TILTING AT WINDMILLS

...As a favor spontaneously asked of or volunteered by the employee, it may be forgivable now and then, but with far too many bosses, especially males dealing with female subordinates, it becomes habitual...

...A year earlier, Anthony Suau of the Denver Post had taken graphic photographs of starving children, but they were deemed so unnewsworthy that his paper at first refused to reimburse him for the expense of his trip and only two papers printed his pictures...

...according to The Washington Post's Molly Sinclair, one customer said she had been beaten on the head with a hot curling iron when she complained about the hairstyle she received...

...I'm sure the reason it won recognition was that it exposed something illegal...

...a bit worse than the lawyer suggests...

...He was in charge of the Navy's cryptanalytic unit at Pearl Harbor that broke the Japanese codes, deciphering the battle orders of the Japanese fleet at Midway and giving decisive help to U.S...

...TILTING AT WINDMILLS Several years ago, in response to the intelligence community's case for assassinations—that it's better to kill a Hitler than to fight a World War II—I said it was my belief that, had the CIA existed in the 1930s and had it been in the assassination business, it would have chosen as its targets Tito, de Gaulle, and Count von Stauffenberg...

...Take what they're doing in California, where the state established a system of highway checkpoints to combat drunk driving...

...In the history of World War II in the Pacific, the names that quickly come to one's mind as the great heroes are MacArthur, Nimitz, and Halsey...

...In the old days such mistakes were localized and would die a natural death...

...Its solicitude for the public is suggested by the fact that it has not disciplined a single cosmetologist, even though...

...The retailing losers are the low-end companies, reports Quinn, while Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, I. Magnin, and Bonwit Teller are doing particularly well...

...In 1940, 500 Jews, crowded aboard a decrepit, paddle-wheel steamer, fled down the Danube River from the Nazi puppet state of Slovakia...

...A recent Roper poll says that Americans daydream more about traveling abroad than about anything else, including being richer or smarter...

...Their number has of course been increasing steadily...

...It is the singling out, for help or harm, of religion or religions that the Constitution forbids...

...The ACLU has filed a suit to stop the program, calling it a "substantial invasion of fundamental constitutional rights...

...Bruce Chapman didn't just daydream...

...On the other hand, the poverty rate of the elderly was only 14 percent...

...I have yielded to many in my admiration for Mary Cunningham...

...is selling tens of thousands of Movado, Piaget, Concord, and Corum watches at prices beginning at $500...

...But they don't have much sympathy for articles like Ohanian's that explore serious, even grave, but not illegal, defects in the system...

...They also have the support of all the people who realize they, too, will be old some day, and they have the enthusiastic support of their sons and daughters, who are delighted to transfer the financial burden of their parents to the government...

...The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics says, according to a report from the Associated Press, that "schools should routinely make calculators available to kindergarten and grade-school children, including during tests...

...You have to make sure they are meeting everbody...

...This information was not given to me by some leftwing fruitcake but by a trusted friend of 20 years who learned it from a former deputy director of the CIA...

...What the Sports section did not say was that the installation had been ordered by the office of the commissioner of baseball, who just happens to be a fellow named Peter Ueberroth...

...You might remember one example from last year's articles in the Monthly—a story about the absurdities of teacher certification called "Yes, But Where Are Your Credits in Recess Management 101...

...unique insights that come from personal experience...

...I should have added that it would have been slipping funds to the Fuhrer through a Swiss bank...

...I was glad to see that the people who give the Pulitzer prizes have added to their awards one for "explanatory journalism...

...Extra effort, special emphasis—whatever name you give it—those of us who think being color-blind is enough simply don't make it and therefore miss the chance to get to know the other fellows...

...Who are the poor...

...His name was Thomas H. Dyer...

...According to a study by the Congressional Budget Office, the largest group of poor people are children...

...To an astonishing extent, they are our children...

...Mercedes Benz's sporty new $23,000 'Baby Benz' is being snapped up...

...At least I'm unaware of any award that recognizes it...

...Over the years, as more and more groups became aware of what this kind of regulation could do for them, state legislatures have been inundated with requests to set up new licensing boards...

...The high moral tone of these groups is illustrated by the Certified Shorthand Reporters Board...

...A prominent black lawyer was quoted by Trescott as saying, "We attended many different events—a reception before a benefit, private parties hosted by whites, a black organization's Christmas party...

...The Ethiopia famine became a fact for the world on October 23 when NBC broadcast a story about it...

...The latter, while certainly not admirable, were relatively benign...

...What may be another major factor in their non-recognition is that these articles usually aren't written by professional journalists, from whose ranks come most of the judges for the awards...

...Another said: "White guests require more work...

...I have long suspected that Washington is a vast wasteland littered with computers that either don't work or are outdated...

...As much as I admire the lawyers of the American Civil Liberties Union, sometimes I want to throttle them...

...At the black party there were no whites ." The truth is, if anything...

...One is to give the appearance of regulation...

...I want the police to check up on drunk drivers...

...The firm in turn, according to The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, included the $250 in its bill to the government...

...We try to run several articles like this each year...

...Another problem computers have created has been identified by Robert Ellis Smith, the publisher of Privacy Journal...

...One black told Trescott: "Black people who maintain a totally black environment see white people as the enemy...

...Incidentally, during his tenure at the Census Bureau, Chapman also billed the government $135 to attend the Conservative Political Action Conference at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington...

...Unfortunately, there is another kind of journalism that they still don't seem to understand...

...Then there's the Board of Landscape Architects, which presumably protects owners of large estates from people who don't know where to plant the palm trees, a vicious gang of criminals if there ever was one...

...The customer even gave the board medical records of the x-ray and stitches she was given in a hospital emergency If you have doubted our contention that the Democrats have become the party of the special interests, consider this report by Ralph Nader's Congress Watch: of the top 25 PAC recipients in the House, 21 were Democrats...

...The board has successfully protected the public from having court testimony transcribed by anyone other than certified shorthand reporters, stalwartly resisting dangerous innovations like the tape recorder that might appear to the untutored to be cheaper and more reliable than shorthand...

...The other is to make sure that there is, in fact, no regulation at all—except of potential entrants, meaning potential competitors...

...By contrast, Preston points out, children can't vote and their only remaining source of political influence is their parents...

...I guess this is one reason why I am more sympathetic to the idea of affirmative action than most of my fellow neoliberals...

...I realize that this would relieve these teachers of an intellectual burden that test scores suggest has been too great for many of them...

...If you think that I'm being a bit extreme, consider something I learned only last month and that I think very few people are aware of: the CIA was behind Idi Amin's rise to power...

...Chapman, now director of the White House Office of Planning and Evaluation, did his traveling while he was director of the Census Bureau...

...And if you doubted the identity of the beneficiaries of the Reagan recovery, consider this report from Geoffrey Quinn of the Associated Press: "Americans are buying expensive goods like never before...

...What is wrong with recognizing the historical importance of religious figures as long as they are not specially singled out but are chosen along with prominent people from other fields, such as politics and education...

...But the man who was probably more responsible than anyone for America's victory in the crucial battle of that war, Midway, died on January 5 of this year, unknown...

...If the Russians were to launch a surprise attack, I once observed, government computers would respond by issuing 50 million erroneous Social Security refunds...

...Award-givers like that kind of thing: nail the crooks, expose the scandal...

...he Washington Post's Style section, which took a few lumps in our January issue, deserves praise for facing up, in an article by Jacqueline Trescott entitled "So Close and Yet So Far," to an extremely painful fact about Washington life: blacks and whites have little social contact...

...With the computer, outdated records appear to be very contemporary...

...He took the trips...

...Giuffrida likes to travel abroad, too...

...On page 106 of the same issue, the Sports section vigorously condemned the threatened installation of lights at Wrigley Field in Chicago, the last bastion of daytime baseball...

...For 1983, 25 percent of all preschool children lived in households with family incomes below the poverty line...

...The problem is that computers are ordered by people who imperfectly understand them, who just as they are getting the barest grip on the machine, are promoted or move on to some other job and are replaced by someone else who doesn't know what he is doing...

...Charles Peters...

...How did the same political philosophy—fascismproduce such different results...

...North American Watch Co...

...In the District of Columbia we have the Board of Cosmetology...

...But where in fields like employment and college admission there was a need for whites to seek out blacks, I think affirmative action is needed from both sides to bridge this troubling social gap...

...This study confirms a trend reported by the demographer, Samuel H. Preston, in the December 1984 issue of Scientific American: "In 1970, 16 percent of those under 14 lived in poverty compared with 24 percent of those older than 65...

...In 1984, Preston says, the federal expenditure per child "is less than a tenth the expenditure per older person...

...Another Republican official, Louis O. Giuffrida, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, found a somewhat more ingenious way to get the government to pay for his attendance at a $250-a-plate political reception for George Bush...

...It seems that the General Accounting Office, which spends much of its time exposing waste in the rest of the government, had itself wasted $13 million on a computer project that was never completed...

...Take, for example, the State Board of Fabric Care, which regulates dry cleaners and has not, according to the Los Angeles Times, revoked a license in more than a decade...

...I recommend it...

...The author sees the Jews in all their human frailty, which makes their courage and tenacity all the more admirable...

...In the same intellectual tradition as the ACLU's opposition to drunk driving checkpoints is the protest by Americans United for Separation of Church and State against the issuance of a postage stamp honoring the work of Junipero Serra, the Catholic priest who founded the missions along the coast of California...

...forces in many other engagements...

...Some of my favorites are in California...

...The former were simply horrible...

...Twenty-three percent of the children lived in poverty compared with 15 percent of the elderly...

...What this reveals is that even among black and white educated elites, the people who have no excuse for not knowing better, racial feelings continue to exist—ranging from hatred to discomfort and self-consciousness...

...The cover story of the January 7 issue of Time hailed Peter Ueberroth as Man of the Year...

...Often even the handful isn't there...

...I suspect there are often sexual overtones involved, "You don't love me if you won't do this," or something similar...

...Nobody," says Smith, "would use an arrest record that was dirty or yellowed or dog-eared...

...This seems to at last meet the need for an award that will recognize reporting that combines factfinding and analysis...

...written by a teacher named Susan Ohanian, who had herself endured the nightmarish requirements that our public schools have instituted to drive the talented from teaching and to discourage them from even applying...

...State licensing boards have, as readers of this magazine know, two functions...

...At an integrated party you usually don't dance...

...In just one year, between August 1981 and August 1982, Chapman took 17 out-of-town trips, including visits to Europe, the Middle East, and South America...

...It's not that these inhibitions can't be overcome —a white Washingtonian, Nancy Folger, is locally famous for her integrated parties—but the hard fact is that few people make the effort...

...In private life," I was delighted to note in Captain Dyer's obituary, "he gardened, raised orchids under lights, and did needlepoint...

...One of the tasks William Agee asked her to perform while she was his subordinate at Bendix was to, write his daughter's application to Princeton...

...This is the firstperson article, written by a participant in the story, who can offer the...

...Leaving aside the propriety of the daughter's application being written by anyone other than the daughter, there is something especially demeaning about being required to provide this kind of personal service for a boss...

...It is the way computers perpetuate mistaken criminal records...

...One reason for this development is the growing political power of the elderly...

...One fascinating contrast is between the behavior of their German and Italian captors...

...But the interest of the teachers aside, isn't it in the interest of the rest of us to insist that our children be taught math in a way that challenges them to think instead of push buttons on a calculator...

...on December 28, government agencies all over town exploded with the kind of glee the average criminal experiences when a cop is caught with his hand in the cookie jar...

...He sent the bill to a consulting firm that works for FEMA...

...By 1982 the situation had been reversed...

...Punish the cops if they beat up some motorist or arrest him unjustly, but give them a fair chance to identify drunks and get them off the road...

...At white events, there were only a handful of blacks...

...The story of their journey, which lasted four years and took them from Bratislava through Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Rumania, and Turkey via the Bosphorus and the Dardenelles to Lesbos, Rhodes, Italy, and finally to Israel, is told in a new book, Odyssey, by John Bierman...

...In fact, his agency spent $5,000 to have his wife accompany him on first-class flights to Europe and Mexico—where, by the way, the consulting firm held receptions for the couple, charging the hors d'oeuvres and liquor to their FEMA contract, of course...

...But one story she tells in her self-righteous and self-pitying book, Powerplay, did win my sympathy...

...But the only one to win an award was "The Army Spies on Civilian Politics," by Christopher Pyle, who had been a captain in army intelligence while the misdeeds he described were taking place...