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July/August 1999 - Volume 31 Issue 7

The Scent of a Rose... Cheapskate Chic... Pornography 101... The Casket Store... Predatory Pricing...

Remember the scent of a rose? I hope you do, because the memory may be all we have left. The scientists have reduced or eliminated the fragrance of roses and other flowers in the interest of selective breeding. Flowers have been bred "for color, size, and shelf life without any attention to scent," a Purdue University horticulturist recently explained to Joyce Howard Price of The Washington Times. In the process floral scent is fast disappearing.

This reminds me of what happened to melons and tomatoes when the scientists began experimenting in order to make them better withstand the rigors of shipping. Their mouth-watering taste was lost.

This makes you worry about what science will do if it starts breeding people. They will surely be attractive and durable - but will probably lack all the distinctive qualities that make human beings interesting, even delightful.

I'm indebted to my old friend Morton Mintz, one of the truly great investigative reporters, for pointing out a curious news judgment by The Washington Post and The New York Times. On June 2, the World Bank released a report saying that, as a result of the economic crisis in Asia and its aftermath, the number of people living on less than $1 a day will reach 1.5 billion by the end of this year - that's 1.5 billion human beings, each struggling to survive for 24 hours on less that we spend for a ride on the subway. The Times thought this news only worth page C-7. The Post didn't run it at all.

I have a friend who is a university president. His name is Douglas Bennet. He is the father of James Bennet, who worked here before he went to The New York Times. Against my advice, Doug became the president of Wesleyan University. I said there's too much fund-raising and too much possibility for getting into hot water for things you didn't do. I don't know if the fundraising part has come true but the innocent hot water has been a case of total immersion. On May 8, he woke up to read a story in the Hartford Courant that revealed Wesleyan had a course requiring students to create their own work of pornography. One student submitted a film that focused on a man's eyes while he was masturbating. Another filmed a female student in sexual bondage.

I have great sympathy for Doug. How was he to have known this sort of thing was going on? After all, as Andrea Billups of The Washington Times points out in her story about the episode, and as anyone who ever attended college will understand, not a single student complained.

When the columnist Matthew Miller worked at OMB during the early Clinton years, he was such a deficit hawk that when you had lunch with him you had to resign yourself to listening to at least a twenty-minute lecture on the importance of reducing the federal budget. So when Matt says "not-to-worry" about the size of a budget item, I pay attention. And he says, "there is no Social Security problem - at least none that requires abrupt action. Higher productivity means faster growth, which increases the size of the pie from which the boomers' golden years will be funded." Until productivity, which recently has been growing at four percent, trends steadily downward, we have time to ponder what long-range social security reforms are most desirable. This may be one of those cases where procrastination is the prudent course.

"More people are getting in the way of disaster," explains Harold Brooks, a researcher at the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla. What he means is that more people are choosing to live in the places most likely to be hit by floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, or hurricanes. Does it make sense for the taxpayers to reward this choice by paying compensation for losses incurred during a disaster that should have been anticipated when the choice was made?

To get an idea of the wealth sloshing around Manhattan, consider that twenty years ago it had just three fancy food stores - Balducci's in the Village, Dean & DeLuca in SoHo, and Zabar's on the Upper West Side. Today, "there are dozens" according to The New York Times, "offering a stupefying supply of exotic - and often expensive - food." There are five of the high-end markets within just seven blocks from Broadway and 74th Street. One, Food Emporium, even has, according to the Times, "a green-and-white-uniformed doorman with a gold-braided cap who calls cabs for customers."

Still, the conspicuous consumption news is not all dismaying. In a recent article, "Cheapskate Chic," The Wall Street Journal noted that bargain basement items like $16.99 dresses from K-Mart are suddenly hot with the IPO crowd. Anything that allows people to feel less obsessed with making money and freer to follow their hearts is a good thing and a long time passion of this magazine. But I was depressed to see that the trend isn't just for cheap chic. It's for pairing with those K-Mart dresses outlandishly expensive items like a $65,000 Mercedes and a $215 Kate Spade handbag. However, I will try to view the glass as half full.

If you were ever bullied as a child - and most of us were - you know in your heart that some of the bad kids were really bad. And you were right. According to a study by the National School Safety Center, half of them have trouble with the law as adults and 25 percent turn out to be serious career criminals.

Funerals cost too much. We all know they do. Yet the scandal persists. One reason is, of course, that the customer is usually tearful and in no condition to bargain. But the other is less well known. It is that the funeral business usually is in charge of its own regulation. Compliant state legislatures have set up regulatory bodies whose membership is by law or custom dominated by funeral directors. Anyone who dares charge reasonable prices is their mortal enemy. For example, The Casket Store in Knoxville, Tennessee offered caskets at almost 75 percent less than the price charged by funeral homes in the area. So what happened? The state ordered it to shut down because it wasn't licensed by the Board of Funeral Directors and Embalmers. Why should you need a license to sell caskets?

Robert Worth, who wrote about the need for better ways to spot bad teachers in his piece on tenure in our May issue, got a letter suggesting one from his brother, Monty, who is a high school teacher. Since it was an idea the Monthly had advocated, I naturally thought, "How brilliant!" Anyway, here it is:

"Who really knows whether teachers are doing a good job? Students, of course. I think that principals should regularly confidentially survey students about their teachers. Of course some of them will say nasty things out of spite, but I have found that the vast majority of them (even 7th graders) provide balanced feedback. Students will say 'he's tough, but fair' or 'it's a lot of work, but you learn a lot.'"

At this year's Tony Awards one of the musical numbers was "I've Got the Sun in the Morning" from Annie Get Your Gun. Few viewers knew that the song was, to put it gently, unconsciously borrowed from a National Shoe commercial that was featured on NewYork radio stations in the mid-'40s. Even composers as gifted as Irving Berlin could be influenced by other melodies they happened to hear. I seem to remember that Cole Porter was similarly guilty in the case of "Don't Fence Me In!" This phenomenon is not unknown in journalism. The columnist Richard Reeves once called this magazine the most unacknowledged source in Washington. To be sure, much of this has been unconscious theft. But not all. We're small enough that the cynical think they can lift an item or two without anyone knowing. I'm sure, however, that most of it is innocent. All of us have had the experience where we remember an idea or a fact we saw somewhere but forget where we saw it. Or indeed we forget that it was anything but our own discovery.

The deadwood in the civil service consists of just 3.7 percent of federal employees, according to a recent report by the Office of Personnel Management. That's the good news. The bad news is that the poor performers have been on the job for an average of 14 years. In other words, they haven't been fired but have been permitted to continue messing up. Even more unsettling is that the report rates as "OK performers" employees who meet "minimum performance objectives." When I was a government employee I found this group the most demoralizing of all. They always did the least they could get away with. They never tried to do the most. You can't tolerate such people and have an effective workforce. Yet the civil service endows them with a righteous sense of entitlement to their jobs.

Paul Light and Don Kettl, whose article appears in this issue, are among the tiny group of political scientists who understand the civil service. Light recently wrote this about it in The Washington Post: "It is slow in the hiring, almost useless in the firing, overly permissive in the promoting, out of touch with actual performance in the rewarding," all of which I can confirm from my own experience.

Recent events in Yugoslavia should have had a humbling effect on all the experts who proclaimed that air power alone can't do the job. That is one of those lessons history appears to have taught that on closer inspection require amendment. As Philip A. True pointed out in our May letters section, allied air power may well have had a decisive effect on the Normandy landing in World War II. The Luftwaffe had been so weakened by its battles against the Allied air force that it could only put two planes in the air to strafe the beaches on D-Day. Bombing- induced fuel shortages and transport problems had crippled the German ability to counter-attack.

Many of us mistakenly applied the lessons of Vietnam and Afghanistan to the Gulf War. But jungles and mountains in those wars limited the power of airplanes and tanks to win the quick victory that proved possible in the desert. Similarly, misapplication of the "don't-cross-the-38th parallel" lesson from Korea may have been a factor in our failure to destroy Iraq's army after it had been evicted from Kuwait. Even in Vietnam, where the bombing often seemed ineffective or too costly in civilian lives, there is considerable evidence that heavy bombing of the North in December 1972 was what finally induced the communists to agree to peace. The lessons of history are there to be learned. It's just that they seldom are as sweeping as we remember them. The critics of airpower are right to say it didn't destroy German morale or German industry until very near the end of World War II, but wrong in not understanding how effective it was in reducing the effectiveness of German armor and air defenses. In Yugoslavia, we probably would have faced long bloody battles if we had tried to invade through mountainous terrain. If, on the other hand, we would have gone in through the mostly flat land from Hungry to Belgrade our tanks might have proved as easily decisive as they were in the Gulf War.

Kosovo provides another occasion for Bill Clinton's critics to eat crow. Of course, they will probably find some reason to deny him credit. Too many of the nation's brightest people are so committed to thinking he's a disaster that they are no longer capable of giving him even grudging or partial credit for such triumphs as seven years of incredible prosperity. What fascinates me is that these people are often right in the specifics of their distaste. There's a lot not to admire in this man. So I agree, for example, with practically every thing my friend Marjorie Williams says against him in this issue. But I totally disagree with her conclusion that he should have been impeached. I continue to think history will place him in the mid-rank of American presidents; not one of the greats, but certainly not one of the disasters.

I hope long time readers of the Monthly will indulge my saluting ourselves once again. For years, this magazine was among the few faint voices to champion the A-10 Warthog fighter. As you may know, this all-too-unglamorous fighter was once opposed and then reluctantly accepted by the Air Force because it lacked the sex appeal of planes like the B-1 and B-2 bombers. The Air Force also had little interest in the A-10 because its primary mission was to provide close air support for the Army which, as any veteran will tell you, is not the highest priority of the air force brass. Well, it turns out that the A-10 was the real hero of the war in Kosovo. It busted Yugoslav artillery positions and tanks while the Army's Apache helicopters sat idle in Macedonia, plagued by mechanical failures. And what of those fancy stealth fighters? They did fine, although one of them did crash, but they hardly justified their Gold Card price tag. It took the Gulf War to save the A-10 from extinction. I sincerely pray that this most recent success will persuade the Air Force that its A-10 force is not only worth keeping but expanding in an age when long-range nuclear missles are of little use in wars where people are gouging each others eyes out with bayonets.

Why does Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the White House Drug Czar resist including alcohol in the national anti-drug media campaign? His office says doing so would dilute the message and that it may exceed his statutory authority. The first is just plain wrong. Drinking is not only the most widespread substance abuse problem but often is the first step to other drugs. As to the statutory authority, there is a bill pending in Congress sponsored by Democratic Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard and Republican Rep. Frank Wolf that can take care of that problem. We hope the White House isn't dragging its feet on this one because of opposition from the liquor and beer interests.

We knew from the Italian ski gondola tragedy that the Chinese Embassy bombing wasn't the only error traceable to bad maps. But I had no idea, until Lisa Getter of The Los Angeles Times looked into the history of mapping mistakes, that in her words "Incomplete or inaccurate charts produced by the National Imagery and Mapping Agency and its predecessor organization have played a role in at least a dozen accidents since 1985." A Navy officer who investigated the Italian gondola accident wrote in a memo, "NIMA reminded me of a fast-food place. If you knew how the food was prepared, you wouldn't eat there. It sends chills down my spine to think that I relied on this information to keep me from hitting a tower or other obstruction."

Antitrust enforcement, which languished for too long, has recently come back in Clinton's second term. Not only has the Department of Justice stood up to Microsoft bullying, it has sued a major airline, American, for trying to eliminate competition with predatory pricing. How does American do it? If a competitor appears, American lowers prices below cost for long enough to drive away the competition. Then it raises prices back to the too-high level that originally attracted the competition. If you doubt that predatory pricing exists, consider the testimony of Alfred Kahn, not some nutty lefty but the father of airline deregulation. When Edwin McDowell of The New York Times asked him if he disagreed with economists who say there is no such thing as predatory pricing, Kahn replied: "My answer is not only yes but that the airline industry is particularly susceptible to it."

This reminds me of another surprising quote, this from the conservative William Rehnquist, who recently told graduates of Washington and Lee, according to The Associated Press, "that the legal profession puts too much emphasis on making money." Rehnquist went on to explain something all lawyers but not many laymen know - that the "dark side" of the law is the emphasis on billable hours. "The client will be billed for the time of the associates at a substantially higher rate than the associates are paid by the firm."

Bell Atlantic is screwing the people of Washington again - and this year the screwing is even worse. You may recall my complaint that 1998 business listings could not be found in the regular phone book but were in the front of the yellow pages. This meant that to find a business number, you had to risk a hernia by picking up the 2 1/2 inch thick yellow pages. The regular book, down to only residential listings, was just 1/2 an inch thick. Why not put the business listings back in with the residential and have two books of manageable size? That may have seemed the sensible, customer-friendly course. But it might have made it a bit harder for Bell Atlantic to sell advertising in the yellow pages since people would no longer be compelled to turn to them for business numbers. So what did Bell Atlantic do? This year it has put both business and residential numbers together at the front of the yellow pages. This creates a phone book that is more than three inches thick. It also means that the elderly and the physically handicapped will have to call Information for each number they don't know. But, of course, Bell Atlantic makes money off that call, too.

"The health care industry loves to say Medicare should act more like a business," writes Laurie McGinley of The Wall Street Journal. "But now that the program is trying to adopt private-sector strategies, many in the industry are squawking." What is the terrible threat that has the fellows so stirred up? Competitive bidding. Medicare is asking HMOs in Phoenix and Kansas City to state how much they would charge for each new patient. Really outrageous, huh?

An episode that has long fascinated this magazine was a 1994 lunch that Judge David Sentelle had with Republican senators Lauch Faircloth and Jesse Helms. Did that conversation have anything to do with Sentelle's later naming of Ken Starr as independent counsel? Shortly after the event, Sentelle told The Washington Post, "nothing in these discussions concerned independent counsel matters." But in April of this year, Sentelle altered his story a bit. "They [the senators] may have said, 'Have you appointed an independent counsel yet?' And I would have said no. There may have been some discussion in one sentence of had we done it."

There is no question that Sentelle's appointment of Starr pleased the Republican senators. Senator Faircloth rewarded Judge Sentelle's wife with a job on his staff - a fact that went almost completely unnoticed by the media. When I mentioned it on C-Span as recently as last December Brian Lamb said, "Are you sure? I hadn't heard that." Since Brian has to rank near the top of Washington's best-informed list, I'm sure most of the viewers assumed I was wrong. But it's the truth. For verification, you can check the Senate payroll records.

Why am I convinced that George W. will be our next president? One reason is that people seem to have decided. They like what they hear and they're going to vote for him unless his campaign screws up royally. I had a similar feeling about Jimmy Carter in 1976. The other factor is guilt. I suspect that people feel guilty about regicide, particularly since they feel they did it to a nice guy when they rejected George W.'s dad in 1992. If you doubt the force of guilt in American politics, consider 1964. People weren't voting for LBJ. They were voting for JFK.

~Charles Peters