COMMENT

...And so he and a gang of his white friends descended on three blacks, beating them with baseball bats and tree limbs until one of them, Michael Griffith, tried to flee across a highway and was run over by a car...

...It's something to look forward to...

...Whatever his motives, Gorbachev deserves some credit for the release—and for outmaneuvering the unreconstructed Stalinists who would have preferred to see Sakharov live out his days in Gorky...

...We will know which stations not to watch and which newspapers not to buy...

...As usual, the authorities' first reaction was to conceal the full extent of the damage...

...He and Poindexter, like any other citizens, should be able to invoke the Fifth Amendment whenever they choose and should be presumed innocent until proven guilty...

...One day, the fawning and sycophantic mass media were celebrating the achievements of the Great Communicator and hanging on his every fatuous word...

...He was rushed to the hospital, where he underwent surgery for a brain tumor found to be malignant...

...Openness is the best protection against illness, malfeasance, misfeasance, and criminal stupidity...

...And we bristled— properly—at the tag "Fifth Amendment communists...

...It's more than just a rash of incidents...

...But in the vast, murky realm called "national security," there isn't even a feeble attempt to apply checks and balances...

...And his review of the individuals whose sentences he commuted makes it clear that at least four will never know freedom again...

...They are our whites...

...arms and assistance in Central America...

...Admittedly, he does not go as far as many opponents of inhumane punishment would wish...

...Only when people begin to assess and debate the benefits and the costs of high-risk technology, only when they begin to evaluate the notion of perpetual growth, will we be able to make rational and humane decisions...

...And though he criticized the leadership of the Soviet Union for its war against Afghanistan, he said he had "great respect" for Gorbachev...

...A Rash of Racism There's some niggers in the pizza parlor...

...The word is out that "statesmanship" is in...

...Who watched him...

...But tell me Nymphs, what power divine Shall henceforth wash the river Rhine...

...A nuclear meltdown at a capitalist power plant is no more dangerous (and no more benign) than a socialist meltdown...

...Many have been downright deferential—to the point where one can only wonder whether the investigations to be undertaken in the new Congress will amount to anything more than a whitewash...

...And that, in fact, is the conclusion to which we are drawn...

...That must be Mikhail Gorbachev's lament after releasing Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov from his seven-year internal exile in Gorky...

...The next day, he was exposed as a bumbling nincompoop...

...A fire at a large chemical warehouse near Basel led to the discharge of huge quantities of highly toxic substances into the Rhine, washing out years of effort to clean up the badly misused river...

...This proved embarrassing for the President, who had promised full cooperation from his staff, and so members of the Administration, from First Lady Nancy Reagan and Vice President George Bush on down, began urging North and Poindexter to sacrifice their rights...

...North is absolutely right...

...In a formal statement, Anaya said, "I call for the abolition of the death penalty because it is inhumane, immoral, anti-God, and is incompatible with an enlightened society...

...I find the new policy of openness in this country very important because openness has always been in short supply," Sakharov said upon his release...

...We cannot claim that when our people take the Fifth they are innocent, but when their people take the Fifth, they are guilty...

...No political gain—by Left or Right—warrants stripping away their constitutional prerogatives...

...All of this rhetoric is presumably left over from Buchanan's Watergate file, for he played a similar role in the Nixon White House...

...mass media, the environmental disaster that struck the Rhine late last year was comparable to the nuclear accident at Chernobyl and the chemical catastrophe at Bhopal...

...Much worse, however, was the considered response of European governments—and especially France's socialist regime—which were content to insist that Switzerland merely abide by the Common Market's chemical safety standards...

...As he said, "Let us put an end to this macabre national death march...

...WHERE ARE THE DEMOCRATS...

...But it is not too soon to begin sifting through the debris...

...Wrapped in the protective cloak of secrecy, the intelligence apparatus goes its own way, indifferent to the strictures of Congress (which are rarely and feebly applied) and immune from public scrutiny...

...No consideration is given to the central reality that we have embarked on inherently dangerous technologies that are bound to fail from time to time, exacting a terrible toll...

...And suddenly all that changed and Reagan became fair game—just another welfare queen caught up in scandal...

...All those who don't feel that should tell us so...

...He is, in other words, a Reagan who can stay awake—and that makes him the ideal candidate...

...Oliver North and John Poindexter occasioned the latest rush to judgment when they invoked their Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate themselves in testimony before Congress...

...When the Government finds the Constitution inconvenient, as it often does, it can always rely on members of the press to join in the trashing...

...Charles Peters, editor of The Washington Monthly...

...During the witch hunts of the 1950s, when many of our fellow dissidents were hauled before official inquisitors, we demanded— properly—that their right to refuse to testify on Fifth Amendment grounds be upheld...

...The spook-in-charge, Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, turns out to have his own history of emotional instability, as well as a strong penchant for stretching the truth on official documents...

...Fred Barnes, writing in The New Republic about the political fallout from the Scandal, applauds the Democrats for having acquired "perfect political pitch," by which he means, he says, that they have "shied away from attacks on Reagan and cheap shots...

...Other intimates of the President have described him since the Scandal broke as "paralyzed" and "living in another world...

...Such atrocities as the invasion of Grenada and the air raid on Tripoli went down without a murmur—were, in fact, celebrated as great feats of statesmanship and military prowess...

...regulatory" agencies...

...with nearly all American whites wherever they gather...

...Why his statesmanship, of course...

...With the tremendous journalistic resources available to the networks, the news services, the major newspapers, and with their inordinate pride in investigative reporting, why did no one pick up on the peculiar doings of the National Security Council staff, on the strange arms transfers out of the Pentagon, on the mysterious funds funnelled to the contrast Because as a rule the mass media prefer not to look too closely at such undertakings...

...Washing the Rhine Samuel Taylor Coleridge may well have been in the grip of premonition when he wrote, more than a century and a half ago: Ye Nymphs that reign o'er sewers and sinks, The river Rhine, it is well known, Doth wash your city of Cologne...

...In Ronald Reagan's case, the collapse was almost instantaneous...

...we don't even know the man) responded, in his Marine cadence, "People have died face down in the mud all over the world defending those individual rights...

...He commuted the death sentence of every man slated to die in his state, then publicly and thoughtfully defended his action in the national media...

...But if you assume the best about the Democrats—that their reaction to the Scandal is grounded in principle—the implications are even more depressing: The Democrats feel constrained to desist because they know there isn't much they would do differently if they were in charge...

...If it were not for Al Shirads disclosure of Washington's arms traffic with Teheran, it would presumably still be business as usual in the basement of the White House...

...The Left, no less than the Right, needs to rethink its position on these issues...

...Good' while trying to free American hostages held by the pro-Iranian Islamic Jihad...

...Why not just say that Gorbachev did the right thing...

...Richard Nixon, after all, was reelected in a landslide four months after Watergate, and it was many months more before substantial numbers of Americans began to question his fitness for the nation's highest office...

...The question that made the rounds in Washington at year's end was, "What did Ronald Reagan know and when did he forget it...

...That, at least, is what Attorney General Edwin Meese III is reported to have said to members of the House Intelligence Committee...

...What has thrust him to the fore...

...Every schoolchild is taught that it was the particular genius of the Founders to devise a method by which each branch of the Federal Government would be held accountable, so that none could drift very far into oppressive malice or inadvertent ineptitude...

...That accounts for the effusive praise for Lieutenant Colonel North, the beribboned hero of the White House basement, and for the reluctance to criticize the Reagan Administration's conspiratorial machinations...

...All newsmen," he thundered, "should remember that they're Americans first and newsmen second...

...After years of condemning the Soviet Union for not releasing Sakharov, they now castigate it for playing a public-relations game...

...It can't be stated more plainly than that...

...And when 1,200 demonstrators, mostly black, marched through Howard Beach to protest the killing of Michael Griffith, they were greeted by shouts of Go home and Animals from neighborhood whites...

...It was as if everyone—including members of the Administration, the Congress, the press, and the electorate-had received a signal that there was no further need for make-believe...

...It was only a few months ago, after all, that the President could do no wrong in the eyes of most of the mass media...

...The death of Michael Griffith was not the first or the only recent outburst of violent bigotry...

...The fifth might be eligible for parole if he lives to be very old...

...And the routine acts of derision that go unchallenged only spread the rash...

...The larger lessons, however, have more to do with the nature of the American empire and its conduct in recent decades than with the particular gang of hacks assembled by the incumbent President...

...More details of the Scandal will surely emerge, and some may prove to be startling...

...It is true, as Molly Ivins observes elsewhere in this issue, that what we have learned so far tends to confirm our most paranoid fantasies about the way things are done by and within the Reagan Administration...

...All this has implications that range far beyond the questions of arms sales to Iran or illicit aid to the Nicaraguan contras...

...Certainly, Gorbachev has his own motives for freeing Sakharov...

...Ever since Joe McCarthy accused them of being soft on communism, they've tried to prove they're tougher than the next guy...

...Toney Anaya, the outgoing governor of New Mexico, who has long been counted as an opponent of capital punishment, used his last two months in office to act on his belief...

...The editorials were paeans of praise...

...Derision of blacks," says Jimmy Breslin, the chronicler of Queens, in his latest novel, Table Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North used the code name 'Mr...

...How many of you guys are going willingly to give up your First Amendment rights...

...Even today, the attention focused on the Scandal has had an unfortunate but all too typical effect: It has diverted attention from the slaughter being perpetrated with U.S...

...One day in December, the Director of Central Intelligence, with all but incalculable resources for mischief-making at his command, began to suffer seizures...

...Though it received much less attention in the U.S...

...it's the basic complexion of social life in these United States, rubbed raw by the malignant neglect of the Reagan Administration...

...It should be obvious by now that such calamities observe no political, economic, or geographic boundaries...

...That's not the rule in Odon, Indiana, which last November ordered street signs named for a favorite native son, Admiral John M. Poindexter...

...Who was in a position to monitor his performance and, if necessary, sound the alarm...

...And now the Rhine is something else, as well: It has become a symbol of deadly pollution and wanton destruction of the planet...

...it was a Beirut weekly called Al Shiraa, the apparent beneficiary of a leak carefully planted by Iranian politicians...

...But it wasn't the U.S...

...When disaster strikes, every effort is made to treat it as an aberration—a case of human failure, a freak accident, a wholly unpredictable equipment breakdown, a departure from accepted procedures...

...If he hasn't yet prodded any other governors into following his lead, he did save five lives and raise the national consciousness during the holiday season...

...WHERE WAS THE PRESS...

...Three days later, a black gang shouting Howard Beach, Howard Beach beat up a white teenager at a Queens bus stop...

...they might, after all, find something they would rather not have to report...

...General Accounting Office Money, is "a relentless part of conversation...

...Defense contractors were 35 per cent more profitable than commercial manufacturers during 1970-1979 and 120 per cent more profitable during the 1980-1983 period/ —U.S...

...nuclear industry and U.S...

...Oliver North (we don't call him "Ollie" in these pages...

...People who take the Fifth have something to hide...

...Neoliberals, like Kinsley and Peters, piped in either because they are indifferent to constitutional protections or because they thought there was political advantage to be gained...

...The Third World, the nations of the Soviet bloc, and Western industrial powers seem equally vulnerable to systemic failures that threaten not only those who live in the immediate vicinity but also those who may be far removed in distance or time...

...The whites who assaulted Michael Griffith and chased him to his death are Jimmy Breslin's whites...

...Second to patriotism, racism is the most common American sentiment...

...According to Barnes and other observers of the political scene, the leading beneficiary of the Scandal among potential Democratic Presidential candidates is Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia...

...No expedience should be allowed to overturn their rights...

...Until the prevailing assumptions about technological "progress" have been subjected to close scrutiny, we will find no shelter—in private ownership, government regulation, or even state ownership—from the inevitable threats to the natural environment and the public's health and safety...

...So the Soviets have opened new nuclear-power facilities since Chernobyl, once again issuing bland assurances that the technology is safe in language virtually identical to that of the U.S...

...His recommendation, for example, is to replace the death penalty with life imprisonment without possibility of parole—hardly an affirmation of belief in rehabilitation...

...The Fifth Freedom William F. Buckley Jr., editor of National Review: "The hell with the Fifth Amendment...

...Rightwingers like Buckley joined the chorus, hoping to save their favorite Administration from imminent doom...

...To what extend did William Casey's illness cloud his thinking and affect his action...

...Just days after the Basel mishap, its lethal consequences were detected several hundred miles down river...

...The answer to Buchanan's question—which side are the media on?—is that most of the time they are on the side of power...

...The assumption of whites in the bars and living rooms of this country, says Breslin, is that "niggers are bad, the reason for this being that they are niggers...

...If you assume the worst about the Democrats— that their reaction on the Scandal is based on sheer political expediency—they are still in the grip of their perpetual defensiveness when it comes to national-security issues...

...Even the secrecy that always surrounds CIA operations did not suffice for the dirty work afoot in the Persian Gulf, the Middle East, and Central America, so the President's National Security Council staff, which supposedly helps devise, evaluate, and coordinate policy, was turned into an operating agency engaged in cloak-and-dagger intrigues...

...press that pulled the rug out from under Reagan...

...They have, indeed...

...Addressing a Cuban-American rally in Some communities follow the rule of waiting fifty years after a local hero's death before naming a school, a bridge, a street, or a park for him or her...

...Casey and North and the rest of the national-security establishment were accountable, of course, to the President—and he, we are told, may have made key decisions while zonked out on sedatives administered after he underwent surgery...

...Anaya also examined the arguments for the death penalty and found them wanting...

...It would be the height of hypocrisy for the Left now to disavow the constitutional protection against self-incrimination and brand North and Poindexter "Fifth Amendment criminals...

...Bob Duvall would be perfect/ Agent Swifty Lazar, naming the actor who might play Admiral Poindexter Miami, Buchanan lashed out at news stories he called "frenzied, unbalanced, and loaded with innuendoes," constituting "a windfall for the Soviets...

...Like some other great rivers—the Volga and the Mississippi, the Danube and the Yangtze—the Rhine is more than a topographic detail...

...This startling rehabilitation, unprecedented in Soviet history (The Washington Post had to dig back to Czar Alexander I for a parallel), has been greeted by sneers and skepticism in the Reagan Admin-stration and the U.S...

...It is only when the power has obviously begun to slip away, as is currently the case in the Reagan Administration, that the media begin to apply the skepticism that ought to be their stock in trade...

...And to his Congressional inquisitors, he rejoined: "I don't think you guys, even though you keep asking the question, really consider the implication of a person being forced to abandon his rights under the Constitution...

...The bureaucrats of Union Carbide, glibly denying the risks in pesticide production, speak the same language as their counterparts at state-owned enterprises in the socialist world...

...Cognitive Dissidents You can't win for losing...

...Patrick J. Buchanan, the ultrarightist hatchetman of the Reagan White House, has been particularly venomous in his attacks on press coverage of the Scandal...

...And then, too, we'll be able to wash the river Rhine and keep it clean...

...He favors aid to the contras, he opposes any move toward nuclear disarmament, he believes in letting the intelligence agencies do their dirty work without undue interference...

...from the hazing of a black cadet at The Citadel military academy in South Carolina to repeated arson attempts at the home of a black U.S...

...As in the case of Chernobyl, the principal question seemed to be how swiftly one could return to business as usual...

...The questions served up on the rare occasions when Reagan deigned to conduct a press conference were cream puffs...

...Michael Kinsley, editor of The New Republic...

...Department of Agriculture official in Arkansas, the poison of racism has erupted once again...

...But in one sense, at least, it's possible to sympathize with Buchanan's outraged sensibility...

...Score One for Life Acts of courage are rare—especially among politicians—so it is gratifying to witness one and commend it...

...For the first time since the days of Nikita Khrushchev, a Soviet leader is striving for more openness in the media and in society as a whole, a less rigidly controlled economy, and modest steps toward democratization...

...He must be puzzled by the fickleness of the Fourth Estate...

...What every medical practitioner knows but hardly anyone mentioned in public was that such disabilities can cause profound changes in a patient's attitude, judgment, and conduct long before they are diagnosed...

...And some leftists were heard making similar noises, eager to see the architects of invasion against the Sandinistas get what was coming to them...

...it is a mythic force, fabled in song, folklore, and literature, coursing through history and culture...

...Here, then, are a few random observations assembled, as it were, in mid-Scandal: WHO GUARDS THE GUARDIANS...

...No room is left for the possibility that the price we pay for the products of these technologies may simply be too high...

...All have been captivated by the lure of technology as a quick fix for human problems, and by the promise of perpetual growth as the answer to human needs...

...But Toney Anaya has made a beginning in a society peculiarly hostile to his ideas...

...Let's go-kill them," said a white youth in Howard Beach, Queens, one night last December...

...The system of checks and balances is one of the comforting myths of the American Republic...

...As is generally the case with such happy formulations, the practice falls far short of principle...

...media...

...For those of us on the Left, it is particularly important to defend North's and Poindexter's right to invoke the Fifth Amendment and enjoy the presumption of innocence...

...The Fifth Amendment exists to protect individuals, all individuals, regardless of political stripe and irrespective of the nation's need to plumb the scandal...

...It seems likely that Gorbachev hopes to enlist Sakharov in this reform effort...

...There is absolutely nothing wrong with members of the general public inferring guilt from an invocation of the Fifth Amendment...

...An urgent question is whether the secrecy and lack of accountability that prevail in matters of national security aren't too dangerous to sustain...