TILTING AT WINDMILLS

...Consider the library of books critical of Ronald Reagan that has been created by his former subordinates at the White House...

...Take the two pilots of Continental Express (a commuter line) Flight 2286, which crashed on an instrument-landing approach to Durango, Colorado last year...

...One more sign that at least the more ostentatious forms of greed are going out of style is the declining number of luxury cars being sold in this country...

...I am grateful to the Washington Stage Guild for its revival of George Bernard Shaw's The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles...

...But now when the first HTE bangs down the phone and dictates his incendiary letter, he tells his secretary to fax it right away...

...The other HTE gets it while he's still hot—in other words when he is most likely to keep the dispute going by dictating a heated response to his secretary, who is of course told to fax it immediately...

...Sue the tobacco companies on their behalf...

...His copilot, according to the National Transportation Safety Board, had a record of deficiencies in performing instrument landings...

...Finally it has announced that it will act "later this year...

...Practically every office has one...

...Thousands of lung cancer victims who became addicted before the surgeon general's warning first appeared die every year...

...The Internal Revenue Service is supposed to send photocopies of returns to taxpayers who request them and pay the required fee for the service...

...In order to make something worthwhile they would have to take risks and immerse themselves among the common people, and this, he said, was the step they were least willing to take...

...A recent survey of the members of the Maryland Bar Association provides additional evidence for a point often made in this column, namely that a lot of lawyers don't like what they're doing...

...Although some crooks don't have a dime, many have money, often because of their crimes, and it is right, at least after their victims have been compensated, for that money to be used to repay the government for the costs their misdeeds have caused it to incur...

...It rejected a proposal by the State Board of Education to require librarians in towns of fewer than 7,500 people to have master's degrees in library science...

...While that's practically certain to make it unconstitutional, the good part of the idea should not be forgotten...

...They happen, as Cooper pointed out, to be among the best-trained law enforcement personnel in the nation...

...Personal autonomy, which was undervalued in the era of the organization man, may be overvalued today...

...The organist looked down on the spirituals Johns loved...

...They should be assigned to walking beats, as should most of the regular District police...

...And on the third, he's on his own, but he can ask questions...

...The citizens of the small communities served by those libraries might just prefer to spend their money on good books, just as they might prefer to keep old Mrs...

...Further evidence for another point long made by this magazine comes from a study reported in The Journal of the American Medical Association that found that three out of five smokers being treated for alcohol or drug dependency said the cigarettes were harder to give up than alcohol or drugs...

...I urge them to try teaching in the public schools, where people of their intelligence and ability are desperately needed...

...When a HotTempered Executive banged down his phone and fired off an angry letter to another HotTempered Executive with whom he had just been talking, the other HTE would have a couple of days to calm down before the angry letter arrived...

...Speaking of our wonderful city government, the District has only 22 paramedics assigned to ambulance duty...

...The New York State Board of Regents has struck a blow against mindless credentialism...

...Today, you get one plane...

...But it made the ordinance apply to those found innocent as well as to those who are convicted...

...The result I fear is that the chronic paranoia of American society will become exacerbated...

...The Anaheim (California) City Council had a good idea but got carried away...

...The education department also wanted to require all the libraries to have computerized information retrieval...

...Now the best and brightest are all too eager to make a switch ." Money is, of course, a major factor in the moves...

...It's worst by far in the city's poorer neighborhoods...

...It is that every day should be lived as if it were the day of reckoning...

...It will report not on the student but on the school, showing how it is performing in comparison to other schools in the state...

...There may be a hint of patriotism involved...

...They are right of course...

...We told you a couple of months ago about the increased injuries and fatalities in California after it raised the limit to 65...

...And because the black elite is much larger today, the problems Johns described are much worse...

...Last month I wrote about the free agency problem in baseball with a player like Claudell Washington switching teams seven times...

...The challenge that has led to this development is the problem of how to soothe the egos of the mergees who are ultimately going to lose out...

...For this reason there has been pressure to rush Savannah River back into production...

...The article turned out to be about something else entirely...

...On the other hand, it seems to me that those acquitted not only shouldn't have to pay the cost of the prosecution, they should be reimbursed by the state for the cost of their defense...

...Johns had another bone to pick with snobbery at his church...

...The argument used by the tobacco companies to defeat a lawsuit by a lung cancer victim is that the cancer was the smoker's own fault because he chose to continue smoking in the face of death warnings on cigarette packs...

...According to the February 13 issue of Time, "a growing number of professionals are turning to teaching in midcareer, taking pay cuts and accepting sacrifices in order to pursue their late-found vocation" The teachers' unions have long used the requirement of the education degree to discourage such mid-career transfers...

...But another, and I suspect even more important, factor is the way talented people think of themselves today...

...The state of its files is suggested by a recent audit of 11 record centers that reports, "In most record centers we found W-2 forms scattered on the floor...

...The pilot had lost his driver's license in Florida because of traffic convictions and had then been convicted of eight moving violations in Colorado in a space of just four years...

...Most of the top reporters and their editors and publishers think Baker is a competent man, perhaps even the most competent among Bush's appointees...

...The federal bureaucracy, which has long been the leader in the creation of fancy titles for everyone, is in danger of losing its preeminence...

...The city of Baltimore, with only a slightly larger population and with much less tax revenue than the District, has more than 130...

...The District of Columbia, as everyone knows, is in the midst of an epidemic of crime...

...He accused them of persisting in the white man's view of slavery—that labor was demeaning—when Negroes should know that it was oppression not labor that demeaned them...

...The new contender for the world's title championship is the postmerger American corporation...

...And, of course, you would be right...

...Jones as librarian because she knows books and cares for them lovingly even though she's never been near a school of library science...

...It is undesirable for peacetime because the run-off it produces is environmentally hazardous...

...The United States of course...

...For three years previous to this crash, the safety board had been telling the FAA that it should require this warning system in commuter airlines— the first time was in 1985, after a Maine crash in which eight people died...

...This lack of loyalty to a team or to an institution, or even to a leader, has become commonplace in the eighties...

...Unfortunately, as David Nather suggests in the article beginning on page 12 of this issue, not all the fellows in the cockpit are as well suited to their tasks...

...The Pentagon has been telling us there is a severe shortage of tritium, which is needed in nuclear weapons and has been produced in only one facility, the Savannah River reactor complex, which has been shut down for safety reasons...

...Yet in the poorest area, the 6th district, there are only 262 police officers, while there are 414 in the 2nd district, which includes Georgetown and other affluent parts of the city west of Rock Creek Park...

...Because the Pentagon realizes that a congressional vote to subtract anything from the operations budget will sound like a vote against readiness and motherhood, it tends to stick items under O&M that it doesn't want scrutinized...

...Now it develops that the Energy Department has been selling tritium to private corporations and research groups, both here and abroad, for decades and is continuing to do so...

...On the first plane, he looks over your shoulder...

...Charles Peters...

...It may, I should concede, be something more than pure self-interest that is motivating the media's heavyweights in this case...

...One was coming off a cocaine high...

...There is, to be sure, no point in sticking with a bad law firm and there is undeniable good in having the public find out the truth about a president...

...The answer is that it is absolutely unique...

...People won't bring unjust suits if they know they're going to have to pay the defendant's costs if they lose...

...Certainly the story has not been pursued by the big shots of the Washington press, who are especially dependent on Baker...

...But now 24 states have alternative certification programs that make it easier for the talented newcomer to break in...

...Twenty-one percent of the fees have had to be refunded because the IRS can't find the returns...

...Between that accident and the one in Durango, there were, according to David Field of The Washington Times, two other crashes that might have been prevented by the warning device...

...All of which reminds me of an important point I haven't made recently: the best solution to court-clogging in the case of civil suits is to adopt a loser-pays rule with them as well...

...It used to be that the time it took to deliver a letter provided a period during which anger could cool...

...And farming was too dirty...

...But what if he became addicted before the warnings began to be published in the 1960s, so addicted that he was no longer free to choose to stop...

...They don't want to see his influence diminished by scandal...

...Have we become so accustomed to our shameful record that we've come to accept it as a kind of given, something we know but which nothing can be done about...

...This strikes me as a splendid idea, which I hope other states will quickly adopt...

...The FAA still did nothing...

...If you had to pick which of five countries—Canada, Britain, West Germany, Sweden, and the United States—has the highest percentage of children living below the poverty line, which would you choose...

...The last time we looked at it ("Thirty-Five Ways to Cut the Defense Budget," Phil Keisling, Jonathan Alter, April 1982), it included items like the salaries of such dubious Pentagon bureaucrats as the 1,500 public information and public relations specialists and 10,000 personnel managers, not to mention subsidies for all those commissaries and post exchanges that are now needed only at the few truly isolated military bases, and such other essentials as reseeding base golf courses and paying for the secretary of defense's private dining room...

...Indeed, it should be adopted by all the states and the federal government...

...This is the rule in England, where it has worked well...

...In 38 states that raised the limit to 65, the rate of increase in fatalities from 1986 to 1987 was nearly three times as high as in the 10 states that kept the limit at 55...

...The Army has purchased special machines to clean its tanks and other battlefield equipment, at a cost of $16,000 per unit...

...Even these fellows might have avoided the Durango crash had their plane been equipped with a ground proximity alarm, which would have given them a 29-second warning to pull up before they hit the ground...

...For the other, Jim Schacter of the Los Angeles Times reports that the title of the day is "vice president, operations analysis and planning...

...I was delighted because I thought it meant that the accompanying article would expose the little-known con game hidden in the Pentagon's "operations and maintenance" budget...

...It decided that the city should bill criminals for their trials and the cost of the police work that led to their arrest...

...And because too many of their former white oppressors, whom they still emulate, continue to value status and prestige above work, this country is losing the international economic competition...

...You can do a good deed and get rich too...

...And because too many members of the black and white elite are too preoccupied with climbing higher on the status ladder, they are all failing to lend a helping hand to those down below...

...He named," Branch continues, "the Alabama State business professors and challenged the congregation to name an actual business to which any of them had ever applied himself...

...Nof long ago, as I was leafing through a Sunday edition of The Washington Post, I was delighted to see a headline, "Ready or Not: Cut Pentagon Readiness Spending...

...As for wartime, it makes so much noise that on a real battlefield it would reveal the location of our forces to the enemy...

...Many people, having read Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters, will tell you how much we need another Martin Luther King today...

...One will remain the real thing...

...But even more, I think, we need King's forerunner at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Vernon Johns...

...This is the argument that can bankrupt the tobacco companies...

...I agree with "Who's Who" (see page 17) that the shortage of media outrage about James Baker's Chemical Bank stock can be attributed to reporters' desire not to injure or anger one of their best sources...

...But it reminded me to remind our readers about those games...

...So, lawyers, if you're still too greedy to go into teaching, here's something you can do to save your miserable souls...

...He had also twice been disciplined for letting a passenger board his plane while a propeller was spinning...

...He might send a polite or even apologetic reply to the first HTE, who, also having had time to recover his equanimity, might be ready to look favorably upon a peaceful overture...

...Now comes a report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration covering 48 states...

...On the second, you look over his shoulder...

...If you're not delighted by the prospect of blue sky and fresh air as the skin peels back on your plane and you want to know what went wrong, you need look no further than this quote obtained by the Seattle Times from a Boeing assembly-line worker: "They used to give you three planes to train a guy...

...It can't be used in peace or in war...

...The only articles that I have seen that were seriously critical of Baker were by C. Robert Zelnick on the op-ed page of The New York Times and Stephen Kurkjian in The Boston Globe...

...Johns could make his congregation, the black elite of Montgomery, nervous when he wore muddy shoes or sold fish and watermelon on the side...

...I'm worried about all those fax machines...

...Did you know that New Jersey parents are going to get a new kind of report card from their schools...

...Most members of the black elite continue to prefer the safety of prestigious jobs in the professions or large corporations to the risks of entrepreneurship, which could provide jobs and opportunities for other blacks...

...There appears to be, I'm delighted to say, something of a trend in this direction...

...What is so special about the Army's machine to justify the extra $14,000...

...All of us admire the skill and heroism of the United pilot who safely guided that 747 back to Honolulu...

...Business was beneath them, Johns said derisively...

...While I'm at it, I might as well update you on still another of our causes, the 55 mile per hour speed limit...

...Although it is not one of the great man's great plays, it does state his view of the Last Judgment, which is mine too...

...Wall Street is full of Claudell Washingtons...

...The rich area is also where almost all of the 995 members of the Uniformed Division of the Secret Service stand around or sit in squad cars in front of embassies, doing practically nothing all day, as this magazine has twice pointed out (see "The Executive Protection Racket," Howie Kurtz, October 1978, and "Why Washington's Best Cops Walk Its Safest Beat," Matthew Cooper, April 1988...

...And in the law, as Saundra Torry and B.H...

...The merged corporations will, for example, end up with two comptrollers...

...He upset them even more with his attacks on their attachment to status and privilege above work...

...On the contrary, the desire to avoid labor had enticed whites into the corruption of slavery...

...But wouldn't we be better off working together to create institutions that we can be proud of, institutions to which we should be loyal...

...The airconditioned squad car, by insulating its occupants from street-smart knowledge of the people in the neighborhoods, has become the greatest friend the criminal ever had...

...Similar commercial cleaners can be bought for $2,000...

...Lawrence pointed out in The Washington Post last month, "Gone are the days when partners remained loyal to one firm for life...

...According to The New York Times, sales of Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, BMW, Saab, Volvo, Jaguar, and Audi automobiles have fallen in the past two years...

...What should be done—and Congress has the power to do it—is transfer these underemployed officers into the city police force and put them in the heavy crime districts...

...I was similarly tormented at the First Presbyterian Church in Charleston, West Virginia, by a series of choir directors who were choosing hymns that demonstrated their good taste instead of the rousers I loved, like "Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus" and "Lead On Oh King Eternal...

...This survey reports that one-third of the lawyers questioned are unhappy with their work and are considering leaving their profession...