TILTING AT WINDMILLS
Peters, Charles
TILTING AT WINDMILLS BY CHARLES PETERS Rampant Rottweilers Cheap Coke Cheap Chic Credit-Crazed Juveniles Yogi Lawyers SHOULDN'T PAULA JONES HAVE sued Trooper Ferguson, The...
...A COUPLE OF ISSUES AGO, I EXPRESsed curiousity about what the H&R in H&R Block stood for...
...And Floyd Spence of South Carolina, who is chairman of the House National Security Committee, gets 94 percent from outside his district...
...Public interest groups could help the decline as they have in the case of tobacco by their campaigns against smoking...
...I’m not kidding...
...A reader, Kevin Herrington of St...
...TILTING AT WINDMILLS BY CHARLES PETERS Rampant Rottweilers Cheap Coke Cheap Chic Credit-Crazed Juveniles Yogi Lawyers SHOULDN'T PAULA JONES HAVE sued Trooper Ferguson, The American Spectator, and the Los Angeles Times instead of Bill Clinton...
...Forty-two percent of the contributions to senators come from out-of-state...
...It was their proclivity for casual sex-meaning brief encounters with total strangers whose faces they often didn’t even see...
...Sweet music to the ears of the computer-challenged...
...SPEAKING OF DISmaying trends, how about this one-the Rottweiler is now the second most popular dog in America...
...A Pentagon watchdog group called Business Executives for National Security estimates that only 30 percent of the military budget goes to combat forces...
...The result has been too many students who are too bored to learn...
...Louis, tells me it’s Henry and Richard...
...It was 27 years ago and the person involved was Suzannah Lessard...
...Now you know how the military-industrial complex continues to survive...
...For a while the bathhouses seemed to be dying...
...That was what made her mad...
...We’re learning we’re in a war that we can’t win...
...The Monthly began its crusade against this kind of stupid credentialism in our second issue in 1969...
...And how many of you had the good fortune to be born with enough talentwhether as an entrepreneur, artist, actor, musician, or athlete-to enable you to make a lot of money...
...And you guessed it, the cuts aren’t in Washington, but in Texas, at its hurricane tracking center in Florida, and at a tornado tracking center in Oklahoma...
...Yet the public school establishment seems smugly unwilling to face its shortcomings...
...THE HMOs HAVE COOKED UP another unpleasant...
...In both states, large numbers of public high school graduates needed help in math and English as well...
...And on the same day he was making the library announcement, Gates managed to take care of more immediate Microsoft business...
...But Gates is not ready for canonization yet...
...According to The Washington Times, the inspector general says the damage to the investigation is “irreparable...
...I have often heard of such offers being dangled, but only recently did I learn of one that was actually made and accepted...
...Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi gets 80 percent of his contributions from out-of-state...
...NOT LONG AGO WE PUBLISHED AN article criticizing today’s rich for not being more like Andrew Carnegie and giving substantial parts of their fortune to good causes such as the public libraries he endowed...
...In the District of Columbia, where any parent knows the public schools are much worse than those of Maryland and Virginia, “none of the 164 principals and only 15 of more than 5000 teachers received unsatisfactory evaluations for the 1995-96 school year,” according to Karyn Spellman of The Wshington Times...
...Gay marriage encourages the mature relationships and social stability conservatives are supposed to value and discourages the casual bathhouse sex that conservatives deplore...
...And you probably know she did remarkable work for us before going on to two decades at The New Yorke?and her recent distinguished biography of Stanford White...
...There is no evidence that she was sufficiently angered by Clinton’s alleged effort to “get to know her” in the Little Rock hotel room to even consider the possibility of legal actionuntil a year later when Trooper Ferguson was quoted in the Spectator and the Times as saying a certain “Paula” had told him after leaving the hotel room that she was available as a permanent girlfriend for the governor...
...According to a recent article by Steven Ginsberg in The Washington Post, the percentage of law graduates not practicing law has doubled since 1988...
...Here’s a man who spent his career computing taxes and the public schools won’t let him teach eighth-grade math...
...To THE RICH PEOPLE WHO DON’T think they should pay higher taxes than the other fellows, I want to ask how much of your success can be attributed to tax breaks and government subsidies or loans that came to you courtesy of your fellow citizens...
...In the House, the percentage of out-of-district contributions is 56-that’s right, 56...
...WHENI WAS A STUDENT in New York in the late forties, I had a good many gay friends...
...But there is no denying drugs will continue to be used...
...There was one thing about them that puzzled me...
...It’s a sad comment on the insane certification requirement in the public schools that a Catholic school.was, according to Dana Fields of the Associated Press, “one of the few where he could work without the certificate...
...We should, of course, not permit them to be endowed with new glamour by the kind of advertising we never should have permitted for cigarettes and alchohol...
...He joined other high-tech executives to lobby Congress for legislation favorable to their industry...
...Incredibly enough, a similar study of 1994 high school graduates in Virginia also found 25 percent needing remedial reading courses...
...It’s an extension of the way I like to dress,” she told The Wall StreetJournal, “and I like to think I dress well.’’ ANOTHERTR ENDT OWARD EXCESS is in the credit-card debt of college students...
...Trooper Ferguson did, or so the Spectator and the Times reported...
...The technology we boast is going to liberate us from offices isn’t dependable...
...She had never been published...
...Shouldn’t the people of each state control their own elections and not have to subject themselves to the influence of outside money...
...This practice later became a major factor in the spread of AIDS...
...people,” one emergency official told the Associated Press...
...We and others of like mind have made some progress...
...She had no college degree...
...I got it straight from the AP...
...THERISE E VEN A RAY OF HOPE FOR those who can’t escape the practice of law, if they live in California, that is...
...A recent survey of judges by Steven A. Holmes of The New York Times suggest this is the case...
...The reason is that the defense industry sells our planes to other nations, meaning potential opponents get what we’ve got and then we have to get something better...
...There is no room in my trade anymore for high school dropouts or for people without university degrees...
...There, troubled lawyers can get Continuing Legal Education Credit for the Transcendental Meditation Program offered by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, which promises to “reduce stress,” to eliminate “neurochemical endocrine imbalances that produce anxiety, inefficiency, health problems, and substance abuse,” and to train “mind and body to function in a relaxed state even in dynamic, stressful activity...
...The amount they owe nearly doubled between 1990 and 1995...
...In those days, the encounters usually took place in Turkish baths...
...A COUPLE OF YEARS ago, we printed some figures demonstrating how the bureaucrats at the Washington headquarters of various federal agencies had managed to protect their own jobs whle sacrificing to the ax those employees in the field who are often doing the real work...
...SPEAKINGOF CHANGING CAREERS, another Monthly crusade-to get lawyers out of law offices and into useful work-seems to be having some success...
...I HOPE THE TRIAL OF TIMothy McVeigh has convinced judges that keeping TV out of the court room is a good idea...
...To our immense benefit, The Wshington Monthly once did that...
...A similar phenomenon has been taking place in the military...
...And for most young people that means going into debt...
...SUPPOSE YOU’RE A BUREAUCRAT faced with a tough investigator who just might uncover some embarrassing facts about your agency...
...But the cheap kind is better than the expensive because it does not get people into debt or cause them to choose occupations on the basis of money...
...SPEAKINGO F DOWNSIZING, ANOTHer place to keep your fingers crossed that it’s being done the right way is the National Weather Service, which has announced plans to cut up to 200 jobs...
...The result has been too many students who are too bored to learn...
...IF YOU NEED MORE EVIdence that our public schools could stand improvement, consider that 25 percent of the 1995 public high school graduates enrolled in Maryland colleges have been required to take remedial reading...
...Of course, this may not matter much since, as The Wall Street7ournafs Nancy Ann Jeffrey points out, “many people today barely know their primary-care doctor...
...And an Army source revealed that of over 495,000 active duty soldiers, only 120,000 man the 10 fighting divisions, with another 80,000 providing essential logistics for the fighting menleaving 295,000 whose activities are less than vital...
...But we liked her unpublished samples and hired her...
...A few months ago, 60 Minutes revealed pervasive corruption among Customs officials who are being bribed to let illegal drugs into the country...
...Increased access to the Internet is quite likely to benefit Microsoft...
...Worldwide production of the two drugs has more than doubled...
...ONE OF THE WEIRDER EXCESSES OF the Bonfire of the Vanities era was dressing children in designer clothes...
...Now the fad appears to be returning...
...One hates to think of the number of Pete Hamils and Suzannah Lessards who are not getting a chance because the boss is afraid to bet on his own judgement...
...We hear one account after another of how illegal drugs corrupt law enforcement...
...The District of Columbia lottery agency, faced with a major investigation for alleged corrupt practices by its employees, hired the chief investigator away from the D.C...
...How can conservatives oppose such unions...
...If you’ve been lucky, why not share your wealth with those who weren’t so fortunate, so that at least their children will have a better chance in life...
...The biggest names in the field are Versace and Moschino...
...What we need is to apply the audition principle of the performing arts to the many other jobs where a performance test makes sense...
...A Navy source recently told Matthew Miller, a former OMB official who is now a columnist, that for the first time in history more than half the Navy’s officers are in support functions...
...Bill Gates, who was one of the delinquents singled out by the article, must have been slipped a copy by a friend...
...Beth Jaffe, a New Jersey lawyer, buys outfits from both for her four-year old daughter...
...Tom had been successful as a CEO-during his tenure H&R Block‘s earnings increased by 25 percent...
...Kevles, who directs the program in science, ethics, and public policy at California Institute of Technology, says that “the bathhouses are thriving” once more...
...In the early 1990s, we seemed to be entering an era of cheap chic, &ch I applauded in an article I wrote for this magazine in June 1990...
...It appears that the ploy has worked...
...SPEAKINGO F INSPECTORS GENERal, Michael R. Bromwich, who is the one at the Department of Justice, recently found a pattern of corruption among prison guards who were being bribed to smuggle drugs to inmates...
...The point is the terrible corruption would end...
...I suspect that, along with snobbery, intellectual insecurity on the part of those doing the hiring has a lot to do with their reliance on credentials...
...WHY DO WE ALLOW OUT-OFstate contributions to political campaigns...
...Chic is always silly...
...But he took a 98 percent pay cut in his $618,000 salary because he believed “the people who are the real heroes out there are the teachers...
...I AM NOW A PROUD MEMBER OF A craft that today would not grant me entry,” New York Daily News Editor Pete Hamil recently observed...
...Cocaine and heroin are cheaper, more plentiful and purer than ever before,” writes Frankel...
...IF WE WOULD LEGALIZE DRUGS, AS this magazine has long advocated, we would end the corruption...
...It seems that some e-mail is getting there later than letters delivered by the postal service...
...For years, my friends with computers have chided me for not getting with the computer revolution so that we could share the joy of almost instant communication through e-mail...
...Sixty-five percent of them carry plastic...
...And if we spent half as much on treatment for addicts-many ofwhom aren’t able to get any help today-as we now spend on the drug war, we might be able to dramatically ininimize the addiction problem, if not eliminate it altogether...
...For writers, look not at the degrees or their publication credits, but at samples of their writing...
...The situation is scandalous...
...And drugs would no longer be endowed with the glow of the illicit...
...One English user complained to The Wall StreetJournal, “Frankly, a clod horse could move between Kensington and Hampstead faster than [e-mail...
...Which takes me back to credentialism...
...But even if cheap is no longer chic, at least the trend lasted for a few years-whch is a lot better than the era of New Idealism which I predicted at the onset of the ‘80s and which was strangled in its crib by the greed that dominated that decade...
...One time-honored technique, often practiced by officials whose shoulders are being peered over by an examiner from the OMB or an auditor from the GAO, is for the agency that might be embarrassed if his inquiry is too zealous, to offer the examiner or auditor the prospect of future employment at a higher salary...
...One factor in this may be that, according to Joshua Wolf Shenk of US, News & Wmld Repm, “78 percent of college juniors and seniors don’t know that the best way to figure out the cost of a loan is to look at the interest rate...
...War on Drugs Yields Few Victories,” is the headline over a long article by Glenn Frankel in a June issue of The Washington Post...
...One answer to this problem is to encourage gay marriage...
...At the age of 41, Tom quit his job as CEO of H&R Block to teach math to eighthgraders in a school with mostly minority students...
...Unfortunately, too many universities completely ignore teaching ability, hiring solely on the basis of degrees, and promoting solely on the basis of publications...
...A KNOWLEDGEABLE OBSERVER OF the defense industry recently explained to me why we seem to be constantly having to put billions into a new generation of fighter planes when we had thought we had achieved technological superiority...
...Forty-two states now have some form of alternative certification that permits people without education courses to begin teaching...
...How much was due to the good fortune of being born into a family that was well-off enough to make sure you received the health care and education that would enable you to make full use of your talents...
...Whatever the implications for the national pysche may be, one thing is clear-we’re more likely to get bitten...
...Every lawyer I know has expressed interest in doing something else,” Ginsberg was told by Hillary Mantis, director of the Career Planning Center at Fordham University’s School of Law...
...But they still have to take the education courses at night or in the summer to be fully certified...
...Dog bites, the same Associated Press story reports, have increased from 585,000 in 1986 to 800,000...
...He also tells me that Henry’s son, Tom, has done something I would admire...
...A few of the methodology courses are useful, but many are junk-insults to the intelligence of the kind of people we want to attract to teaching...
...TEACHIINS AGN OTHER PROFESsion where an audition should be decisive...
...Too many universities ignore teaching ability, hiring solely on the basis of degrees and publications...
...Of course, it must be accompanied by subject knowledge, but that knowledge without a knack for the classroom is worthless...
...But now it appears that they are making a comeback because, according to Daniel J. Kevles writing in The New York Times Book Review, “the advent of therapeutic drugs-notably the protease inhibitors-appear to have made AIDS a disease you can live with rather than die from...
...surprise for you next time you wake up in a hospital...
...They are compromising the safety of...
...My wife’s HMO changed hers three times in four years...
...At your bedside you will find not your family doctor, but someone called a “hospitalistl’ It seems the HMOs have discovered it’s more cost effective to have one of these fellows handle patients’ questions and answers than to pay different personal physicians for hospital visits...
...Does this mean we're becoming more vicious-or are we just more afraid...
...IN THE MIDST OF ALL THESE trends in the wrong direction, I find one that delights me...
...Bill Clinton didn’t say it...
...The clincher is the contrast between the Simpson criminal case where TV was permitted and the Simpson civil trial where it was not...
...With the glamour gone the use of drugs should decline...
...Recently, Gates visited a District of Columbia library to announce that Washington would be one of 43 cities receiving funding from Microsoft to provide their public libraries with access to the Internet...
...But even more important, Shenk suspects, is the tendency of today’s young people to think they have to emulate the “pretty cushy” lifestyle of Courtney Cox’s character in TV’s Friends...
...inspector general’s office with a 40 percent pay increase...
Vol. 29 • July 1997 • No. 7
