The Akron Beacon Journal from Akron, Ohio • Page 19

The Beacon Journal www.01m.ccfm ItliJjllflV Sunday, September 26, 1999, Page B3 Don't look to Buchanan for irony; his strength is hypocrisy WASHINGTON: The line on Pat Buchanan has always been this: He might be slightly cracked for example, writing in his latest book that Hitler's invasion of France was defensive secure his or that Nazi Germany was no tnreat to the United States after 1940 but at least he is principled: He knows what he believes and says it without fear or equivocation. After Buchanan's recent performance auditioning for the Reform Party presidential nomination. however, it is clear that his reputation for principle is an elaborate fraud. For example: In a column last November headlined "The Dispossession of Christian Americans," Buchanan is agitated about figures showing that half of Harvard students are Asian or Jewish. He decries "a Harvard student body where non-Jewish whites 75 percent of Charles Krauthammer I (L "tongue in cheek." Tongue in cheek? Buchanan wrote not one but two columns denouncing the Ivy League for "denying its first-class tickets to the upper crust of society," to "Euro-Americans." There is not a hint of irony in either piece.

Moreover, the second (Jan. 1, 1999) refers explicitly to the fuss kicked up by the first (Nov. 27, 1998): "When I suggested that it might be time for Euro-Americans to demand affirmative action, the usual suspects answered with the usual invective." The second column is the time to reveal it was all in jest, no? No. If anything, Buchanan laid it on thicker in the follow-up, righteously declaring, "This social and moral injustice needs airing." And, by God, airing injustice is what Buchanan does. Right? Right Until he's called on it on national TV.

Then he goes impish and squishy and claims that he is an ironist Pat Buchanan is a lot of things. But ironist he is not He is, for starters, a both-sides-of-the- mouth politician. His technique is to convey raw prejudice to his followers, who understand his code, then go on respectable media, smile and pretend he never meant it His trademark is the wink. The wink is interpreted by his friends in mainstream media as: "I'm fooling the mob." It is understood by the mob as "I'm fooling the pointy-heads." An ironist he is not. But a hypocrite he is.

He savages the Republican Party for being insufficiently committed to the unborn, then gets ready to defect to a party that is entirely and publicly indifferent to abortion and, to boot, to the other great social issues Buchanan claims are so near his bosom, such as gay rights. Howard Phillips' Constitution Party shares not just Buchanan's foreign and economic policies but his views on abortion, religion and the rest Why then is Buchanan courting the Reform Party? Because the Constitution Party is not up for $13 million in free federal money. So off to dance with Ross Perot and to lunch with Lenora Fulani, self-de Problem with 'Dutch' is a biographer lost in starlight the U.S. population get just 25 percent of the slots. Talk about underrepresenta-tion! Now we know who really gets the shaft at Harvard white Christians." This is, of course, cracked.

(The implication that Asians and Jews have had 50 percent of the spots set aside for them to the exclusion of white ethnics is nutty.) But when he thunders that "a liberal elite is salving its social conscience by robbing America's white middle class of its birthright, and handing it over to minorities," he at least seems full of passionate intensity. So when Gloria Borger asked him about this on Face the Nation "You wrote in that column that 'Ivy League colleges' should 'look more like as you put it, by reserving 75 percent of their slots for, quote, 'non-Jewish whites'" we might have expected a rigorous defense. Instead, Buchanan first tried denial. "Oh, I don't think I wrote that" When Borger shot back, "You did write that I'm quoting," Buchanan took a dive, protesting now that he'd been speaking could no longer distinguish between things he had seen in movies and things that he had lived Bill Kovach, chief of the New York Times' Washington bureau during the Reagan years, said that stories that revealed Reagan's addled mind failed to get "traction" in the court of public opinion because his persona was too seductive. This legacy, by the way, has passed on to Bill Clinton, who has survived storms that would have left less charming men broken on the rocks.

Morris was clearly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the material he collected, collated and re-re-collated in 14 years on this book. Every writer of nonfiction can empathize with the problems posed in lending shape to mountains of information. But what jumped at me in reading the pages where the fictional Morris appears was the extent to which the author seems overwhelmed, cast in shadow, and fairly put under by the magnitude of the Reagan mass and charisma. This fictional witness describes Reagan as a gigantic asteroid whose magnetism and gravity pulled the grain-of-sand biographer in its wake. This is couched in the language of irony, but it still seems that the writer has been blinded by the very persona he is trying to spoof.

The effect is somewhat like watching children watch television knowing they cannot differentiate between the characters and themselves. I am eager to read the whole of Dutch But the sense I get from the pages with the now-famous invented Morris is that the writer was hypnotized by the brightest light in Washington and came away with fading evanescence instead of a palpable story. The moral of this tale, boys and girls, is that when you encounter a bright, bright light, put on sunglasses and take several steps back. Staples is a New York Times editorial writer. NEW YORK: Edmund Morris' Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan has yet to reach its publication date and is being embargoed by Rottweilers at Random House but has already become the most reviled political biography in recent memory.

Fair-minded people will read the book before deciding whether or not to call for the author's literary head. But it is clear from portions of Dutch being secreted around Manhattan that something went terribly wrong be tween Morris and the president whose "authorized" biography this was meant to be. Morris has taken the eyebrow-raising step of inserting into this "biography" fictional characters including one that seems loosely based on himself. This device should get Dutch classified as a novel instead of a nonfiction book. Anything less amounts to literary fraud.

But the device was necessary, Morris hinted, to create solid ground in an ethereal personality that provided too little substance for a traditional biographer. But even a partial reading of Dutch shows that the reverse is true. The trouble was not too little Reagan, but way too much, experienced at too close a range. The claim that Reagan's personality was too thin to make a biography is disproved by the fact that several writers have written good ones without the help of fictional invention. Lou Cannon did it in President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, Haynes Johnson did it in Skepwalking Through History, and the Jesuitical Garry Wills did it most penetratingly in Reagan's America, which showed in eery detail how Reagan came to mistake the world of movies for the one in which he lived.

Former White House chief of staff Donald Regan captured the boss well in his memoir, saying that the White House staff conceived of the Gipper's as a presidency of good camera angles with Reagan as a "sort of supreme anchorman whose public persona was the most important element of his presidency." Famous actors have a brighter personal radiance than the rest of us -which is why we call them "stars," and why a frisson runs through a restaurant when stud muffin Brad Pitt waltzes in to eat The star power that lights up the diners almost inevitably becomes impenetrable, keeping the star from seeing out and the rest of us from discerning what lies within. This two-part deception between the star and himself and the star and his "public" was nowhere more pronounced than in the reign of Ronald Reagan, the actor turned president. The Gipper in his political prime was Brad Pitt cubed. His camera-ready radiance kept them swooning in the aisles and made him politically immune to blunders, lies and the revelation that he Brent Staples scribed (former?) "militant black nationalist Marxist and social therapist" now a power in the Reform Party. Bu chanan's association with Fulani, once head of the "black-led, woman-led, multiracial and pro-gay" New Alliance Party, is beyond parody.

She is so far out on the loony left that she once called Michael Dukakis a "white supremacist candidate." (She ought to read Buchanan's columns.) In April 1987, she went to Libya to join a rally marking the first anniversary of the U.S. bombing of Libya That bombing was the work of Ronald Reagan, Buchanan's hero and boss. Buchanan was White House director of communications at the time of the attack. Fulani called it a "terrorist bombing." And we thought that red-brown alliances were a specialty of the Russians. Who knows? Maybe Buchanan now thinks the bombing was a big mistake.

Or just tongue in cheek. Krauthammer is a Washington Post columnist. TReOccASioHUl IS ttettSSARYl. AUTHPhiladelphia Inquirer would write about European countries as well as contact various people in Europe for whom residents had given her messages to deliver. 25 years ago Cold winds blowing across Lake Erie brought record snowfall to the Akron area and caused widespread power outages and unusually low temperatures.

Some areas reported up to 2.5 inches of snow. It was the earliest measurable snowfall on record, breaking a 49-year-old mark from Oct 10, 1925, when 1.5 inches fell The low temperature during the night was 34 degrees. Meanwhile, the safety-nanny aginners switched to the threat to the health and general welfare of society caused by people who use cell phones when they drive. Using cell phones in cars is particularly disturbing to aginners who opposed the invention of the horseless carriage in the first place. They continue to fight to restrict the use of automobiles by lobbying for laws to slow cars down to a cave baby's crawl with government restrictions and traffic laws.

A vocal group of aginners once argued for the government to ban radios in cars because the infernal devices could distract drivers from their driving duties. Aginners who specialize in social arguments want to ban cell phone use in shopping malls, supermarkets, restaurants and other public places. Since people normally talk in shopping malls, supermarkets, restaurants and other public places, the aginners are reduced to arguing that it simply isn't proper to talk to someone who either isn't present or isn't at the other end of endless miles of copper wire. Go figure. I like my cell phone.

I don't want the aginners to screw up a good thing. As long as I am not hurting anyone, no one should care if I talk on my cell phone any more than if I talk to myself, an invisible blue marmoset or someone within arm's reach. There also is no reason why I should be told where I can use my cell phone as long as it is where other people are allowed to carry on conversations. Admittedly, cell-phone conversations should be discouraged in movie theaters, libraries and other places whce normal conversations are restricted. Cell phones in cars are no more dangerous than drivers who eat 3ig Macs or drink designer water from tar cup holders as they tool down the road.

Are we going to ban drive-through windows at fast-food establishments or outlaw conversations with passengers in cars? Don't ask ha. aginners. They might like the idea. Nethaway a Waco (Texas) Tribune-Herald columnist Secret society of wet blankets united against invention This Week 100 years ago Work began on building a station for the world's first electric police patrol wagon. The station, along with the chiefs office, would be first class, with modern improvements.

The patrol wagon was being assembled under the direction of Frank F. Loomis, city director of mechanical engineering. 75 years ago Al's Hole in the Wall Auto Accessories store at 307 S. Main St was holding a grand opening. Souvenirs being handed out were toy Actually, I don't know when this coalition began it is secret, after all.

But I can easily envision a group of hand-wringing cave persons trying to throw cold water on the popular new invention of a flint knife. The argument would be that cave persons have gotten along just fine, thank you very much, with flat river rocks. Sharp rocks can cut and be used to hurt innocent cave persons. Sharp rocks could fall into the hands of cave children. In no time, "Ban Sharp Rocks" stickers could be seen on the clubs of the ancestors of today's aginners.

Or something similar. Over the millennia, this coalition of aginners has opposed everything from from history to back, a downtown-office landlord, proposed that the city inventory buildings to determine architectural and historic value, collect delinquent taxes and assessments, impose caretaking requirements on owners, recognize the right to petition for demolition and campaign to attract responsible owners and lessees. Colenback (who has since lost his building to mortgage foreclosure after the prime tenant, Owens-Corning, opened a new headquarters here) said last week that he hasn't seen much progress toward ending the. glut of empty downtown offices. He contends offices are the most profitable use of the property.

He objects to government subsidies, partly because their costs aren't understood by most citizens, though he concedes preservation and other development might not happen without them. It's uncertain what the Madison's reincarnation will be, the project having just reached the city-accepts-gift stage. But elements of the pattern have popped up in finished projects. Three long-shuttered hotels the Commodore Perry, the Hillcrest and the Park Lane -have been turned into apartments. So has the former Macy's department store.

balloons, roses for the ladies, gas measuring sticks and accelerator heel rests. The rests, which normally sold for 25 cents, prevented wear on the floor carpet Al's boasted of having "everything for your car but the license." 50 years ago Helen Waterhouse, the Akron Beacon Journal's "flying reporter," boarded an Air France airplane in New York on her way to Europe. While vacationing overseas, Waterhouse the use of fire to the use of cellular telephones. Cell phones have been a popular technological advance. The descendants of the cave persons who loved flint knives love their cell phones.

So, naturally, the coalition of aginners is trying to roll back the clock to the heyday of human civilization when people huddled in the dark and suffered. Boy, those were the good old days. The aginners first floated the junk science rumor that cell phones cause brain tumors. Junk science is a favorite tactic for aginners. Since it is difficult to prove a negative, it took time to debunk the anti-cell phone, brain-tumor tactic.

parking lot The renovated Valentine Theater, 103 years old, is to reopen next month. Last week, a report said the city would lease the former Toledo Edison steam plant to the Alexander the Wisconsin developer of Macy's and the Hillcrest, for a riverfront retail and commercial center. Earlier schemes, for upscale housing and an entertainment-restaurant complex, had fallen through. The plant, closed since 1985, once supplied heat to downtown buildings. Edison would give the plant to the city, along with $800,000 for the $4 million, three-year renovatioa The city would contribute $500,000.

But the demolitionists havent been idle, either. Downtown watchers awoke in surprise one Saturday last month to find that the otherwise unremarkable structure that housed the defunct Dyer's Chop House, once a popular and storied eatery, had been leveled under a permit allegedly issued covertly four months earlier by the city-county planning director. Whipple, former managing editor of the Blade, teaches journalism at the University of Toledo. His is another in a series of reports from other Ohio cities. Pattern of downtown slide Waco, Texas: Somewhere in the world is the secret headquarters of a powerful coalition of citizens who come from all walks of life and yet share the single- Rowland minded goal to prevent popular technological advances.

This coalition of killjoys, wet blankets, safety nannies, Chicken Littles, tongue-cluckers and fin-ger-waggers has opposed every new popular invention since Nethaway the flint knife. They are "aginners," people who are against whatever they decide to be against The Madison sits at Madison Avenue and Huron Street, the rare intersection in the central business district still having buildings at all four corners. Parking lots pockmark the rest This is chronicled in then-and-now stories and pictures published in the Blade, staunchly in the preservationist camp. By one reckoning, only about 20 percent of downtown land has buildings on it Most downtowns have succumbed in various ways to the urban sprawl of the past half-century but, at least in the Blade's view, Toledo is among the worst, especially compared to Cincinnati, Des Moines, Buffalo, Indianapolis, Cleveland and Akron. The newspaper, urging a ban on the demolitions, wrote: "With each demolition the architectural diversity of the downtown is diminished, part of the city's history is lost, its promise for the future tarnished, its chances of revival lessened." Former Mayor Michael Damas, a parking lot operator, has a different perspective: "IVe torn down a few buildings.

Most of them the owners wanted to get rid of because of taxes and upkeep. Nobody likes to do it, but you can't hang cars in the air. Without parking, no business will succeed." Nearly four years" ago, Lloyd Colen- A Letter from Toledo: Aged office building nearly empty. Owner threatens demolition. Yikes! Another parking lot Preservationists protest City, reluctantly, accepts structure as gift False starts ensue.

Viable developer appears. Govern ment subsidies spur restoration or renovation. Historic edifice saved. That Dattern is 4 emerging in the latest 4 attemot to Dreserve a downtown landmark, the Madison Building, Toledo's first skyscraper. Built in 1891 and originally called the Nasby Building and later the Security Building, the 11-story tower reportedly was inspired by a cathedral in Seville, Spain, but the resemblance vanished with removal of the tower top in 1934 and enclosure of the remainder in a checkerboard facade three decades ago.

Inside, above a couple of false ceilings, is the original, described by a preservation architect as "absolutely beautiful probably as grand as aay ceiling we have in downtown." Edson Whipple.