Tilting at Windmills

...Right...

...So, especially among the young, social contact tended to be phone booth to phone booth...

...Wen I went to New York to go to college in 1946, phones were still very hard to get because of backed-up orders from the war...

...Besides, a lot of people simply couldn't afford them...

...Among liberal Democrats, the favorite ticket for 1992 is Bill Bradley and Bob Kerry...

...Another important reform —and this one is clearly laudable—was recently floated by William Seidman, the head of the FDIC, in testimony before the House Banking Committee: Restrict federal deposit insurance to $100,000 per individual instead of per account...

...Veteran readers know that this magazine has long advocated not women's, but men's, liberation...

...And before we forget the moral blindness at the Post that allows the sports section to flack for Virginia Slims, you should know that the editors of the Post decided it wasn't news when Canada outlawed all forms of cigarette advertising...

...Well, the conventional wisdom just isn't true any more...

...People delighted in nature, shunned war, and crafted ceramics instead of weapons...

...Many other plants were two weeks to a month ahead of their normal schedule this year...

...Machoism is the enemy, whether in men or women...

...Have you heard about the Frink letter...

...In those days the aircraft of choice among Third World airlines was the DC-3...

...I'll reserve comment on Kerry, but if you need a good, quick briefing on him, see Jacob Weisberg's article in the December 18 issue of The New Republic...

...Charles Peters...

...How much longer is the sports section going to mindlessly fall for the cons of corporate America in cases such as this and the paper's shameless promotion of cigarette-sponsored sports events...

...public life today...

...They can afford to lose the $200 million they would sacrifice in political advertising...

...And only Canada, Japan, and Australia join the United States in allowing paid political advertising on TV...

...Their model is the Secret Service...

...Since there must be at least a few who, if their stories were known, would provide examples for the rest of society to follow, I urge each of these foundations to establish a second award, this for articles about such courage...

...I may have found a female ally...

...Max Bialystock couldn't have put it any better...

...I'm indebted to Newsday's Maurice Carroll for the explanation, which is that the president's office is located just across the hall from Room 9, the City Hall press room, while the comptroller's is located across the street in the Municipal Building...

...It would have been easy to keep the old tax...

...The licenses these stations receive from the federal government have proved to be licenses to mint money: $26.7 billion in advertising revenues in 1988 alone...

...Harris proposes that all those drawing a salary of more than $50,000 a year from the federal government be required to fill out their own income tax returns and publicly disclose any penalties they have to pay because of errors...

...Shouldn't there be a little blushing at the Post about this...

...Over the years the conventional wisdom has come to be that raising taxes on the rich won't raise large amounts of money because there aren't that many rich people...

...Suppose FDR had gone before Congress the day after Pearl Harbor and said, "Even though the Japanese have made a dastardly sneak attack that destroyed our fleet, I'm going to turn the other cheek because I promised in the 1940 campaign that I would never send American boys to a foreign war...

...And speaking of official cars, do not begrudge Douglas Wilder, Virginia's governor, his new Lincoln Town Car, but I do wonder why the state had to pay extra for six-way adjustable power seats...

...About Bradley, I do have this warning to offer: At a crucial moment he was dead wrong on a crucial issue...

...Ronald Reagan made the rich so rich that just the increase from 28 to 38 percent tax on incomes above $100,000 would raise an additional $100 billion in the next five years alone...

...An example of the leadership for which Polner has received far too little credit was his prophetic article in the April 1971 issue of The Washington Monthly that for the first time recognized the plight of Vietnam veterans, which would continue to be a national disgrace until their service and suffering finally began to be recognized in the eighties...

...TILTING AT WINDMILLS A potentially important reform in the compensation of federal employees is gaining momentum in the Bush administration and on Capitol Hill...

...She is Marija Gimbutas, an archeologist at UCLA, who contends that 6,000 years ago there was a European culture in which neither men nor women dominated the other sex...

...Deposit insurance should protect the average man, not the big shots...

...The point is, of course, that the world, and most particularly the U.S.A., is increasingly oriented to the convenience of the affluent and the screwing of the rest of us...

...The state police, who provide the drivers, like to think of this as a security function...

...But it will be undesirable if it fails—and I bet it will—to lower federal salaries in the many areas of the country where they are, especially in the middle grades, higher than the local competition...

...Written long ago by Sigmund Freud to one of his patients but only recently discovered, it reveals that the great man was not above giving due regard to the practical considerations of life: "Your complaint that you cannot grasp your homosexuality implies that you are not yet aware of your fantasy of making me a rich man...

...A few weeks ago, on the front page of The Washington Post's sports section, there was a story by Michael Wilbon headlined "NFL Will Attempt To Shorten Games...

...23.1 percent for men...

...But Bradley made an impassioned plea for the lower rate, arguing he had promised it to rich lobbyists in return for their going along with the elimination of loopholes in Bradley's Tax Reform Act of 1986...

...Only Norway and Sri Lanka do not permit free television time for their political parties...

...That the latter has happened is suggested by this recent report in The Wall Street Journal: "Between 1979 and 1988, the number of women arrested for violent crimes went up 41.5 percent vs...

...Black men in Harlem are less likely to live to 65 than the males of Bangladesh, according to a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine...

...But there is still hope...

...As one Maryland legislator observed: "There sure are a lot of those people standing around with things stuck in their ears...

...If matters turn out all right, let us change this imaginary gift into a real contribution to the Psychoanalytic Funds...

...It is also true that there were more brutally hot summers in the eighties than in any of the other six decades of my life...

...This did not exactly inspire confidence on the part of the traveler, who knew that the last DC-3 had been built in the 1940s...

...Such a ban, if enacted in the United States, would, of course, deprive the Post of advertising revenue...

...I'm indebted to Max Kampelman, a prominent Washington attorney, for those facts and for his enlistment, in a recent essay in The New York Times, in an old Washington Monthly campaign to require TV stations, as a condition of their licenses, to give free time to candidates...

...But it will now require tremendous courage for congressmen to vote for one...

...I applaud both awards but fear they will find few credible American nominees...

...Why does the president of New York's City Council receive more press coverage than the city's comptroller, who has more important duties...

...A kind attendant at the cigar store or delicatessen downstairs would take your calls and yell upstairs or push your buzzer and you would run down to the phone, often praying that it was Miss or Mr...

...I'm reminded of all this by James Fallows's recent observation in The New York Review of Books that he couldn't find a usable phone booth in Manhattan but noticed one sleek automobile after another gliding by as its occupant talked into a cellular phone...

...The latter method requires us to insure all the deposits of the rich who are smart enough to spread them around in different insured banks and savings and loans in amounts of $100,000...

...S tate and local government officials tend to imitate the fellows in Washington...

...We have wanted men to imitate the best in women, rather than women to imitate the worst in men...

...I should note that I have long been an admirer of Murray Polner, the editor of Present Tense, and, incidentally, the author of a book review that appears on page 59...

...If reporters are encouraged to ferret out these stories, the heroes involved will receive the recognition they deserve and others will be encouraged to emulate them...

...In 1961, none of those DC-3s was older than that...

...They're rich enough to pay for sound investment advice, which makes insurance unnecessary...

...What Bradley did was to take his own honor more seriously than what was right for the country...

...And did you know that Weyerhauser, located in the historically cool and wet Northwest, is developing a drought-resistant tree...

...Today, airlines are flying some DC-8s and 707s that are more than 30 years old and many 727s, 737s, and 747s that have been around more than 20 years...

...Earlier this year I received announcements of the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award and the Cavallo Prize for Moral Courage in Business or Government...

...Is it possible that this had an unconscious effect on the editors' judgment...

...For example, in Maryland, the state provides cars and drivers for the governor (who was the only state official to be so honored in my home state of West Virginia from the time 1 was a boy until I left to come to Washington in 1961), and for the lieutenant governor, the attorney general, the state treasurer, the comptroller, the speaker of the House, the president of the Senate, and occasionally, according to The Washington Post's Richard Tapscott, for the governor's "best friend," Hilda Mae Snoops...

...In the 1960s my job at the Peace Corps required considerable travel...

...There was not one word in the article that even hinted to the reader that the major reason games are longer is the frequent and lengthy time-outs for television commercials...

...The trend is even starker among teenagers...

...That sounds good to me...

...It could be highly desirable if it improves government salaries in large cities such as New York and Los Angeles, where they are on the whole not competitive with the private sector's...

...If you wondered whether the tax reforms I recommended last month could raise revenues significantly, I can understand why you did...

...If you have ever been in Bangladesh, or its neighboring Indian state of West Bengal, where Calcutta is located, you will realize how grim the Journal's finding is...

...Justice for everyone in the Middle East requires expression of liberal Jewish opinion in America to encourage the moderates in Israel...

...People who have that kind of money don't need federal insurance...

...The commentators who ridicule concerns about global warming may be right, but until now, in my 29 years in Washington I had never seen winter end the day after Christmas nor a crocus bloom as early as the first week of February...

...This, I assure you, will produce tax simplifications overnight...

...A majority of the committee, believing that the country would need the additional revenue and comforted by the thought that keeping the rate as it was would not constitute a politically suicidal tax increase, seemed ready to preserve the 38 percent rate...

...The wooden booths of those days afforded privacy and could even be called cozy compared to the facilities available today...

...Thought of metal fatigue was never far from our minds...

...In 1987 it was 38 percent, but it was scheduled to drop to 28 percent in 1988...

...These two steps, abolishing the manufactured commercial and requiring all speeches and debates to be given free time by the stations, would go a long way toward eliminating money as the dominant factor in American politics...

...I cannot tell you how depressed I am that the American Jewish Committee has sold out to its wealthy, right-wing backers and canceled its support for the liberal magazine, Present Tense, while continuing to subsidize the much more costly but hard-line conservative Commentary...

...I'm indebted to Godfrey Harris of the Harris/Ragan Management Group in Los Angeles for another reform that could revolutionize the system...

...But we didn't do it because of one man, Bill Bradley...

...If you read the final item in this column last month, you know how important I think an income tax increase is...

...The time was the fall of 1987, the place was the Senate Finance Committee, and the subject was the top rate for income taxes...

...Since a phone call was just a nickel, even if the operator was unpleasant enough to demand further payment for another three minutes—and often she mercifully did not—this was a splendid means of communication for those of us who were temporarily or permanently impecunious...

...How many more take-offs and landings could those wings endure...

...Although there have been conspicuous examples of bravery in eastern Europe and China, there is, as you may have noticed, a severe shortage of moral courage in U.S...

...The Monthly goes beyond Kampelman in advocating that the free time be used only for debate and speeches by the candidates and not for the manufactured commercials that make the candidate look better and his opponent worse than either really is...

...I can't think of a single recent example of anyone risking his career on behalf of principle and the public interest of the kind that Kennedy wrote about in his book...