December 2002 Archives

A lot has been written about John Ashcroft and his religiousity. Lots of people (mostly liberal) have said that his mixing of state affairs with his reverence for Jesus is inappropriate.

But I don't get bothered much by Ashcroft's religion. I think Ashcroft's failure as Attorney General has nothing to do with his religion.

Have you heard of a program called Total Information Awareness (TIA)?

TIA is a Pentagon program designed to build a large-scale counter-terrorism database from lots of different sources, including e-mail, electronic and credit card purchases, airline travel, rental cars, telephone calling cards, gun purchases, and medical records.

Now here's what bothers me about Ashcroft:

The administration's interest in e-mail is a wholly unhealthy precedent, especially given this administration's track record on FBI files and IRS snooping.

Nevertheless, this is no reason to hand Big Brother the keys to unlock our e-mail diaries, open our ATM records, read our medical records, or translate our international communications.

OK. Still with me? Do you think I'm being alarmist? Do you think the previous 3 italicized paragraphs are coming from the ACLU, or the the Electronic Privacy Information Center, or the Southeastern Legal Foundation (all of whom have been critical of TIA)?

Do you? You would be wrong.

Those italicized words were written in October 1997 by then-Senator John Ashcroft.

At the time, he was making a point about the Clinton administration's views on the Internet and it's proposed regulations and controls.

But today, Attorney General Ashcroft has been curiously quiet on the issue of TIA.

Hey, at the time, he had a point -- TIA would be bad for civil liberties, bad for the Internet and the emerging e-commerce sector and lastly, ineffective in catching terrorists.

Was he wrong then, or wrong now?

As far as TIA helping us "connect the dots": one of our major shortcomings in intelligence pre-9/11 was an over-reliance on technology and an underestimation of the value of human intelligence.

Nope, I'm not impressed with Mr. Ashcroft. I think he is dangerously misguided in his approach to the war on terror at home.

That's why I don't like him. The religion argument is a straw man.

Why isn't anybody complaining about the "conservative bias" of media executives?

If the GOP wants to attract black voters, argues TIME's Jack White, it must confront the legacy not only of Trent Lott, but also of former President Reagan.

Al Gore is everywhere. Last night he turned up on Saturday Night Live.

One sketch had SNL impressionist Darrell Hammond playing Hardball host Chris Matthews. Al Gore played Trent Lott, complete with a wig that looked like a dead muskrat on his head.

Hammond/Matthews: "Sen. Lott, high ranking members of both parties are calling on you to step down after your comments about Sen. Thurmond who was a segregationist. Should your bonehead behavior spell trouble for Republicans?"

Gore/Lott:"When I said our country wouldn't have all these problems if Strom Thurmond had been elected president it had nothing to do with segregation. I simply meant that things would have been better if Thurmond were president because he would have kept white people and black people separate. I just hate it when liberals take me out of context like that."

Matthews: "Why do I get the feeling you thought "Birth of a Nation" was the feel good hit of the summer?"

Lott: "It has come to my attention that some of my comments about Strom Thurmond may have been construed as racially insensitive. Let me apologize. I meant no disrespect to any white people. I myself am a white man and some if not all of my best friends are white. Let me make this clear. As long as I am in my office we will leave no white person behind."

Matthews: "Senator, you're shedding a lot of light on the situation. Unfortunately the light is coming from a cross you just set on fire."

A friend of mine reminded me that today is the anniversary of John Lennon's death. So I wrote the following piece for his web site. Thought you might like reading it.

I heard about it the morning after it happened.

I was shaving. I had tuned the radio to WJR. J.P. McCarthy was interviewing Dr. Emmanuel Tanay, a forensic psychologist, and a frequent guest.

I picked up the conversation in the middle.

McCarthy: "But why would he kill John?"

I froze. In that split second, I knew what had happened.

I dropped the razor in the sink and wiped my face. I went to the milk chute where the paperboy put the morning paper. I jerked open the door and pulled out my copy of the Detroit Free Press. I unfolded the paper. The headline said, simply:

"Ex-Beatle John Lennon Murdered."

Below the headline was a 5-year old picture of John on the day he received his immigration card, capping a years-long battle with the US government. He was skinny, wearing a suit and tie smiling proudly, holding up his treasured immigration papers.

He was dead.

I threw the paper on the kitchen table and sat down, stunned.

Later that morning at work, no one mentioned it. But I could see that it bothered not a few people greatly.

It reminded me of the morning Bobby Kennedy died. I was sitting on the city bus going to school. The entire bus was eerily subdued. Across the aisle from me sat a woman, head down. She was silently crying, the tears falling past the lenses of her sunglasses.

One wag took the cynical approach: "Hundreds if not thousands will die next year in Afghanistan and Poland. We're weeping over John Lennon? Please spare me."

He might have mentioned the Iran-Iraq war, too, for that matter. It was a weird time in history.

Oh, yeah, one other comment sticks in my mind from that day.

"John Lennon is dead and Ronald Reagan is President."

Sorry, but someone DID say it. President-elect Reagan, much to his credit, did have some kind words to say about John that day as did Jimmy Carter and just about every other world leader on the planet.

Did I say it was a weird time in history? Right.

What else do I remember? I remember thinking that if John Lennon were a fictional character in a movie or a novel, he would be considered too unreal to be believable. The manner of his birth, the arc of his life and the circumstances of his death were too fantastic for make-believe.

Looking back, it seems clear that few personalities were simultaneously dominant in the realm of entertainment, news media and, improbably, politics. It is a more common phenomenon today, but John Lennon was one of the first.

You could say that Lennon was an avatar of the information age--an age when the lines between politics, media and entertainment have blurred to an exceptional degree.

I also remember thinking that life was cruel. Say what you want about John Lennon, but nothing he did in his life justified the manner of his death.

Perhaps fittingly, it was one of the biggest stories of that year (which included a Presidential election) or any other in recent memory. The media went...bonkers! for months.

The story finally faded when, a few months later, President Reagan was shot.

And then the Pope was shot a few months after THAT.

It was a weird time in history.

Did I say that already? Right.