(Display Name not set)October 2003 Archives

Do you ever get the feeling the Bush administration is fighting the war on terrorism by bobbing for apples? I do -- and not because it's Halloween. But never mind. It's also floppy Friday, time to forget our troubles. Here's some entertaining word-play, aka bad puns, making the rounds of the Web in various places like the Malapropria page of The Mailbox News or the Puns Intended page of ezboard.com:

If you don't pay your exorcist, you get repossessed.
You feel stuck with your debt when you can't budge it.
The man who fell into an upholstery machine is fully recovered.
A backward poet writes inverse.
A bicycle can't stand on its own because it is two tired.
Those who jump off a bridge in Paris are in Seine.
When two egotists meet, it's an I for an I.
A man's home is his castle, in a manor of speaking.
A man needs a mistress just to break the monogamy.
A hangover is the wrath of grapes.
Shotgun wedding: A case of wife or death.
In democracy your vote counts. In feudalism your count votes.
She was engaged to a boyfriend with a wooden leg but broke it off.
Dancing cheek-to-cheek is really a form of floor play.
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
Condoms should be used on every conceivable occasion.
What's the definition of a will? (It's a dead giveaway.)
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
He often broke into song because he couldn't find the key.
Every calendar's days are numbered.
A boiled egg in the morning is hard to beat.
He had a photographic memory that was never developed.
A plateau is a high form of flattery.
A midget fortune-teller who escapes from prison is a small medium at large.
Once you've seen one shopping center, you've seen a mall.
Bakers trade bread recipes on a knead-to-know basis.
Santa's helpers are subordinate clauses.
Acupuncture is a jab well done.

With apologies to all surfers who've already seen these, and further apologies to all who can't stand puny humor.

Everybody has noticed how foolish the president sounded at his Rose Garden press conference. But mea culpa! I forgot to mention what may have been his most peculiar remark: "The world is more peaceful and more free under my leadership, and America is more secure." Was he dreaming? Maureen Dowd's claim this morning, that Crawford George has morphed into Baghdad Bob, may be an extreme caricature. But comparing the president to the former Iraqi information minister who announced, as U.S. forces surrounded Baghdad, "We are winning the war ... this is for sure" makes more sense than most of us would care to admit. And it merely echoes yesterday's comparison by Muhsen Awaji, who went even further: "Remember how Saddam Hussein talked about winning the mother of all battles? It is the same disease." The fact that Awaji is a Saudi Islamist lawyer does not, unfortunately, invalidate the diagnosis.

Does the president know what the meaning of "is" is? I'm not talking about Slick Willie. I mean Gee Dubya Shrub, whose evasions -- a mixture of half-lies and outright lies -- were on display again yesterday in his Rose Garden press conference. (Here's the entire transcript.)

His attempt to blame the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln sailors for the "Mission Accomplished" banner, a White House creation that provided the TV backdrop for his triumphal May 1 speech declaring victory in Iraq -- oops, the end of major combat operations -- is only the most laughable and makes him sound like one of those French weasels his minions used to blame for not supporting him.

Here are some equally ludicrous statements from his press conference.

QUESTION: Will you acknowledge now that you were premature in making those remarks [about the end of combat]?
ANSWER: I think you ought to look at my speech. I said Iraq's a dangerous place, got hard work to do, there's still more to be done. ... But my statement was a clear statement, basically recognizing that this phase of the war for Iraq was over, and there was a lot of dangerous work. And it's proved to be right. It is dangerous in Iraq.

If anybody asks him, he'll also predict that the sun will set this evening.

Q: If there are foreign terrorists involved, why aren't Syria and Iran being held accountable?
A: Yes, well, we're working closely with those countries to let them know that we expect them to enforce borders, prevent people from coming across borders if, in fact, we catch them doing that.

It wasn't enough to say we'd let them know. He had to let us know, in typical pol's jargon "we're working closely with them." I'd bet that collaboration is news to Syria and Iran. As revealed today, in fact, Iran won't share Al Qaeda intelligence with the U.S. government and pooh-poohed charges that terrorists were slipping into Iraq across its borders. "We don't have any relations with American security services so there is no reason to do anything on this issue," an Iranian spokesman said.

Will someone on the White House staff please inform the president, since he doesn't read the news?

Q: In recent weeks, you and your White House team have made a concerted effort to put a positive spin on progress in Iraq. [The reporter then referred to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's leaked "slog" memo casting doubt on the progress.] And people out there don't believe that the administration is leveling with them about the difficulty and scope of the problem in Iraq.
A: I can't put it more plainly; Iraq is a dangerous place. That's leveling. It is a dangerous place.

If that's leveling, the Flat Earth Society has a place reserved for him.

Q: Are you considering the possibility of possibly adding more U.S. troops to the forces already on the ground there to help restore order?
A: Yeah, that's a decision by John Abizaid. He makes that -- General Abizaid makes the decision as to whether he needs more troops. ...

Will someone on the White House staff please remind the president he is the commander-in-chief? Recently he made sure to tell the press that he was, so it could spread the word to us, but it seems he's forgotten.

To another question asking "Can you promise a year from now that you will have reduced the number of troops in Iraq," he replied that it was "a trick question, so I won't answer it." I say a trick question deserves at least a trick answer. Or something like the statement he made on Monday that the increased violence in Iraq was a sign of progress.

As one commentary noted: "That formulation left even some Republicans wincing." Considering the new death-toll milestone reached today in Iraq, they should be doing more than that.

Half of the Arab world is laughing at the upside-down notion that the attacks are the result of U.S. success just as we used to laugh at Iraqi propaganda. "< FONT color=#003399>Remember how Saddam Hussein talked about winning the mother of all battles?" Muhsen Awaji, a Saudi Islamist lawyer, told a New York Times reporter. "It is the same disease."

POSTSCRIPT: As if to prove parallel universes do exist, here's a Los Angeles Times reporter's take on the press conference: Jocular Bush Keeps It Light for Most Part.

One brilliant writer I know who used to be a major sports columnist keeps telling me he has two novels in mind. This is someone who wrote four smart, densely literate columns a week at a minimum of 1,000 words each, for years. Try it some time, it ain't easy. After Rupert Murdoch bought the paper he worked for, he decamped to Hollywood and became a top TV writer-producer. But he has yet to write those novels. When I ask him why, he says it's because novels are the toughest test of literary merit.

Which brings me to Henry Kisor, another writer I know, whose first mystery novel, "Season's Revenge," is just out. I finished reading it the other night in one pleasurable gulp, and I have to agree that even a genre novel is some kind of test -- maybe the toughest test.

Kisor has been good before. As a journalist he's been a Pulitzer Prize finalist in criticism. As a non-fiction author, he's written "Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America" and "Flight of the Gin Fizz: Midlife at 4,500 Feet." I especially loved his memoir, "What's That Pig Outdoors?," about how he grew up deaf with hearing parents and how he made both his life and career in the hearing world.

Modest to a fault, he recently told an interviewer: "The tools of a mystery writer are very much like those of a journalist except that journalists of course can't invent things, while mystery writers must."

For "Season's Revenge," about the murder of an eccentric millionaire in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Kisor invented an unusual mystery-novel hero: Deputy Sheriff Steve Martinez, who shares something of the author's outsider status. He's a man caught between cultural identities. Martinez isn't deaf, but he is a Native American of Lakota descent who was adopted by white missionaries and who grew up in a white world. Martinez doesn't usually think of himself as Native American until he's reminded by others, largely because of his looks and their prejudices.

Kisor's development of that theme in Martinez's dual sense of himself, along with the rich detail he brings to the story, sets "Season's Revenge" apart. It not only creates the sort of suspense that kept me turning pages, it paints an authentic portrait of life in rural America. Kisor also inserted the subplot of a budding romance, rather deftly handling the sex, and entertained me with a lot of natural lore about bears in the northern woods (especially whether a bear can be used as a murder weapon).

In fact, there are so many colorful characters living in fictional Porcupine County that I didn't want to let them go. I wished I could stick around after the mystery was solved just to see what happens to them. Apparently Kisor had the same idea. He says he's planning a series of Porcupine County mystery novels with Martinez at the heart of them and is already onto the next one.

Nothing like a combination of nitrous oxide and Stan Getz to get the week off to a relaxing start, even if it had to begin this morning in the dentist's chair. Anyway, getting back to reality ...

It's well known that Molly Ivins has the president's number. The current issue of Mother Jones reminds us with her latest piece, which is not online yet. But it's too good to recommend without giving a substantial taste of her wisdom.

Ivins has known Bush slightly since high school and has "studied him closely as [Texas] governor," she writes. "What we have here is a man shaped by three intertwining strands of Texas culture, combined with huge blinkers of class. The three Texas themes are religiosity, anti-intellectualism and machismo."

Let's assume the religiosity is genuine: no one is in a position to know otherwise. ... The anti-intellectualism is also authentic. This is a grudge Bush has carried at least since his college days when he felt looked down on as a frat boy by more cerebral types. Despite his pedigree and prep schools, he ran into Eastern stereotypes of Texans at Yale, a common experience at Ivy Schools at that time. ...

The machismo is what I suspect is fake. Bush is just another upper-class white boy trying to prove he's tough. The minute he is questioned, he becomes testy and defensive. That's one reason they won't let him hold many press conferences.

One of the savviest writers around, Ivins can also be one of the funniest. Witness her current best seller "Bushwacked" and the previous one, "Shrub" (both co-written with Lou Dubose). But Ivins doesn't offer sparkling gems of wit in the Mother Jones piece because she doesn't need to. The straight dope is striking enough. What she provides is a clear appreciation of the president's character and personal history. If we've heard the tale of Bush's privileged background before from others, no matter. Ivins tells it best:

Jim Hightower's great line about Bush, "Born on third and thinks he hit a triple," is still painfully true. Bush simply never acknowledged that not only was he born with a silver spoon in his mouth -- he's been eating off it ever since. The reason there is no noblesse oblige about Dubya is because he doesn't admit to himself or anyone else that he owes his entire life to being named George W. Bush. He didn't just get a head start by being his father's son -- it remained the single most salient fact about him for most of his life. He got into Andover as a legacy. He got into Yale as a legacy. He got into Harvard Business School as a courtesy (he was turned down by the University of Texas Law School). He got into the Air National Guard -- and sat out Vietnam -- through Daddy's influence. ... Bush was set up in the oil business by friends of his father. He went broke and was bailed out by friends of his father. He went broke again and was bailed out again by friends of his father; he went broke yet again and was bailed out by some fellow Yalies.

No second acts in American life? I'm ready for more laughing gas.

Nice to see one of our strongest political columnists continuing to appear in the arts and culture pages. I'm talking of course about Frank Rich, of The New York Times, who excoriated the Bush administration Sunday for its sublimely misguided efforts to manage the news, "Why Are We Back in Vietnam?"

Loved it all, but especially his point that "the first place to look" for the news "is any TV news show on which [Condoleezza] Rice, [Andrew] Card, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld are not appearing." They get trotted out for Oprah or Letterman, while real journalists who might ask real questions, like Ted Koppel or the producers of "Frontline," get stiffed. It's an obvious point, but somebody needed to say it -- and Rich said it beautifully.

Speaking of political columnists, I'd say that David Brooks is still trying to find his rhythm as the latest addition to The New York Times's op-ed page. He's best when his political bias comes wrapped in clever social commentary. Otherwise he tends to go flat. Compare Saturday's column, "Living in the Age of Edge," about Helmut Newton as the personification of meaningless style, with a recent one about the three faces of the Democratic Party, "The Good, The Bad, The Ugly."

Just by using that movie cliché for a headline (even copy editors on the feature desk know to avoid it), he lowers expectations and fills up on conventional wisdom. The column on Newton, though not sterling either, at least draws the interesting conclusion "that of all the human traits that shape culture and history, the most underappreciated is the power of vacuousness."

Here's an example of strong writing by Martin Bernheimer on an entirely different subject: the Boston Symphony Orchestra's concert performance of "Pelléas et Mélisande" under principal guest-conductor Bernard Haitink. It's music criticism that speaks in real language, conveying real impressions without resorting to either the academic jargon of the specialist or the technospeak of overdone scholarship.

Charles Murray is stirring up trouble again. Emily Eakin reports in "A Cultural Scorecard Says West Is Ahead" that he says it's not his intention. "But his record is hard to ignore."

Murray, the conservative co-author of "The Bell Curve," which put the civilized world in an uproar when it professed that whites were smarter than blacks due to differences in hereditary IQ, now claims in another wicked book, "Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950," that:

1) "Europeans and North Americans account for 97 percent of scientific accomplishment," Eakin notes, based on his inventory of "eight fields -- astronomy, biology, chemistry, earth sciences, physics, mathematics, medicine and technology -- as well as a combined index ranking scientists from all disciplines."

2) While Europe has been the overwhelmingly dominant influence on human achievement -- as measured by the relative amount of space given in 34 standard reference works in four languages to 4,002 significant people in the arts and sciences -- the European heyday of great accomplishment is over.

3) The most influential scientist ever is Newton, followed by Galileo and Aristotle. Then in a steep drop come Kepler, Lavoisier, Descartes, Huygens and Laplace, followed by Einstein (ninth on the list), Faraday, Pasteur and Ptolemy. Darwin doesn't show up until 17th, after Hooke, Leibniz, Rutherford and Euler. Finally, Berzelius, Euclid and Maxwell round out the top 20.

"For literature, philosophy and visual art," Eakin writes, "Murray decided that unbaised global inventories were not feasible: the references works were too skewed toward their national traditions. So he created separate indexes by culture instead."

But if you think the scientific list is peculiar, perhaps not so much in makeup as in sequence, the list for the giants of Western literature will amaze you. Shakespeare comes out first, no surprise. But Goethe ranks second, ahead of Dante (third), Virgil (fourth) and Homer (fifth). There is no Cervantes, no Saint Augustine and no Saint Thomas Aquinas, to whose humanist influence on Christianity Murray himself attributes Western dominance.

Any listing like this is bound to be questioned. But when it lays claim to qualitative accuracy based on a statistical method open to doubt -- Eakins quotes several historians and scholars on its biases and value judgments -- it seems a fool's errand.

Murray's top 20 literary giants include Petrarch, but no Plato or Lucretius; Euripedes, but no Aeschylus or Sophocles and no Aristophanes; Byron, but no Wordsworth or Keats, and no Chaucer or Milton; it includes Rousseau, Voltaire, Moliere, Racine and Victor Hugo, but not Montaigne, Balzac, Baudelaire, Stendahl, Flaubert or Proust; Sir Walter Scott but not Jonathan Swift or Jane Austen; Virgil and Horace but not Ovid.

Schiller makes the list but not Freud or Thomas Mann; Boccaccio make the list along with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky; but there's no Pushkin; Ibsen makes the list but not Chekov; there's no Kierkegaard or Nietzsche, Orwell or Joyce, Twain or Faulkner. And what of Yeats or Blake? Not there.

Let's end the week on an entertaining, not to say lascivious, note. Here it is: "My Vagina Monologue," by George Gurley, which was the most amusing piece I read all week.

It's about time: "Defying a threatened presidential veto, the Senate joined the House Thursday in moving to end four-decade-old restrictions on travel to Cuba." Maybe sanity will prevail, and not the politics of South Florida, where Gee Dubya Shrub needs to curry favor with the Cuban emigré community for the next presidential election.

I went to Cuba with a group of tourists in 2002 on a cultural trip arranged by the Seattle rock museum Experience the Music Project. The fact that the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Asset Control, which is supposed to be fighting terrorism and drug trafficking, devotes 10 percent of its budget to tracking down "little old grandmas" who've arranged "to bike in Cuba" is beyond belief.

Worse is the president's pledge "to step up enforcement of the travel ban, by increasing inspections of travelers and shipments to and from Cuba." And worst is the Department of Homeland Security's immediate reaction that it would direct "'intelligence and investigative resources' to identify travelers or businesses that circumvent the sanctions against Cuba." That's just what's needed, Tom Ridge's minions busily terrorizing American tourists in the war against Fidel Castro.

I was only in Cuba for 10 days, not long enough to get more than a surface impression. But as I wrote at the time, "waking up in Havana feels wondrous." I took a lot of notes and turned them into a three-part travel story, "Where time has stopped." It began:

From the look of the cars, or what's left of them, it's the 1950s. And nobody is hurrying to work. The hush of dawn lasts until 10 in the morning, when the grocery stores finally open. But the faint odor of petroleum from the nearby oil refineries already hangs in the air. It will last all day, until a fresh sea breeze washes it away at evening.

It's not only the sight of American-made cars from an earlier era -- a 1951 Chevrolet parked on its axles, a 1955 Studebaker in need of a paint job, a 1954 Chrysler cab in front of my hotel -- that lends Havana a feeling of stopped time. It's the sleepy pace of daily life.

There's no big-city bustle in Fidel Castro's capital, population 2.2 million, unless you count the crowds that pack the bus stops under the midday sun or the tourists that jam the clubs and hotels at night. From every corner you can see empty stretches of impoverished streets paved with dirt, dilapidated buildings with once-ornate facades now crumbling and blackened with age.

Though hardly a cure for the poverty, joyous Cuban music can be heard everywhere day and night. I've come to think of it as the holy order of the clavé, and it may be something of an antidote to bitterness. I have no other way to explain the graciousness and openness of the Cubans I met. Even the persistent street hustlers selling cut-rate cigars and the pretty, equally unavoidable prostitutes in the dance halls were remarkably pleasant, their aggressiveness just a form of friendly persuasion.

Then, of course, there's the stopped-time image of Che Guevara in his military beret, a distant if famous memory of the '60s, but still seen everywhere in today's Cuba. Che's handsome, bearded face — on billboards and postcards, on T-shirts and posters — is not just an emblem of the Revolution. It is the symbol, some would say relic, of a state religion.

If you go to Che's shrine in Santa Clara southeast of Havana, where he is buried beneath a gigantic Soviet-style statue that commemorates both his decisive military victory over Fulgencio Batista's army in 1958 and his departure for Bolivia in 1965 to foment another (this time unsuccessful) revolution, you will see him heroically outlined against the sky.

The words "Hasta la victoria siempre" ("Always to victory") are inscribed on the statue's huge granite pedestal. He carries his rifle in one hand. His other hand, wounded in battle, is wrapped in bandages. The dimly lighted crypt beneath the monument, where Che's bones are interred in a wall vault along with 30 others who died with him in Bolivia, has the sacred aura of a martyr's burial place.

The great man himself, Fidel Castro, far from being preserved in amber, is a constant living presence with his own aura of grandeur and mystery. Yet the 75-year-old father of the Revolution -— whose ideas are law and, however dubious, communist policy -- is nothing if not a reminder of the past: a walking, talking embodiment of stopped time.

I went on to point out that the pleasures of Cuba are many, its famous cigars in particular, "but fine dining is not one of them. The food I ate was tasty (leagues beyond, say, Czechoslovakian cuisine). But we were invariably served a monotonous diet of the "Cuban trilogy," our tour leader's phrase for chicken, pork or fish (always red snapper)."

I noted, too, that music is a daily devotion. "Because there are about 14,800 well-trained professional musicians, most of them concentrated in Havana, the city's restaurants and cafes, hotels and dance halls come alive with the joyful sounds of swinging bands and lilting singers. In my experience, only Vienna (though decidedly more sedate) can match the Cuban capital for its devotion to music in daily life." And finally, when some in the group were mugged after a baseball game as they left Havana's main stadium -- a mugging that sent one of us to the hospital -- it was a too-vivid reminder that even where time has stopped and the music plays on, poverty and violence still lurk like evil twins.

It's no fun to start the day with computer troubles, which I've had all morning. Now that Tech Support has solved my problem, I'm hoping it can rescue a troubled world's war-crime panel called the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission. Its problems are much greater than mine, according to a front-page story in today's Wall Street Journal.

"More than a quarter-century ago, in 1977, countries that had signed the Geneva Conventions decided to create the world's first permanent commission to investigate war crimes," Jess Bravin reports. "The commission is still waiting for its first case." Sir Kenneth Keith, a New Zealand appeals court judge who is the current president of the commission, "has been forced to a reluctant conclusion. The governments that voted to establish his group are just 'not very keen' on its actual work."

Read the complete story and weep (subscription required); or if you have a taste for gallows humor, laugh yourself silly. The commission operates on a $110,000 annual budget (give or take $2) and has "no permanent staff, facilities or equipment" to investigate the boundless atrocities of a world seemingly in a state of permanent war.

Hans Blix, the U.N. weapons inspector, tells the Journal: "My heart is full of sympathy for Ken Keith." As well it should be. The U.N. will not cooperate with the commission, and Blix, who attended the conference that created it, says he'd forgot it still existed.

Saddest of all, "a 1998 training exercise for the commissioners, sponsored by the Swedish government at a military base near Stockholm ... was the closest they have gotten to a war zone." They investigated "mock atrocities by Swedish separatists. The scenario imagined rebels establishing the breakaway republic of Greater Dalecarlia, prompting a Swedish reaction."

Apparently "Swedish forces bombed civilians" and the would-be Greater Dalecarlians "tortured farmers and schoolchildren." But that was because it was a mock exercise. I hesitate to think of what the Swedish welfare state's atrocious reaction might have been in reality. My guess is saunas without massages.

So now it's official: The U.S. government believes Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl's executioner was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged chief organizer of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Yet something about yesterday's announcement smells fishy. As The Wall Street Journal noted in its news story yesterday: "Reports of Mr. Mohammed's alleged role as Mr. Pearl's killer surfaced several months ago, but officials repeatedly dismissed them."

Why did the U.S. government change its mind? It claims to have new information but won't say what it is. It won't say whether Mohammed, who was captured in Pakistan last March and is being held somewhere secret, had confessed, or where the new information came from, or how it had been corroborated. It claims that to say anything would compromise the war on terrorism.

From my reading of Bernard-Henri Levy's maddening, egotistical, convoluted but ultimately brave and useful book, "Who Killed Daniel Pearl?," at least one thing seems clear: Omar Sheikh Saeed -- the London-born terrorist who lured Pearl to Karachi for the kidnapping, who was captured and then sentenced to death by a Pakistani court and who is now appealing his sentence -- was a double agent working simultaneously for al Qaeda and Pakistani intelligence. This, too, is not new, as Levy himself points out even as he goes to extraordinary lengths to show it (in vivid detail).

Now, if Saeed was undoubtedly Pearl's kidnapper and if Mohammed was undoubtedly Pearl's executioner, does that finally confirm what many observers, Levy among them, have been saying all along? That the Pakistani secret service known as the ISI (Inter Service Intelligence), or at least a significant faction of it, and al Qaeda have been working together as two sides of the same jihadist coin?

Here's a problem for the Bush administration: If the collusion between ISI and al Queda is officially acknowledged, it means the war in Iraq was misconceived from the very beginning; it means that Pakistan, a so-called U.S. ally, is where the Bush administration should have focussed the war on terrorism instead of Iraq; it means that the U.S. government has either been lying all along or has been so incompetent that it cannot be believed. Either way it seems discredited.

Meantime, I don't know how much credence to give Levy's theory that 1) Pearl was kidnapped and murdered not because he was an American journalist and a Jew, though both reasons seem sufficient, and 2) not because he was investigating the al Qaeda-ISI connection and knew too much, which hasn't been proved, but 3) because he was investigating the possible transfer of Pakistan's "nuclear know-how" to the Taliban in Afghanistan and knew too much, also not proved as well as denied by Paul Steiger, editor of the Wall Street Journal.

Levy could be right, although so much of his year-long investigation relies on speculation that you have to share his leaps of faith. Further, for all Levy's probing insight, for all the shoe leather he wore out retracing Pearl's footsteps, staying in the Karachi hotel Pearl stayed in, visiting the cell at the farm where Pearl was held and murdered, contacting the ISI and gaining entry to an al Qaeda madrasa stronghold forbidden to Westerners, even managing to question the "fixer" who put Pearl in touch with Saeed, Levy never names Mohammad as the killer who personally slit Pearl's throat except as a dismissive afterthought on page 449 of a 454-page book.

On learning of Mohammad's arrest in March of 2003, Levy writes:

According to the latest news, he's Pearl's assassin. Him, the "Yemeni" who held the knife. There's even an ex-CIA agent, Robert Baer, now a writer, who says: "That's what Pearl was doing ... looking for Mohammed ... he was on Mohammed's trail ... well, Mohammed didn't like it ... Mohammed got revenge ... Mohammed, with Omar, planned the kidnapping and killed him with his own hands. ..." To me the idea is less than plausible. I can't believe bin Laden's number-three man, chief of al-Qaida operations, this rather distinguished Kuwaiti intellectual, could have done the job himself.

But then Levy gets a look at the photo of a haggard, hairy, bleary-eyed Mohammed on the morning of his arrest and he thinks "yes, why not ... this Mohammed could have killed Daniel Pearl ..." But that's the extent of his belief. After all his analysis and all his guesswork, Levy missed an essential part of the answer to his question: Who killed Daniel Pearl? So his warning that we're in for another al Qaeda attack, this time a nuclear one, while not to be dismissed, is less surprising than his myopia when it came to Mohammed.

At the end of his book Levy asks himself if he's made much progress. "Do I see things more clearly than at the very beginning of my investigation, when things seemed simpler? ..." And he replies: "Sometimes I think yes. I hang on to my conclusions. I remind myself it's not every day you find a killer [Saeed] who is both in the upper ranks of al-Qaida and agent of the ISI." But otherwise, he's not so sure of his progress. The world of the jihadists is made of mirrors and multiple identities, mirrors within mirrors and identities within identities. That is the one proof of which Levy and his readers can be certain.

As a recovering workaholic I took an unannounced day off yesterday. I'm also unprepared today. If the world were right side up, it would matter. But it's not. So I'm relying on my old friend Skeets Gallagher to bring me around, and he's no model of efficiency. Skeets is still catching up with last week's Hollywood issue of The New Yorker.

"Just tackled David Denby's piece on Pauline Kael," he says. "Sad. The guy exchanged his chops for the fickle approval of a better writer, and he's haunted. Some guys think Noel Coward was joking when he remarked that 'certain women should be struck regularly, like gongs.' If the old darling were around today, he might have said 'certain men, too,' and added 'lobotomized.' Submit or suffer being like everybody else!"

Meantime, Skeets hopes we're all catching Lewis Lapham's editorials in Harper's Magazine. "Lapham is possibly the sanest man ever to emerge from a gated community," Skeets says. I wish I could offer some samples of Lapham's editorials, but I can't find them online. Instead I recommend one of his essays, "The Road to Babylon," which bears out Skeets's opinion, and his most recent book, "30 Satires."

Also, in an entertaining but equally enlightening mode, here's Lapham being interviewed by Jon Stewart a couple of months ago on "The Daily Show." (Beware the pre-interview movie trailer. Arrghhh!) Pushed for political definitions, Lapham equates "dyed-in-the-wool liberals" with "true conservatives" and "compassionate conservatives" with "radical nationalists" aka "utopian anarchists." Makes sense to me.

"Neglect Paul Krassner at your own risk." So sayeth Skeets Gallagher. Krassner's most recent Zen Bastard column in the New York Press, begins with a tidbit about Der Gropenfuhrer that must have had the Los Angeles Times eating its heart out.

Krassner writes:

Maybe I should start selling "I Told You So" t-shirts. Five years ago, I published this item: "Here's a story about the arrogance of power even the tabloids won't publish. At a dinner party, Arnold Schwarzenegger told a young woman he would give her $1000 if she would stick her finger up her ass and then let him smell it. She refused. Later, he followed her into the bathroom and forcibly stuck his own finger up her ass. He did not pay her. She is an actress and has not brought a lawsuit because she fears it would hurt her career in Hollywood."

And he reminds us:

The morning after California's recall election, on "The View," Meredith Vieira demonstrated to Joy Behar the new governor's special handshake. Vieira simply placed her right hand on Behar's left breast. Amidst laughter and applause, Behar asked, "Can I please have my nipple back now?"

Nobody has ever accused Krassner of lacking imagination. But given the facts as he understands them, he doesn't need to imagine anything. Not when scientific studies, the Internet, television and the news media offer prime material that requires no embroidery. The rest of his column, taken directly from all those sources, is proof that all he does is make the indispensible connections. That, of course, does require a Zen master.

Postscript: Krassner isn't the only one mocking Der Grope. Dave Letterman's getting in his licks.

I'm falling down on the job. My staff of thousands reminds me it's been a while since I've paid any attention to Gee Dubya Shrub. The reason, easy to understand, may be summed up in two words: Der Gropenfuhrer. Culifornia's lemmingmeister has loomed so large he's edged li'l Shrub out of the frame. This morning, however, I didn't have to look far to see that li'l Shrub has managed to edge himself back in.

My two favorite punching bags met yesterday and proceded to spin like tops. Li'l Shrub briefed the press afterward with prepared wisecracks about how much he and Der Grope had in common -- marrying well, speaking English badly and big biceps. I don't think his speech writer intended any reference to family values and concern for the culture, or for physical culture, but there you have it. Meantime Der Grope seemed to get his spin signals wrong. "According to accounts on both sides," today's New York Times reported, "little of substance was discussed." But Der Grope told the press they spoke "at great length about the problems of California."

Whom to believe? I suppose it's possible that when li'l Shrub matched biceps with Der Grope, it was code for comparing the California and U.S. budget deficits. Or maybe it was code for the $9-billion energy rip-off of California by Enron and other Texas-based corporations. But I really doubt that. A 15-minute one-on-one, plus 30 minutes in the same room with advisers, and another 15 minutes alone together in li'l Shrub's limo doesn't sound like a meeting of substance so much as a melding of sweet nothings.

Because I don't want to end the week on a sour note about Shrub and Der Grope, I'd like to point to Timothy Noah's challenge to Tom Wolfe, yesterday in Slate. Will Wolfe take it? I hope so.

I'd wondered why Wolfe's entertaining polemic in defense of Edward Durell Stone's white marble Gallery of Modern Art (aka the Huntington Hartford museum) -- "The Building That Isn't There" Part 1 and Part 2 -- which prompted Noah's challenge, had gone pretty much unnoticed. (Even trusty Arts Journal didn't to link to it.)

I personally agree with Noah that the museum is a monstrosity. Like him, I cringe whenever I pass it on Manhattan's Columbus Circle. It seems so awkward, massive yet fragile and standing on puny legs, I always think it's about to topple over and that maybe it should.

But there's an infectious pleasure to Wolfe's take on the building's peculiar architecture and on Stone's defection from the International Style. Besides, who can resist Wolfe in one of his killer harangues? You won't find a swifter summary judgment about the orthodoxies of Modernism and a whole lot of other "isms."

So Der Gropenfuhrer has tapped a rabbi from the Simon Wiesenthal Center for his Culifornia transition team. Nu? The rabbi said he accepted the appointment, according to the Jewish daily Forward, because of "the assurance that this is not a partisan group." More than that, the rabbi is already arranging a trip to Israel for Der Gropenfuhrer, notwithstanding his now-regretted admiration for Hitler's speechifying and his wedding toast to old-time Nazi Kurt Waldheim. Will Israelis be as broad-minded (no pun intended) as Der Gropenfuhrer and welcome him as warmly as his Culifornians did? If so, that will be quite a tap dance.

The Gotham reviews are in. The score so far for "Golda's Balcony": two raves (Clive Barnes and Michael Sommers), one near-rave (Howard Kissel), one positive notice (Linda Winer), and one huge slam (Bruce Weber). If the variations make you wonder whether critics are worth their weight in newsprint, that's not a surprise. Artists themselves, when they're smart, can take the critics or leave them. But producers can't do without them and neither can the theater-going public, unlike movie-goers who have made their distaste for critics a vehement credo.

Howard Kissel of New York's Daily News comes close to a rave: "Seldom has history embodied itself in one person as clearly as it did in Golda Meir. ... [Playwright] William Gibson has done an amazing job of conveying this life in a one-person play." Tovah Feldshuh "gives Golda extraordinary vigor and passion. ... In some ways, her task is made difficult by the one-person show format, which requires her to imitate the people around her. She does them skillfully, but these simulations give the show a sense of artificiality. So do the many projections on the rather busy set. ... Ultimately, though, these distractions do not diminish the force of Feldshuh's portrayal."

The New York Post's Clive Barnes terms it a "fascinating play ... too complex to call a one-woman show. ... Feldshuh gives a blazing performance, less an impersonation -- with a prosthetic nose, straggly wig, padded legs and enough makeup to sink a thousand Helens of Troy, she's a ringer for Golda -- than a heroic concept. ... The play's only fault is that in trying to humanize Golda Meir, Gibson has slightly diminished her with a shrugging comedy too stereotypical to be entirely lifelike."

Michael Sommers of Newark's Star-Ledger raves about Feldshuh as "one fierce actress [who] delivers a spellbinding performance. ... It's the role of a lifetime. ... Looking every inch like the legendary Israeli leader from her potato nose to her orthopedic shoes, Feldshuh energizes Meir with burning intensity. ... It's early in the Broadway season to start handicapping the Tonys, but she sets a hot pace for the best actress race in June."

Newsday's Linda Winer, in the most balanced review of "Golda's Balcony," calls it "a handsomely crafted, tough-minded story of a complex woman and an international force who [had an] undeniably inspirational life [and] a wise, bittersweet skepticism about miracle workers. ... Despite the limitations of one-person biographies and the downward spiral of Middle East realities, Gibson finds an admirably pragmatic way through the emotional and literal minefields." Feldshuh, as Gold Meir, "is very strong -- fervid and kindly, fierce and decent, willful and generous."  

Bruce Weber of The New York Times slams the play, the production and Feldshuh: "It's a ponderous essay wrapped in melodramatic autobiography. ... [There] are some devastating, movingly narrated nuggets of history. But over all his script ... offers less a genuine portrait of this important figure than a mélange of show business tricks by a polished audience-pleaser. ... [The] cheesily overwrought production ... subscribes to Jerry Bruckheimer's blow-the-morons-out-of-the-joint theory of entertainment." About Feldshuh's performance, he writes: "Her fierceness is fierce; her tenderness is tender. She does impressive voices and is adept in caricaturing the postures of male world leaders; you'll laugh at her Kissinger. But in the end her achievement is not the animation of Golda Meir but of Mr. Gibson's artificial, overly literal imagining of her. And Ms. Feldshuh is unable to enliven a construct into a character."

I had my own say a couple of days ago. I called it "a human tale of confession -- a sentimental, occasionally hokey, one-woman show so gripping as a flesh-and-blood Broadway entertainment that it's almost embarrassing to admit it's an instance of Holocaust literature which, believe it or not, can make you laugh (not just cry). ... I'm betting word-of-mouth raves will be unstoppable; 'Golda's Balcony' will be a smash; and when Tony time comes around next June, Tovah Feldshuh will be nominated for her portrayal of Golda in a performance made of both steel and chicken soup." I'll leave it at that.

You've probably seen references to most of the news events that Harper's Magazine listed the other day in its Weekly Review. These aren't all of them, just the ones that might have been a figment of Jon Stewart's funny bone:

A shoplifter in Amsterdam was kicked to death by supermarket employees. A lightning bolt killed 20 pregnant cows in Florida. Wesley Clark said he believes that humans will someday exceed the speed of light. Arnold Schwarzenegger told his son that being governor will be a lot like making a movie. Japan was investigating an orgy in China involving 400 Japanese tourists and 500 Chinese prostitutes. A penis-snatcher was beaten to death in Gambia, and a monkey moved a robot with its mind.

Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.

"The joke was that Sammy didn't start walking until he was two, and the first person he walked toward was a white woman," Davis's mother, who abandoned him before he could walk, tells Wil Haygood in "In Black and White" (Alfred A. Knopf, $26.95). And for much of his life Davis scarcely changed direction. "He did so want to be white," his first love, Helen Gallagher, tells Haygood. Everyone who knew him said the same.

But it wasn't just his many affairs with white women (including Gallagher; his deepest love Kim Novak; and -- most famously -- his second wife May Britt) that brought out the bigots and the death threats. It wasn't just his worship of white celebrity and power (his adulation of Frank Sinatra, his embrace of President Richard Nixon) that saddened friends and sent detractors around the bend. It wasn't just his physical cowardice that would have kept him from marching in the South with Martin Luther King Jr., until Harry Belafonte, for one, refused to let him not march.

It was something else, something that Davis himself recognized. "I think Sammy was smart enough to know he had no common link to blacks," an old friend of his tells Haygood. The reverse was also true. "Blacks didn't support Sammy," a longtime associate says. "White America made him." Late in his career, Davis even attempted the feeble joke of "introducing himself to audiences as the only black actor who didn't appear in 'Roots,'" Haygood writes. "Ha ha ha. But the more he repeated it, the more a kind of sadness crept into his voice."

The irony, of course, is that Davis had been steeped from childhood in the traditional heritage of black entertainment. Born in Harlem in 1925, he was raised on the chitlin circuit by his father and Will Mastin, tap-dance performers in black vaudeville. Davis never went to school a day in his life. His only education was standing in the wings and joining them onstage, for the first time at the age of four. Self-trained, he was shaped by a cultural inheritance handed down from the minstrel tradition of the 19th century. More than any other black performer of his generation, he had mastered its art and was himself the last great link to consummate black vaudevillians like Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. If anybody had earned the right to be in "Roots," it was Davis.

Haygood traces all of this from beginning to end -- the long struggle to escape vaudeville and the rise to the heights of showbiz -- with a rich sense of context. You get the feeling of well-rounded history. Even when details are necessarily offered only in glimpses, he evokes them with deft strokes based on remarkable, first-hand reporting and thorough research. Above all, Haygood writes with a strong point of view. He's big-hearted yet skeptical, sympathetic but no pushover: "There was white culture and there was Negro culture. There was also the culture of success. That was the best culture of all to Sammy." Haygood's tone is also poetic and personal, making "In Black and White" wonderfully readable.

That's no small feat, especially compared to the alternative -- Gary Fishgall's "Gonna Do Great Things" (A Lisa Drew Book / Scribner, $26) -- which gives a much sketchier version of things, despite massive amounts of trivia. Scribner's promotional claim that Fishgall's is "the first definitive biography" of Davis is obviously not true. But even if it were, it's definitive the way a local train schedule is: No stop is too minor to list. So we get page after wooden page detailing every television appearance Davis ever made.

Fishgall's diligence would have been better served by more stylish writing and less reliance on secondary sources ("Assuming Davis and Novak slept together, it is probable that the relationship represented more than merely physical attraction."). He also goes in for oversimplifications and makes some preposterous claims. Fishgall writes that under the tutelage of an Army sergeant with a large book collection, Davis, who could barely read when he was drafted at 19, "worked his way through 'The Complete Works of William Shakespeare,' Carl Sandurg's multivolume biography of Abraham Lincoln, a history of the United States, tales by Poe, Dumas, Dickens, and Twain. ... " What, no Chaucer?

Both biographies tell how Davis met Sinatra (for the first time in 1941). They recount the mutual admiration and recriminations through the Rat Pack years. They tell how Davis lost his left eye in a car crash in 1954, converted to Judaism later that year and was whipsawed by the racial identity politics of the 1960s and '70s. They also count the millions he earned and lost, highlight his obsessive work habits, and let us in on his hedonism, his porn collection (Linda Lovelace became his live-in house guest, tending him with her "deep-throat" skills; he then promoted her as "a talent") and his dabbling in Satanism. Davis made it to all the stations of the cross. Before he died in debt in 1990 at 64 of throat cancer, the world's most famous black entertainer was possibly its loneliest.

Also setting the two biographies apart is Haygood's comprehension of "the color divide" within the black world; his reporting on Davis's maternal grandmother, Luisa Sanchez, a light-skinned, Manhattan-born beauty whose Cuban-rooted "miedro al negro (fear of the black)" turned her into a racist who "felt smothered by black Harlem" and who encouraged her grandson's abandonment; and an appreciation of the man who was more father to Davis than his real father: Will Mastin. "In Black and White" pays him the tribute of a full portrait.

"It was a shame upon his death," Haygood writes of Mastin, dead in 1979 at the age of 100, "that there was no one around to take measure of his life. He had outlived his obituary writers who might have offered proper tributes." Davis had enormous talent, yes, along with "a checkered family history in Wilmington, North Carolina" on his father's side and the "brutal Cuban heritage" on his mother's side, Haygood notes. But most important, Davis had "a vision of old Will Mastin swinging a cane." And like "Uncle Will" -- who was abstemious, careful with money, not to be trifled with, every inch his opposite -- Davis was possessed by the old man's ghost:

The ghost was the business itself -- the shoeshine box you kept and the rack of suits you owned and the names of theaters you had committed to memory and the money you had saved and the celebrity you had earned and the way your ear pressed against the velvety curtains backstage. ... The ghost was the smooth road out of every town that had treated you right and with respect. The ghost was the Negro side of town, the folks who point to you as if you were some kind of hero. ...

The ghost was the soft bed in the good hotel. The ghost was all the edgy headlines of the day -- Negroes on the march, Negroes jailed -- which sailed right over you because you did not bleed from those wounds. ... You had a matinee in Pittsburgh, another gig in Vegas. ... The ghost had kept you away from your deep southern roots, where blood had roiled and men had been treated as less than men. ... The ghost was the diamond ring on your pinkie. It was the way you tipped your hat to the lovely lady walking toward you. ...

Haygood riffs about that ghost for pages. He writes like a demon, with perspective, understanding and compassion to burn. It's a pleasure not to be missed.

This review is reprinted from the Chicago Sun-Times.

The election of Culifornia's Gropenfuhrer has spawned many articles about the meet-cute of fame and power, most recently Anthony Lane's Talk of the Town piece, "Poll Stars," in this week's New Yorker, and Todd Purdom's Week in Review piece, "Government by Celebrity ...," in Sunday's New York Times. As Der Gropenfuhrer settles into Sacramento, we're bound to see many more like them. But the ur-text of that meet-cute is a very funny 1992 British television series, "Fame in the 20th century," later rebroadcast by PBS, which is unlikely to be improved upon for the wisdom it offers.

One thing you learn from it, besides such pregnant details as Hitler's theatrically clever idea "to enter a rally always from the rear of the auditorium, so that he appeared to emerge from among the people as the expression of their desires, the embodiment of their dreams about a better fate," is how far Uncle Sam has come since the days when:

Power was in Washington and fame was in Hollywood. The only fully equipped American superman was in the movies: Tarzan of the Apes, [whose] ape-call was based on a Tyrolean yodel. If Johnny Weissmuller, like his parents, had been born in Germany, he would have provided Hitler with a stunning example of what the master race looked like with its clothes off. But Weissmuller was raised in America and got the job of Tarzan instead. ...

Weissmuller had a face off the front porch of the Parthenon. He was a natural to play king of the jungle. In one low-budget movie after another he fought to gain the upper hand over Tarzan's deadly enemy -- the dialogue. ... This was where dreams of omnipotence belonged: in dreamland. The king of the jungle was a sportsman turned actor and the jungle he was king of was a hundred yards across at its widest point. Everybody was enchanted and nobody was fooled ...

In Europe, the eyebrows of the highbrows were raised in derision at America's culture of daydreams. But there was one big advantage in confining daydreams to culture. It kept them out of politics.

The advantage has long since disappeared. If there were any question of that, Der Gropenfuhrer will doubtless try his mighty best to make sure it has vanished forever. But to wish us back to the dreamland days of Johnny Weissmuller and the Tarzan era, as though they were a model of sanity, is too ridiculous to contemplate. Has anybody got a better idea?

It's hard to imagine a Jewish schoolteacher from Milwaukee with the power to plunge the world into a nuclear war. But after seeing the William Gibson play "Golda's Balcony" (opening Wednesday on Broadway, following a successful Off-Broadway run), it's not only imaginable but credible.

Goldie Myerson, better known as Golda Meir, the prime minister of Israel from 1969 to 1974, gave Henry Kissinger conniptions, to say nothing of what she gave her husband Morris. Meir had the will to launch Israel's then-secret "temple weapons" even if, as the sole means of defeating the combined Egyptian-Syrian suprise attacks of the Yom Kippur War, it would have meant the destruction of the temple itself.

"Such, such were the joys," as George Orwell put it in another context. If he felt, recalling his school days, that they were "peculiar to childhood and not easy to convey," he was wrong. Meir in her 70s at the moment of her greatest crisis -- surrounded by generals fearful that the Arabs would make good on their vow to throw the Jewish state into the sea -- had the same "sense of desolate loneliness and helplessness" as Orwell did, "of being locked up not only in a hostile world but in a world of good and evil where the rules were such that it was actually not possible for me to keep them."

In the play, Meir puts it in her own, very different words as "the question that won't die." But it is the same question that Orwell asked all his life, that any benevolent leader grappling with a hostile world of good and evil must ask: "What happens when idealism becomes power?"

I don't mean to give the impression that "Golda's Balcony" is a play of ideas on the order, say, of "Copenhagen." Thank God, it's not -- though it doesn't hesitate to declare wisdom like this: "There will be peace when the Arabs love their children more than they hate the Jews." It's far more a human tale of confession -- a sentimental, occasionally hokey, one-woman show so gripping as a flesh-and-blood Broadway entertainment that it's almost embarrassing to admit it's an instance of Holocaust literature which, believe it or not, can make you laugh (not just cry).

I'll leave the official reviews to the critics. Whatever they say, though, I'm betting word-of-mouth raves will be unstoppable; "Golda's Balcony" will be a smash; and when Tony time comes around next June, Tovah Feldshuh will be nominated for her portrayal of Golda in a performance made of both steel and chicken soup.

"The death penalty is probably the one legal issue that everybody has an opinion about," Scott Turow said. The best-selling novelist is out on the lecture circuit promoting his latest book from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, "Ultimate Punishment," which he describes as "a memoir by way of an essay." I caught his lecture the other night on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

Although Turow, 53, still considers himself an "agnostic" when it comes to making moral judgments about the death penalty, his arguments against execution were wholly persuasive. I'll leave them for the book to elucidate. Equally fascinating to me was his point that over the years he's "taken all positions"; he went from a complete idealist who believed in the essential goodness of human nature when he was a student at Harvard Law to a total Hobbesian who believed the opposite when he became a federal prosecutor in his native Chicago. Since then, however, he has reversed his views again and now does pro bono work as a defense attorney in capital cases while continuing to write his books.

When I asked him what he made of the fact that many nations do not have the death penalty, he pointed out that the reasons had less to do with morality or even with the idea of deterrence, which he discounts in any case, than with their lower murder rates and, more interesting, their political legacies. The various European countries and most of those in South America that do not have the death penalty have had long histories of unstable, authoritarian or totalitarian rule. Execution by the state as a means of political control left those nations with a deep distrust of the death penalty, he said. The United States, by contrast, with its long history of stable, democratic government, has rarely resorted to such draconian rule. Thus the death penalty was not freighted with the kind of political baggage that discouraged it.

RANDOM NOTES

Best title for the governator: Der Gropenfuhrer ... Most overlooked TV commentary: chocolate 'Sex' ... Sounds good but: pure baloney ... Stan Herd: busy environmental earthworks artist ... Nothing brilliant but: still worth it ...  Last and least: why all that Seinfeld bother?

Postscript: When Britney Spear poses nearly nude, it confounds some writers. "To be clear," an MSNBC commentary notes, "there's nothing inherently amoral or scandalous about manifesting your sexuality for a mass audience." What the writer objects to is the pop star's poor command of English in an interview that accompanies her photos. Odd thought: Should a writer who manifests his commentary for a mass audience try for plain English himself? Or should he get an editor to manifest it for him?

Overlooked but not forgotten, artist Peter Max has designed a limited edition of a half-dozen patriotic posters to help raise $1 million for the proposed Pentagon Memorial. Here's one of the six, titled United We Stand, and here are two others, God Bless America and Peace on Earth. The signed posters, which go on sale in mid-November, will cost $150 each. Max will do "poster overpaints" for $8,000 each.

Given the mission of the Pentagon and what happened there on 9/11, and the unsubtle style of Max's art, it was to be expected that he would beat the drum of national pride. The posters load up on flag art and capitalize on that great icon of American mythology, the Statue of Liberty. Unlike the contemplative design for the Pentagon Memorial itself, they're all about overstatement. If you enjoy Max's usual bright palette of loud and zealous colors, these posters are for you.

It's already old news that the lemmings have spoken. But now that they've elected Arnold Schwarzenegger as governator of Culifornia, what's next? Running Clint Eastwood for president? Re-animating Sylvester Stallone and running him for senator? That's too obvious. How about doing something really subtle. Let's join Sen. Orrin Hatch's campaign to amend the constitution so Arnold can run for president.

When the world's most famous bodybuilder-turned-action-hero first ingratiated himself with the Republican Party -- "Hello," he said. "I'm Conan the Republican" -- people thought he was tongue-in-cheek clever. When he married Maria Shriver, they thought he was a helluva lot cleverer. By feeding the lemmings what they wanted yesterday -- a "not-Gray-Davis" android with a household name -- he's proved yet again how clever he is, finally transforming himself into what another writer once presciently called "a large Austrian male Statue of Liberty." Nothing could be more oxymoronic, unless it's a compassionate conservative.

Postscript: The virtual Frank Sinatra has a cold. His 40-foot-high, three-dimensional image has run into technical problems. Producers of "Sinatra: His Voice. His World. His Way." -- a special-effects extravaganza designed to re-animate the crooner -- have postponed tonight's debut at Radio City Music Hall in New York. But the show will go on, beginning Tuesday. Following the engagement, Sinatra may run for mayor.

Ever since Lorin Maazel took over the New York Philharmonic, critics have lined up for and against and in between. Today's Financial Times review of their performance of Berlioz's "Roméo et Juliette" puts the case on both sides as well as anything I've read: The maestro "is a bit like that girl with a curl. When he's good, he's very good indeed, and when he's bad he's tawdry."

But read the full review, which tells how Maazel "brought out the virtuosic best" in a "variable orchestra" and "mustered a gutsy performance on a vast scale." The reviewer also offers this "incidental intelligence: in their possibly misplaced zeal to abandon Lincoln Center in favour of Carnegie Hall, Philharmonic apologists have wasted no effort to disparage the acoustics of Avery Fisher Hall. After a concert that sounded as fine as this, I think they may protest too much."

Here's some incidental intelligence of my own: I ran into Emanuel Ax at my local gym and asked him what he thought of the acoustics of Zankel Hall, which has been the subject of so much critical hemming and hawing in recent weeks.

I figured Ax's opinion was worth something, and not just because he has to have a great pair of ears to be the pianist he is: Ax performed, both as a soloist and as Renée Fleming's accompanist, in the concert that inaugurated Zankel Hall last month.

Ax said he loves the hall, thought it sounded great from the stage and -- having attended several other concerts -- from the orchestra seats; he didn't mind the subway rumbling nearby -- which he found barely audible and not worth worrying about -- and rolled his eyes about the critics. "They've got to say something," he said, and smiled as he said this. It was a gentle form of indulgence. (Click on his name above, and you'll hear why.)

Here's a story that might as well be satire because, if true, it's so nefarious even Gore Vidal might not believe all the dots it connects among Arnold Schwarzenegger, Enron's former CEO, Kenneth Lay, and the California energy rip-off. It's also based on facts, unlike the tabloid tale in The Weekly World News headlined: "Alien Backs Arnold for Governor."

According to internal Enron memoranda uncovered by the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, Schwarzenegger was among a dozen or so "insiders" who conferred with Lay at a hastily arranged meeting in the midst of the energy crisis in May of 2001. The insider meeting -- Enron's own term for it -- was intended to drum up business support for an Enron "solution" to the crisis a month after California Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante filed a civil suit to make various power companies return $9 billion in illicit profits from market manipulation to the state's electric and gas customers.

One reporter who has seen 34 pages of internal Enron memoranda charges that "Schwarzenegger knowingly joined the hush-hush encounter as part of a campaign to sabotage" the litigation. Schwarzenegger has claimed he can't remember the meeting, although an Enron e-mail lists him as an attendee. (Scroll to second memo.) Forty-eight top execs are listed as invitees -- a who's who of power players, among them Michael Eisner, Eli Broad, David Baltimore, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Terry Semel, Donald Bren, Bill Simon and Sherry Lansing -- most of whom were smart enough not to show up. Only 12 attended besides Arnold, including Michael Milken (and none of the above).

If Schwarzenegger becomes governor, proponents of the civil suit fear he'll approve the "sweetheart settlements" cooked up by the toothless Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (now headed by Patrick Wood, III, a Bush appointee recommended to him by -- guess who? -- Ken Lay), which requires Enron, Reliant, Dynegy, Williams Company and other Texas-based corporations to pay back only two cents on the dollar just as the civil suit is about to go to trial -- and that would likely kill the litigation.

Last week the commission signed a settlement agreement with Reliant. The company did not admit any violations of the law, but agreed to pay $15 million, with two more $5 million payments over the next two years and total payments potentially coming to $50 million. That amounts to a slap on the wrist, despite being touted as the comission's "largest ever" settlement agreement. Even the San Diego Tribune, a Republican bastion, contends in an editorial that Californians are being stiffed by the commission.

I see that Lloyd Grove, the new gossip columnist at the Daily News in New York, leads this morning with an item about Sammy Davis Jr. that "rips the zipper off the pint-size entertainer's gigantic sexual appetites." Oooh. And he got it all from Wil Haygood's first-class biography "In Black and White," just out from Knopf.

Having just reviewed that biography and another by Gary Fishgall for the Chicago Sun-Times, which will run the review next Sunday, I have to say two things: 1) The key to Sammy Davis Jr. was not the sex stuff but rather, as Haygood points out, his devout wish to be white; and 2) Grove must be coming up dry in his new job if he has to reach back 40 years to a dead entertainer for a lead item on a Monday morning.

Have the chickens begun to roost? There probably wasn't a pre-adolescent boy growing up in America in the immediate aftermath of World War II who didn't mimick Adolf Hitler's salute as a form of mockery during a game of King of the Hill or its equivalent. But "Little Adolf" Schwarzenegger was a bit older than that -- 32 at least -- when he used to "imitate Hitler for laughs."

The co-writer of Schwarzenegger's autobiography, Douglas Kent Hall, remembers him "clowning around in a barbershop, pulling his hair down over his forehead, employing the end of a comb as a short mustache, and raising his fist" as late as 1980. Hall even has photographs of it. Which seems to indicate that the would-be governator of California either had a very late adolescence or never got over the jest.

Equally disturbing -- whether aping Hitler was a sign of mockery or implied admiration (along the lines, say, of a Freudian slip rather than a Chaplin comedy) -- Schwarzenegger's egoistic admiration for, in his own mangled words, "people who are powerful ... who people listen to and just wait until he comes out with telling them what to do" stamps him as a self-proclaimed strongman in the style not of John F. Kennedy, whom he cites, but in the fashion of an old-world politician whose authoritarian roots in mittel Europe Austria are still too much with him.

If California voters aspire to the status of lemmings and want to elect a leering, breast-and-ass-grabbing, post-adolescent Schwarzenegger as their governator, it's their game to play. But they should be prepared to live with the idea that a he-man "little Adolf" could come back to haunt them.

Language is alive and wriggling. Herr Doktor Professor Alan M. Edelson sends along this tale: A linguistics professor was explaining to his class how the use of the double negative varies in different languages. In English, the double negative results in a positive statement. This is not necessarily the case in other languages. But, he said, in no language does a double positive result in a negative. From the back of the class came a reply: "Yeah, right!"

Probably no one has more admiration for the poetry of W.B. Yeats, "the industrious adept of a batso mystical philosophy," as Clive James puts it in the current issue of The Spectator, than Clive James. Reviewing a new book of Yeats scholarship, which he harpoons under the title Slogging to Byzantium, James points out that when it comes to Yeats' "stone-dead rigmarole" -- in other words, his theory of history's gyres and such -- "Genius has to be forgiven its foolishness. Newton was just as interested in his wacko chronology as in his celestial mechanics." But James is not about to forgive the latest foolishness of wacko scholarship:

Except for Professor Ricks, who finds the later Yeats less a poet than a rhetorician, nobody sensitive to poetry doubts the magnificence of Yeats's steadily maturing achievement, his wresting of complexity out of mere fluency; and the professor could have reached his contrary opinion only after a small asteroid had passed through his brain, perhaps while he was listening to Bob Dylan.

Is there any literary critic besides James who can write like that? If you know of any, please be so kind as to let me know. And please exempt all the usual suspects from Gore Vidal to James Wood. If the usual suspects have the required breadth of literacy, taste, knowledge and experience, chances are they don't have the requisite humor.

Am I the only one who finds the films in the seven-part series Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues getting progressively worse? I think the best film was Scorsese's on the first night of the series. The rest -- beginning with Wim Wenders' -- have been missed opportunities. Very dull, though I love the music. Here's another take. (Free registration required.) Speaking of music on television, did anybody catch Elton John this morning on the Ellen DeGeneres Show? I'm not a big fan of his, but that was a real concert grand he was playing on -- big as an oceanliner, and at least he's a real musician. Don't forget to click Ellen's Web site. She's got a clever routine on it that will make you laugh.

South African writer J. M. Coetzee, who has long been on the short list for the Nobel Prize in Literature, won the award this time out. Soon after yesterday's item was posted, betting on Philip Roth because of his Hollywood credentials, a reader sent this e-mail:

"Roth? You think? With Naipaul in 2001, Roth tomorrow could be perceived as two solid whacks against Islam right close to one another. Roth is worthy. My bet: won't get it this year. I'm in for Transtroemer. Upheaval, chaos, America at odds with much of Europe; stick with the local boy."

This was my reply: "I thought it was clear from the tone I took that I was kidding. Guess not. I do agree with you that it doesn't look like Roth's year. But the hometown boy doesn't seem right to me. I'd go with Coetzee if Adonis doesn't get it. How's that for hedging? And probably wrong, too." 

Now comes the really important question: What does Harold Bloom have to say?

Is anybody taking bets on the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, to be announced tomorrow? Not being privy to the machinations of the 18-member Swedish Academy, I'd be willing to bet on Philip Roth largely because a star-studded movie of his 2001 novel, "The Human Stain," is coming out later this month, and it would be a shame to waste that kind of publicity. Rival candidates who've been touted -- among them, Janet Frame of New Zealand, Inger Christensen of Denmark or Tomas Transtroemer of Sweden -- can't offer such high-powered Hollywood synergy; not even J.M. Coetzee of South Africa, who's also reported to be on the short list, although the Syrian poet Ali Ahmad Said (better known as Adonis) could give Roth a run for the money on that nickname alone. As a Syrian modernist with a PhD, moreover, Adonis may have politics working in his favor. Roth, as an American who's also Jewish, definitely does not. But could Nicole Kidman, Anthony Hopkins, Ed Harris and Gary Sinise star in one of Adonis's poems? Not bloody likely.