

...Color-blind antipoverty programs were cut...

...But as a combination Keynes, Schumpeter, and Newton for the 1990s, which is the role he sets for himself, he falls short...

...One of the ironies of Coates’s book is that he fails to explicitly ask more of the homeless while he continually praises initiatives that forbid clients to use drugs or alcohol, carry weapons or fight, and that often require the homeless to work and to adhere to meticulous progress plans...

...Prometheus Books, $14.95...