American Democracy

So intent was Riccardo Migliori on his mission - observing the U.S. election and asking questions about the voting process in Baltimore - that he missed the statues of saints and the oil painting of Pope Leo XIII. So foreign was the idea that voting might take place in a house of worship that he apparently didn't notice the brass crucifix on the wall above him, either. In fact, it wasn't until he left the polling place in Little Italy and stepped onto chilly Exeter Street on Tuesday morning that Migliori, a senior member of Big Italy's parliament, realized he had just seen Americans voting in the basement of a Roman Catholic church.

The ingratiating display at the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library in Dallas last week simulated reverence for a failed president who plunged us into massive debt, polarized Americans and made America the target of Muslim radicals and homegrown terrorists ("Bush family, Hillary Clinton flock to Texas," April 25). George W. Bush is and will ever be one of the darkest blotches on our country. No matter how much he has donated to world causes, he hasn't said he's sorry for the tens of thousands of lives lost, both American and others, around the world.

I have to disagree with your statement that Grover Norquist was only a symptom of the GOP's refusal to raise taxes ("Bucking the pledge," Nov. 28). Most, if not all, of the Republicans in Congress have signed his pledge. In doing so they pledged their primary allegiance not to the United States but to Mr. Norquist. And there were real consequences to pay for those who didn't side with him. Have you forgotten that Maryland lost Rep. Wayne T. Gilchrist, a talented, moderate Republican House member from the 1st District, thanks to Mr. Norquist's operatives?

Tonight, we celebrate the season with the lighting of Baltimore's Washington Monument. But unless we take needed action, we are at risk of losing this festive tradition - along with one of our city's most iconic landmarks. Sadly, the monument has fallen into disrepair and is in serious need of attention due to years of exposure to the elements. It has been closed for safety reasons since June 2010. If we fail to meet the challenge of restoring it, the nation's first monument to George Washington will accelerate its perilous decline and could forever go dark.

Who's buying our democracy? Wall Street financiers, the Koch brothers, and casino magnates Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn, among others. And they're doing much of it in secret. It's a perfect storm -- the combination of three waves that are about to drown government as we know it. The first is the greatest concentration of wealth in America in more than a century. The 400 richest Americans are richer than the bottom 150 million Americans put together. The trend started 30 years ago, and it's related to globalization and technological changes that have stymied wage growth for most people.

China's Communist rulers were only probing to see if American democracy was really as corrupt as they had always said.The FBI and White House sound like characters in an Oliver Stone movie about their relationship.The gangsta-rap community is doing the work of its most extreme critics.Sir Paul McCartney? That will never sell.Pub Date: 3/12/97

Thursday night, we celebrate the season with the lighting of Baltimore's Washington Monument. But unless we take needed action, we are at risk of losing this festive tradition — along with one of our city's most iconic landmarks. Sadly, the monument has fallen into disrepair and is in serious need of attention due to years of exposure to the elements. It has been closed for safety reasons since June 2010. If we fail to meet the challenge of restoring it, the nation's first monument to George Washington will accelerate its perilous decline and could forever go dark.

It takes a violent assault on a shrine of American democracy to bring about a modicum of national unity, however brief.Q. How is Monicagate like Seinfeld? A. It goes on forever, is not really funny and is about nothing.What's an Arkansas chicken company doing polluting Maryland? @Let's go pollute Ark.Civil rights and the equal protection of the law are for Koreans, too.Pub Date: 7/28/98

The ingratiating display at the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library in Dallas last week simulated reverence for a failed president who plunged us into massive debt, polarized Americans and made America the target of Muslim radicals and homegrown terrorists ("Bush family, Hillary Clinton flock to Texas," April 25). George W. Bush is and will ever be one of the darkest blotches on our country. No matter how much he has donated to world causes, he hasn't said he's sorry for the tens of thousands of lives lost, both American and others, around the world.

"Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy," by James Fallows. Pantheon. 296 pages. $23 This is a disturbingly thoughtful book. The author, Washington editor of the Atlantic Monthly, has fashioned a powerful indictment of media more inclined toward exploitation than explanation, and pontificating rather than probing."The message of today's news coverage is often that the world cannot be understood, shaped or controlled, but merely endured or held at arm's length." What is too often missing in daily reporting - especially on television - is a sense of context, the connecting points that explain the broader relevance of an event.

I have to disagree with your statement that Grover Norquist was only a symptom of the GOP's refusal to raise taxes ("Bucking the pledge," Nov. 28). Most, if not all, of the Republicans in Congress have signed his pledge. In doing so they pledged their primary allegiance not to the United States but to Mr. Norquist. And there were real consequences to pay for those who didn't side with him. Have you forgotten that Maryland lost Rep. Wayne T. Gilchrist, a talented, moderate Republican House member from the 1st District, thanks to Mr. Norquist's operatives?

So intent was Riccardo Migliori on his mission - observing the U.S. election and asking questions about the voting process in Baltimore - that he missed the statues of saints and the oil painting of Pope Leo XIII. So foreign was the idea that voting might take place in a house of worship that he apparently didn't notice the brass crucifix on the wall above him, either. In fact, it wasn't until he left the polling place in Little Italy and stepped onto chilly Exeter Street on Tuesday morning that Migliori, a senior member of Big Italy's parliament, realized he had just seen Americans voting in the basement of a Roman Catholic church.

Who's buying our democracy? Wall Street financiers, the Koch brothers, and casino magnates Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn, among others. And they're doing much of it in secret. It's a perfect storm -- the combination of three waves that are about to drown government as we know it. The first is the greatest concentration of wealth in America in more than a century. The 400 richest Americans are richer than the bottom 150 million Americans put together. The trend started 30 years ago, and it's related to globalization and technological changes that have stymied wage growth for most people.

Peter Levine followed the pattern that he now sees as basic to getting involved in civic life. As an undergraduate at Yale, he was president of the student government. Later, after he got his doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University - where he was a Rhodes scholar - Levine did not retreat into the ivory tower of academia; he joined the civic-based lobbying group Common Cause. There was only one problem he found there. "The median age was very high," he says. Surrounded by people of a certain age who had grown up assuming that you were supposed to be engaged with your community and with politics and such, Levine became concerned about the apparent lack of civic involvement among young people.

CHICAGO -- When it comes to partisan gerrymandering, the subject of a U.S. Supreme Court decision last week, two numbers are relevant. The first: five. That's how many of the 392 incumbent House members running in 2004 lost to non-incumbents. The second: zero. That's how much chance there is that the Supreme Court will stop this endless, insatiable and alarmingly successful effort to prevent voters from deciding elections. American democracy is beginning to resemble a Western movie set: authentic-looking storefronts with nothing behind them.

ONE OF THE BLESSINGS of American democracy is a military that takes its orders from civilians and stays out of politics. This is so ingrained in American thinking that the alternative is almost beyond imagining. Yet there are countries around the world where generals have to be factored into the political reckoning, and it distorts the entire framework of public life. Today the American military is setting out to fulfill the orders it has received. Readers know that this page takes issue with the policy that led to those orders.

President Clinton, like most of his fellow citizens, tends to take for granted and, thus, to underrate the achievement of the people who came together to make the United States of America. So, he overestimates the prospects of ''new'' democracies in the rest of the world.The triumph of American democracy is not that the majority rules; it is that multiple minorities are tolerated. Majority rule is easy to achieve, but it is not so easy to prevent the majority from disenfranchising, suppressing, driving out or killing minorities.

THE LAST week of March, two D.C. City Council members took an interesting, unannounced trip to El Salvador.Frank Smith and Harry Thomas flew to San Salvador on March 23, without notifying either the American Embassy there or the Salvadoran Embassy here, and traveled around for a week, largely to formerly Marxist rebel-held territory.Members of the curious 16-member delegation, which included immigration activists from D.C., made it clear when they returned home a week later where their sympathies lay. They spoke of observing naked children running around town squares and of an undetonated bomb on church steps with the words on it: "Made in the U.S.A."

Almost 40 years ago, Susan Sontag burst onto the literary scene with the battle cry, "In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art." And she delivered. This cultural gambit, developed in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (Picador, 312 pages, $14), has been republished to coincide with the appearance of her new collection of essays, Where the Stress Falls (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 351 pages, $27). Sontag's status as a trendsetter has long been eclipsed, but the recent essays show that her moral and aesthetic self-righteousness remain intact.