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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.

Seattle and beyond: making the connection in the 21st century

It was immensely significant for black America that the last major public demonstration in the U.S. in the 20th century was a protest over global economics and trade. More than forty thousand people came to Seattle to oppose the policies of the World Trade Organization, which since 1995 has functioned like an international cabal in league with powerful corporate and financial interests. Labor activists went to Seattle to force the WTO to enact trade sanctions against nations that use child labor, prohibit labor unions and that pay slave wages to their workers. Environmental activists came to Seattle to pressure the WTO to ensure environmental safeguards would be part of any global trade agreements.

What motivated both labor and environmentalists is the political recognition that issues like human rights, employment and healthcare cannot be addressed individually as separate issues. Nor can they be effectively discussed only in the context of a single nation-state. Capital is now truly global, and any analysis of specific socioeconomic problems that may exist in our country must be viewed from an international perspective.

The oratory sweepstakes

You may think a person would bring up the subject of political rhetoric in our day only to dis it, to mourn the decline of the once-noble art, to compare the puny babble of our modern pipsqueaks to the magnificent cadences of Jefferson, Lincoln and Churchill, and so lament anew. Not me.

What I mourn is that none of the current candidates measures up to the glory years of the Ineffable Big George Bush and the Immortal Dan Quayle, who shall be forever revered for setting new standards in political language.

My personal favorite in the oratory sweepstakes is George W. Bush, who is rapidly developing a style that may yet become comparable to his father's. He is a master of the perfectly opaque response. We now know that Ronald Reagan's famous line in the 1980 campaign -- "There you go again!" -- was carefully scripted in advance. This leads to visions of an entire team of W. Bush speech writers cogitating on how to achieve the perfect nonanswer.

Examples:

  • "Whatever's fair."
  • "Whatever's right."
  • "I’m all right on that."
  • "Whatever is fair between the parties."

And, a recent gem of opacity:

Eternal vigilance is the price of ...

Eternal vigilance is the price of ... um, well, guess we can't say that anymore. We might get sued.

Mostly when we think of threats to free speech, it's government actions or laws we have in mind -- the usual bizarre stuff like veggie libel laws or attempts to keep government actions or meetings secret from the public.

Sometimes you get a political case, like Gov. George W. Bush's effort to stop a Bush-parody site on the Internet. The parody, run by a 29-year-old computer programmer in Boston named Zack Exley, annoyed Bush so much that he called Exley "a garbageman" and said, "There ought to be limits to freedom." (That's not a parody -- he actually said that.)

Bush's lawyers warned Exley that he faced a lawsuit. Then they filed a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission demanding that Exley be forced to register his parody site with the FEC and have it regulated as a political committee.

This fits in with the four instances in which faculty members at the Bush School of Government and Public Service in our fair state were reprimanded at the behest of Bush associates for saying less-than-glowing things about our governor.

No rights whites must respect

In the Dred Scott decision of 1857, the Supreme Court turned down a petition for freedom from an enslaved African American. The author of the court's ruling, Chief Justice Roger B. Tawney, declared that blacks could never be granted equal protection under the law or civil rights, because they were inherently inferior to whites, and forever would be.

Tawney observed that "the unhappy black race" had always "been excluded from civilized Governments and the family of nations, and doomed to slavery. Negroes were beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."

The infamous Dred Scott decision reaffirmed the fundamental legal condition of African Americans, not as citizens or human beings, but as property. Black people were to be treated by law enforcement officers and the courts primarily based on the color of their skin. Yet despite the nearly 150 years since the Dred Scott decision, African Americans still encounter nearly identical racist attitudes from the police and the courts.

Media hype for another 'American century'

In the nation's biggest news weekly, the final headline of 1999 posed a question that preoccupies many journalists these days: "A Second American Century?"

Providing some answers on the last page of Time's Dec. 27 issue, pundit Charles Krauthammer was upbeat. "The world at the turn of the 21st century is not multipolar but unipolar," he wrote. "America bestrides the world like a colossus." We are supposed to see this as a very good situation.

"The main reason for the absence of a serious challenge to American hegemony is that it is so benign," Krauthammer went on. "It does not extract tribute. It does not seek military occupation. It is not interested in acquiring territory." With such declarations, Time magazine echoes its founder, Henry Luce, who coined the "American Century" maxim six decades ago.

Like his colleagues in the punditocracy, Krauthammer recognizes that foreign rivals are restless. ("The world is stirring.") Yet the outlook is favorable: "None have the power to challenge America now. The unipolar moment will surely last for at least a generation."

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