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Who won the war on crime?

We're in for an orgy of boasting, this campaign year, about the dropping crime rates, with the "get tough" crowd pounding their chests and claiming victory. For the first half of last year, FBI figures showed a 10 percent decline in "serious crime," meaning violent and property crime. Murder down by 13 percent, robbery off 10 percent, forcible rape down 8 percent. Starting with President Clinton, it would require near-inhuman forbearance for the man who has increased federal budgets for crime control from just over $1 billion to $4.5 billion over the past five years to eschew a boast over this "accomplishment."

But while crime rates -- on paper -- are continuing to drop across the country, these rates are dropping regardless of whether a tough or a lenient approach to crime is being applied. Take a look at San Francisco and New York. Since 1995, violent crime has dropped 33 percent in San Francisco and 26 percent in New York. Great law enforcement? Terrific timing? Perfect policy application? Hardly.

Aol Time Warner: calling the faithful to their knees

And so, early in the year 2000, it came to pass that visions of a seamless media web enraptured the keepers of pecuniary faith as never before. A grand new structure, AOL Time Warner, emerged while a few men proclaimed themselves trustees of a holy endeavor. They told the people about a wondrous New Media world to come.

Lo, they explained, changes of celestial magnitude were not far off. A miraculous future, swiftly approaching, would bring cornucopias of bandwidth and market share. A pair of prominent clerics named Steve Case and Gerald Levin gained ascendancy. Under bright lights, how majestic they looked!

And how they could preach! Announcing unification, they seemed to make the media world stand still. Reporters and editors gasped. Some were fearful, their smiles of fascination tight. Others bowed and scraped without hesitation.

In keeping with the dominant creeds of the era, believers in the divine right of capital asserted that separation of corporate church and state was an anachronism. A torch had been passed to a new veneration. Media monarchs would rule with unabashed fervor, while taking care to help regulate mere governments.

System of justice shutdown

Have you noticed that the system of justice in this country is shutting down, piece by piece by piece? We have long noted the deleterious effects of "tort reform" here in Texas, where insurance companies are ever bolder, and injured workers and consumers have fewer and fewer rights. But there is a shutdown in criminal justice, as well.

A "Frontline" documentary on PBS, "The Case for Innocence," gives the most chilling case histories in a stupid and tragic trend in criminal justice.

DNA identification, which has become more sophisticated by the year, is the greatest advance in criminal detection since the fingerprint. It has enabled the system to put away criminals who otherwise would have gotten off scot-free and to find perps years after the crime when their DNA shows up after an unrelated arrest. Short of a truth serum, this is the best thing that could happen for the criminal justice system.

The problem is, DNA evidence sometimes shows that the system messed up and nailed the wrong person for a crime. In fact, it happens depressingly often.

New millennium, old crime: those sanctions against Iraq

On Jan. 15, the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. and the ninth anniversary of the Gulf war, 10 people will begin a month-long fast on the steps of the Capitol in Washington D.C. They're members of Voices in the Wilderness, the Chicago-based group that has been trying to marshal public opinion here against the sanctions (instigated by the United States through the United Nations) against Iraq. The group won't eat, and will spend each day lobbing politicians, human rights groups, government officials and the press.

There are plenty of awful U.S. policies that have survived the turnover into this new millennium, but few of them can be as malignant as the sanctions that have been killing Iraqis at a steady rate since they were imposed in 1990. The United Nation's Children's Fund (UNICEF) and other U.N. agencies in Iraq reckon that more than 1 million civilians, mostly children, have died from malnutrition and disease as a result of the embargo. Despite the United Nations oil-for-food program, UNICEF estimates that more than 4,000 children under the age of 5 die each month as a consequence of this same embargo.

Y2K Bug and other paranoia

So here we are in the Year Aught, the millennium's over, the Christmas tree is down, we're in debt, and here comes January, February, Ry-Krisp and cottage cheese. Now is the winter of our discontent, so I think we ought to coordinate our paranoias.

I've been worried about our paranoias lately -- we don't have them in order.

Some of us got all paranoid about the Y2K bug, while the media enjoyed a late-year terrorist boomlet. Traditionalists are sticking with the Russians and still want to build Star Wars. I couldn't figure out why, at this late date, the Strategic Defense Initiative still has legs, unless it's because the Republicans haven't had a new idea since the Reagan administration, so they're stuck with it.

But then I happened to pick up one of those old techno-thrillers, a vintage late-Cold War gem, that had the Soviets hiding astonishing technological capabilities, all the better to eat us with, my dear. How fiendishly cunning were those Soviets in the thrillers -- and I realized you can't have an entire genre of literature loose in a society for years and years without repercussions.

What happened to the 'Information Superhighway'?

A few numbers tell a dramatic story about extreme changes in media fascination with the Internet.

After the 1990s ended, I set out to gauge how news coverage of cyberspace shifted during the last half of the decade. The comprehensive Nexis database yielded some revealing statistics:

The Democratic presidential contest

It's taken me quite a while to make up my mind about the Democratic presidential contest. I find Al Gore as discouraging as everybody else does. Even if you agree with him, imagine trying to work up enthusiasm for Gore.

I once spent a day with Al Gore off the record, so I know there's a real human being in there somewhere. Lord knows what happened to it.

Meanwhile, Bill Bradley has been coming up and coming up. It's always been clear that the man is a class act, without a phony bone in his body.

The trouble is, class acts are a problem in this country. Adlai Stevenson was a class act, and he lost twice. I've had my political heart broken by class acts more times than I care to remember. I'm class-act-shy.

Almost every cycle we get some candidate greatly esteemed by those who know and care a lot about government -- John Anderson, Bruce Babbitt, Paul Tsongas -- some brainy, professorial type who appeals to some of the media, all the college kids and practically nobody else. No lunch-bucket appeal.

I long since decided that if the candidate doesn't have some Elvis to him, he ain't gonna make it. Bradley has zip in the Elvis department.

The Future Past

Let's pause a moment before we head for the exits. I'm talking about the spectacular, the ludicrous, the humiliating and uproarious discomfiture of the Y2K doomsayers. How deliciously wrong they were! We're dealing here with one of the biggest busts since the Edsel.

Are there lessons to be drawn from the fiasco? I suppose the core phenomenon to be looked at is the propensity of the richest, most secure nation in the history of the planet to believe that collapse, utter and awful, is just around the next corner. This mental outlook is understandable in, say, Poland, which has been invaded and ravaged not a few times in this century. And there are some ethnic fractions here -- Hmong, for example -- who could be pardoned for having an apprehensive take on the future. But the Hmong weren't buying all those generators, or laying in enough canned food and bottled water to last through the rest of this century.

Happpy new millennium

Happpy new millennium, everybody! And wasn't that an instructive little episode? All those nutters and even normal citizens conned by doom-mongers into laying in supplies and weapons.

And didn't the media have a lovely time scaring us all to death about terrorism? You'll be happy to know that the Border Patrol at Ojinaga was on full alert. There's more damage done by fear in this world than by evil.

And now for Old Business, as they say in the agenda world. If you want a perfect example of why people despise politicians, try six Republican presidential candidates, each of them taking the position that Elian Gonzalez, the 6-year-old from Cuba, should remain in this country.

Is there something wrong with me, or is this a no-brainer? According to the boy's relatives in Miami, he is close to his father, who took care of him during the day. Juan Miguel Gonzalez is an excellent father who works as a hotel doorman, meaning he has a job in Cuba's dollar economy. Nor is the boy being sent back to a dreary island prison.

Black Radio Entertainers

Jazz owes a lot of its popularity to the phonograph, going back to the early days, when Thomas Edison invented the musical box that brought jazz to people who lived outside of the areas where jazz musicians played. Through phonograph records, they could hear the music of such people as "King" Joe Oliver. He was the first of the legendary great trumpet players to come out of New Orleans, the city where most experts in the field say that jazz originated. Jazz was played in the whorehouses in that city, and Louis Armstrong credits Oliver as being one person from whom he learned his style of playing trumpet.

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