Some people go to church. Others call their therapists. And then there are those – millions of them – who, when the urge arises to confess the frank, dirty, embarrassing, humbling, and troubling details of their lives, visit GroupHug.us.

Sound crazy? Even Jamaica Plain graphic designer Gabriel Jeffrey, who launched the Web site on a whim in the fall of 2003, never expected that within its first three months, GroupHug would receive 13 million hits. He didn't anticipate that thousands of strangers, drawn to the promise of complete anonymity, would post confessions ranging from the mundane ("I really like the taste of turkey Gerber baby food") to the momentous ("I live the kind of life that lots of others envy, but I think of suicide every day").

Now, a year and a half after its initial meteoric rise, GroupHug is still thriving – and has recently spawned a book, Stoned, Naked, and Looking in My Neighbor's Window: The Best Confessions from GroupHug.us (Justin, Charles; 2004). But Jeffrey's own confession? He's ready to move on to other projects. "My interest in it is done," admits the 25-year-old entrepreneur. "It's like a record that I really liked in high school."

How'd you come up with the idea for GroupHug?

Now and then I'll do some random project. I've been a freelance designer; while I was freelancing, I would do random projects just to keep things interesting. So I'd been wanting to do sort of a community-built magazine, and I thought anonymity would be kind of a cool feature. After distilling the idea, I wound up coming up with the idea of confessions. I figured it was a good, concise way to have a bunch of personal stories that were anonymous. So I thought about it, not really too hard, actually, for a couple of weeks before I just sat down and scribbled down my ideas and made the thing. Total, I probably spent four hours making it.

Who did you originally think would post their confessions?

Oh, just friends and friends of friends. I put it online and sent the link out to half a dozen friends, maybe, and it just started that way.

When did you first realize it was spreading beyond that?

Within a matter of days. I mean, on the first day it was up, there were 30 confessions. The second day there were maybe 50, the third day I think 150. Within a week, I was looking at thousands. Just from the third week alone, there were around 2.5 million hits.

Did you ever feel like you'd gotten in over your head?

Oh yeah, definitely. When I first started it, you would post a confession and it would go immediately to the web site. That worked fine when it was sort of a controlled group, or peers who got it. Very quickly I had to hack together a moderation system; all that did was, somebody would submit a confession, and I would have to go in and approve each one. By the end of the third week, obviously, that became unmanageable. So I got my brother and a couple of friends to start helping me moderate, and at the same time, I put out a little classified ad looking for a programmer to basically work with me for free, to figure out a better way to do it. I actually got, I think, 30 qualified applicants who wanted to do it for free, which was amazing.

Why do you think that is?

Programmers are divas, and they want their name on something big. If that means putting in some free time to build on your portfolio, it's worth it. And by that time, certainly in the web world, GroupHug was starting to be known after a few weeks. A month later I was able to launch the new one with the help of Adam Bregenzer. There have been some refinements since then, but it's really held up pretty well.

What do you think the appeal is? Obviously you didn't expect it to become so huge; why do you think it has?

I think it's kind of the whole package. When I started, I thought it was a terribly original idea, and then of course the first thing anyone does when people start to pay you any attention is to try to burst your bubble. So I got dozens of e-mails saying, "Hey, there's this site that already does that, and that site that already does that." But it was clear after a few weeks that GroupHug, for whatever reason, had caught on in a way that others hadn't.

From a design standpoint, it was very simple, very easy to use. The name, GroupHug, it's fairly disarming, I think. It just felt right to people, fun and safe. It had some serious momentum pretty quickly, and once there was that kind of momentum, it just kept going. I think there was an element of luck, an element of timing, and possibly just having the right friends who had enough friends to keep forwarding it around.

Do you think the popularity of GroupHug goes hand-in-hand with the popularity of reality TV? The whole voyeurism thing?

Definitely. People are eating that stuff up. Everybody wants to be a part of it. For whatever reason, right now the cultural Zeitgeist dictates that everybody wants to be a porn star, and everyone wants to let it all hang out.

Tell me about your encounter with the Secret Service.

It was pretty early on; I think it might've been the same month that I started. I was out of town, and early in the morning I was walking to get coffee, and I got a call from my friend who actually owned the machine that the site was living on, saying that the Secret Service had contacted him, and he'd given them my information. Five minutes later, somebody from the Secret Service called me and asked a bunch of questions about how anonymous is it, what kind of information did I keep? And then they wanted to talk about a specific confession threatening the commander in chief, and if there was any information I could give them. I explained exactly what I did have and what I didn't have, and it satisfied them enough that I didn't hear from them again.

Did that experience make you think, what the hell am I doing?

That certainly made me do a little research as far as my responsibilities with something like this. What I found out, more or less, was that I should be prepared to cooperate.

How do you determine if a confession is real or made up? Or doesn't it matter?

My guidelines have been the same since day one, the guidelines for submitting it and the guidelines for approving it and all that. They're pretty basic. The first one's that it should be a confession. The second and third are basically no violent crimes, no sex crimes. Then no identifying information; it really has to be anonymous. Other than that, it's kind of up to people's best judgment. It's a public-moderation system now, so people sort of vote. I do encourage them to weed out the obvious lies, but that's not so easy. I think the final round of moderation is when people are reading it, and kind of get to decide for themselves. I'm sure there are some really poignant, interesting confessions that are completely made up, but then, I don't know how much that matters, because the point isn't really that this person exists and this exact situation happened.

Aside from the presidential threat, do you ever get confessions that seem dangerous, like someone's thinking of hurting someone else? Is there anything you can do when that happens?

There's nothing I can do. That's probably the biggest dilemma with this whole thing. You can make an argument that because it's anonymous, and because people can post anything, that it's doing more harm than good. But I don't know. If people actually are doing horrible things and confessing about them, they've already done it. I'm providing a public bulletin board. I certainly hope it's not encouraging any kind of unethical behavior.

So you don't ever get confessions from people saying they're planning to do something bad, and then you're left feeling like, oh no, there's nothing I can do to stop this?

That's probably one of the reasons I don't read the thing anymore.

You don't read it at all?

No.

I know initially GroupHug was a spare-time project for you. What were you doing with the bulk of your time then, and what about now?

Then I was a freelance graphic designer. [GroupHug] has never made me any money. Hopefully, the book will make some money. But it's never been a job. As much time as I may have put into it, it was always in my free time. Now I probably spend less time than ever dealing with it. I'm personally moving into a full-time job that's going to really require all of my time. I'm an art director at Arnold Worldwide. So I probably won't have a whole lot of time to coddle my little web baby.

Well, it sounds like you're somewhat bored with it at this point, anyway.

Yeah. The nice thing about the book, for example, was that by necessity I reached a point where I was done with it. Now I just sit back and wait for my millions to roll in. Whereas with something like a web site, it's an indefinite kind of project. I didn't know how long I would keep it around. I've kind of thrown together other little experiments that I got bored enough with to where I shut them down or they just didn't catch on. This one, people are still interested in, so it'll be up, as far as I know, forever. My interest in it is done. I had my fun with it. As far as a social experiment goes, I guess it was a success: it caught on, created a meme. People are still really interested in it. I suppose I'd probably be interested in finding somebody who was more genuinely interested in the topic matter to keep it running.

Who chose which confessions would be in the book?

I did. At that point I was much more familiar with the content than I am now, so I handpicked all of them for the book.

Did you have favorites that had stuck with you?

Yeah, there were a few that I had bookmarked, just because I thought they were particularly funny or interesting. Now none of them stick with me. It's like a record that I really liked in high school.

That you never want to listen to again.

Exactly.

So are you tired of talking about it?

Honestly, sometimes, yeah. I like it when somebody recognizes it, or maybe knows who I am in relation to it. Some people have asked me if it bums me out that it might be one of my major life accomplishments. Not really. I don't expect it to follow me in any kind of negative way.

People are probably asking you to talk about it a lot right now because of the book.

Yeah, exactly. And I'm certainly interested in promoting the book. But as far as the whole concept of the site and all that, I kind of feel like I've talked it to death. I don't have any new analysis on it.

Well, maybe you can talk to me about this: your publisher's publicist says "the concept of the online confessional has numerous social, cultural, and religious ramifications worth exploring." Tell me about that quote.

I think that's probably true. Other people have explored it in far more depth than I have. I've been sent several papers that people have written about it, and some people have written some sort of interesting things in the press. I think what was interesting to me about it in the first place was having a successful project and just seeing what people would do with it. I don't think it has any ramifications, really. People have been doing the exact same thing forever, like messages in a bottle or hobo signs on trains or graffiti or letters to the editor. I think it's one in a long line of people telling stories. I suspect that somebody will do something more interesting with the concept at some point in the future.

It was a little more than two weeks ago that NBC News broadcast a piece of video from Fallujah that was both startling and sickening. U.S. Marines are seen walking into a mosque where several injured, unarmed Iraqi insurgents are lying on the floor. Although NBC censored the audio, we now know that one of the Marines excitedly said, "He's fucking faking he's dead. He's faking he's fucking dead." The Marine aims his rifle – and shoots the insurgent in the head.

For a few days, at least, the video clip – taken by freelance journalist Kevin Sites, a veteran war correspondent – seemed certain to become one of the signature images of the war in Iraq. And perhaps it will. An investigation is under way, and if and when the young Marine who pulled the trigger is publicly identified, the image may take its place in the pantheon of wartime horror. To this point, though, something odd has happened, or rather hasn't happened. Because so far, it seems, the clip is already fading from memory, and has not joined such terrible images as the torture photos from Abu Ghraib, or those of the American contractors who were butchered and mutilated in Fallujah a year and a half ago, or the heart-stopping photos of casualties, many of them civilian, on display at falluja.blogspot.com, or even the unseen but easily imagined execution of Margaret Hassan, killed in cold blood after a lifetime of helping the Iraqi people.

Why this should be is hard to say. But here's a guess: we know too much to let the clip stand alone, without context. In Susan Sontag's 2003 book on photography and war, "Regarding the Pain of Others," she writes that "to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude. ... A photograph – or a filmed document available on television or the Internet – is judged a fake when it turns out to be deceiving the viewer about the scene it purports to depict." There was a time, perhaps, when Sontag's insight would have been regarded as a revelation. Today, though, it's commonplace. In introducing Sites's report on the Nov. 15 NBC Nightly News, anchorman Brian Williams said, "It illustrates how complex and confusing life can be on the front lines of this war," thus setting the stage for an ambiguous interpretation of video that appeared, on the surface, to be pretty unambiguous. Sites provided more context, reporting that American forces had been killed or injured by the booby-trapped bodies of dead insurgents, and that the Marine who shot the injured Iraqi had himself been shot in the face the day before.

Thus, rather than being cast as a symbol of all that's gone wrong in Iraq, the Marine has been treated almost as an object of pity. To be sure, that has not been universally the case. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have both called for an investigation into whether the Marine may have committed a war crime. Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth, on Fox News's The O'Reilly Factor, went so far as to say that "there is a prima facie war crime here that deserves court-martial." And yes, Arab news services such as Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya, not to mention Web sites that spew flat-out propaganda on behalf of the Iraqi insurgency, have reportedly been showing the video constantly. But among the American media, even staunch anti-war critics have been subdued.

The reason, I suspect, is that Sontag's lesson was internalized a long time ago by a generation of Americans who grew up learning about atrocities committed by U.S. troops in Vietnam, who blamed young American soldiers for a failed and immoral policy, and who later realized they were pointing the finger in the wrong direction. What that young Marine did in Fallujah was horrifying. But it didn't take place in a vacuum. Rather, it took place in the midst of days upon days of street-to-street fighting, of exhaustion, of fear, of split-second decisions that could mean the difference between life and death. What happened in that mosque was a tragedy, but who among us could say that we wouldn't have done the same thing? The real tragedy is that a scared young man made a mistake, while there are no consequences for the far more serious mistakes committed by the likes of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, et al.

This is NOT to say that the Marine shouldn't be held accountable. What he did may not have been a war crime, and a court-martial seems pretty drastic for his spur-of-the-moment reaction to a potentially dangerous situation. (Indeed, according to the current U.S. News & World Report, unnamed Pentagon officials expect the Marine will be cleared of all charges.) But to argue that he should not be locked up in Leavenworth is not the same as saying that he did the right thing. Sites wrote a long, impassioned entry on his weblog, www.kevinsites.net, on Nov. 21, eight days after the shooting. Numerous reports have made clear Sites' empathy for the troops with whom he has been embedded. Yet what's been overlooked to some extent is the degree to which Sites, and those around him, understood that something had gone drastically wrong inside the mosque.

Sites wrote about the Marine coming up to him after the shooting and saying, "I didn't know, sir – I didn't know." Sites added, "The anger that seemed present just moments before turned to fear and dread." And he wrote that "observing all of this as an experienced war reporter who always bore in mind the dark perils of this conflict, even knowing the possibilities of mitigating circumstances – it appeared to me very plainly that something was not right. According to Lt. Col. Bob Miller, the rules of engagement in Fallujah required soldiers or Marines to determine hostile intent before using deadly force. I was not watching from a hundred feet away. I was in the same room. Aside from breathing, I did not observe any movement at all." And for those who would argue that Sites should have, well, lost the video, he had this to say: "Hiding this wouldn't make it go away. There were other people in that room. What happened in that mosque would eventually come out. I would be faced with the fact that I had betrayed the truth as well as a life supposedly spent in pursuit of it."

These are the words of an honorable man pursuing an honorable course. Yet so twisted with rage are some of our so-called patriots that they have all but accused Sites of treason for telling the truth – the whole truth, complicated and contextual, explaining not just what the Marine did, but what he had been through before he did it. Sites makes it clear that the U.S. Marine Corps itself is anxious to find out what happened, to learn whether a breakdown in discipline and training had occurred that could place other Marines in danger. To some here at home, though, things look a lot simpler.

Take, for example, "Frank from Malden," who called The Howie Carr Show on WRKO Radio (AM 680) the day after Sites's report aired on NBC. Calling himself "a former Marine and very proud of it," Frank said, "I think this young gentleman should have got a medal for what he did." Then there was this: "I would think that the reporters in country should kind of be looking over their shoulder. Because if the reporters are going to put these kids in that situation, they may have some friendly fire there, you know?" An incredulous Carr asked, "What, do you think they're going to frag this guy the next time he goes out, this Kevin Sites?" Frank replied, "It could happen. That's the way it was. It could be again, you know?" Frank laughed and hung up. Carr seemed momentarily flustered; he then recovered and said that Sites "seems to be a real pro," and that he presumably could not have gotten his video out of Fallujah without military approval.

Yet Frank from Malden's point of view isn't all that unusual. In 1965, Morley Safer, then a young reporter for CBS News, accompanied some Marines to a group of Vietnamese villages known as Cam Ne. What Safer observed was the first televised American atrocity of the war. The Marines set fire to thatched huts, and threw hand grenades and fired flamethrowers down holes, killing the civilians who were cowering inside. It would have been even worse if Safer's South Vietnamese cameraman hadn't intervened. As described by David Halberstam in "The Powers That Be," CBS executives were deeply unhappy when they saw Safer's story, knowing – then as now – that they would be accused of being unpatriotic, of undermining the war effort, by putting the truth on the air. "They knew they had to go with it," Halberstam wrote. "It was not so much that they wanted to as that they simply could not fail to use it." And so they did. And so CBS president Frank Stanton was awakened the next day by a phone call from Lyndon Johnson, who told him, "Frank, this is your president, and yesterday your boys shat on the American flag."

As we all know, to this day you can still find reasonably bright people who believe that it was the media that lost the war in Vietnam – that the United States never lost a battle, but it lost the larger fight because the media undermined morale and dissipated support for the effort. Well, it's true enough that we never lost a battle in Vietnam; nor are we likely ever to lose a battle in Iraq. But the dilemma then – and, one fears, the dilemma now – is that no matter how many battles we win, the war can't be won because it's based on false premises. How can we win a war that we're fighting on behalf of people who hate us and who want us to leave their country? In any case, covering up the truth is hardly the solution, then or now.

"I feel very strongly that everything should be shown," says Jules Crittenden, a Boston Herald reporter who was embedded with the Army's Third Infantry Division in the spring of 2003. "In this particular case," Crittenden says of Sites, "he had a job which is very unambiguous. His job is to record what's going on. The military invited him there with full awareness – and I know, because I've spoken to many of the people involved with designing the program – that the embed will produce good, bad, and ugly. The military, in establishing this program, understood that there are going to be some bad days. I think they have always expressed a great deal of faith in the professionalism and fundamental goodness of American soldiers. You don't have a bunch of loose cannons running around out there. And they can trust their people to deal with this. I don't think that sense of trust that the military has on their own part or the trust of the American people has been violated by this incident. There's an investigation under way. The majority of people out there seem to understand the context in which this situation happened."

Context is vital, but it can also change, and it's never complete because everything can't be included. Another moment from Vietnam: in 1968, Eddie Adams photographed South Vietnamese general Nguyen Ngoc Loan at the very instant that he executed a Viet Cong fighter with one bullet to the head. Adams won a Pulitzer Prize for the photo, which seemed to encompass all the insanity and immorality of that war. Yet Adams, who died earlier this year, later came to see it quite differently. He got to know General Loan, and realized that the execution was perfectly justified; and he regretted that Loan's life was made much more difficult because of that infamous image.

"Photographs, you know, they're half-truths, you know, that's only one side," Adams told National Public Radio in 1998, shortly after Loan's death. "It's just a sad statement, you know, I think of America. He was fighting our war, not their war, our war, and ... all the blame is on this guy. I got to know him pretty well. I talked to him the last time about six months ago. He was very sick, you know, he had cancer for a while. And I talked to him on the phone, and I wanted to try to do something, explaining everything and how the photograph destroyed his life, and he just wanted to try to forget it. He said let it go. And I just didn't want him to go out this way."

I asked Dirck Halstead, himself a former war photographer and an acquaintance of Adams, whether he could draw an analogy between Adams' experience and Sites'. Halstead, now the editor and publisher of a magazine called the Digital Journalist, responded by e-mail. "In general, photojournalists are like cops. They have pledged themselves to always do the right, ethical thing. However, we all have heard of countless police officers who have become traumatized as a result of having to shoot someone in the line of duty. Unfortunately, this comes with the turf," Halstead told me. "Kevin Sites was covering a battle, as a pool embed. His job was to record what was going on. He was as surprised as Adams was by what happened. He also, obviously, was conflicted and confused by what he had just shot. ... He clearly has bonded with the men he has been covering. This happened with most of the pool reporters and photojournalists who have covered the war. This makes it even more difficult, since he obviously feels he let his comrades down. But he has to keep in mind why he was there, and what his job was. I feel for him and want to express to him my respect for a job well done."

Adams only learned of the broader context of Nguyen Ngoc Loan's life later, after his photo had been seen around the world. Sites tried to offer what context he could in his original report – the exhaustion, the fear, the booby-trapped bodies, the death that lurked around every corner. But a photographer can, at best, help tell the story of what's happening just outside the range of the viewfinder. The broader context – the broadest context – remains elusive. On Nov. 17, NPR's Melissa Block interviewed an Al-Jazeera spokesman, Jihad Ali Ballout. The subject: why Al-Jazeera was running Sites' video on an almost-continuous loop, whereas it refused to show the execution of Margaret Hassan, a video that network officials have admitted is in their possession. Ballout told Block that "these atrocities of killing innocent people, especially people such as the late Mrs. Hassan, was really an outrage. There is a difference between that and when there is a whole army of 20,000 military people converging on an area in Fallujah." Block responded by asking whether Al-Jazeera was using a "double standard" in showing the Sites video but not the Hassan execution. Ballout didn't really have an answer.

Now, of course, the Hassan execution does not balance off the Fallujah mosque incident in any way, and the moral equation is complex. On the one hand, what happened to Hassan does not somehow justify the misbegotten war in which we are now embroiled. On the other hand, it is useful to remind ourselves – and it is obviously useful for the Arab world to remind itself – that what the Sites video documents is not the moral equivalent of shooting Margaret Hassan in the head. One was a split-second reaction to a confusing, possibly deadly situation. The other was an act of terror in the most literal sense – that is, it was the taking of an innocent life solely for the purpose of spreading terror. One was a tragic mistake. The other was pure evil. But though we should surely see both – as well as the bodies of the civilians who have died or been maimed by our arrogant act of liberation, as well as the beheadings and the Abu Ghraib images and everything else – we travel down a dangerous road when we use these images to try to justify. At best, they help us to understand, however imperfectly.

"The meaning of these pictures is not embedded in the video itself. What people think about this video is going to depend on what they think about the war," says Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Bob Zelnick, who chairs Boston University's journalism department, and who is a former war correspondent for ABC News, praises in-depth reportage, such as Dexter Filkins' Nov. 21 New York Times article on accompanying U.S. troops in Fallujah, for educating the public about the terrible consequences of urban warfare. "There has been a realistic picture presented of what these guys are up against," he says. "You read that stuff and you can understand what's going on over there, why anybody would pull the trigger first and ask questions later. Human beings have the blessed ability to make distinctions. We can distinguish between Abu Ghraib and Fallujah. The reason we can do that is because of good reporting in each case."

The problem – the tragedy, really – is that though the images tell us much about the way the war is being conducted, they tell us little about the wisdom of the war, or even its ultimate cost. It says much about this war that we can see pictures of a Marine killing a wounded insurgent, of Iraqi inmates being tortured, and of atrocities committed against Americans and other Westerners by terrorists, yet we cannot see the flag-draped coffins arriving at Dover Air Force Base. That – as well as the additional suffering we've inflicted on the already-long-suffering people of Iraq – is the ultimate context.

When the new Senate storms Capitol Hill early next year, the narrow Republican majority of the past two years will disappear, to be replaced by a much wider Republican majority. Currently, the Senate comprises 51 Republicans, 48 Democrats, and an independent – Jim Jeffords, of Vermont, a former Republican who usually votes with the Democrats. Because of last week's election, the Senate will soon seat 55 Republicans, 44 Democrats, and Jeffords.

Who are these people? Unlike the House, where Republican members lead lives of near-anonymous fealty dictated by Speaker Dennis Hastert and majority leader Tom DeLay, senators matter as individuals – not as just a voting bloc. There are moderate Republican senators, such as Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, of Maine; Lincoln Chafee, of Rhode Island; and Arlen Specter, of Pennsylvania – who nearly got his head handed to him last week for daring to suggest that anti-choice judges might not pass muster. There are religious conservatives, such as Sam Brownback, of Kansas, and Orrin Hatch, of Utah. And there is Jim Bunning, of Kentucky, who's in a class by himself: last week he was re-elected despite widespread reports that he has Alzheimer's disease, and even though two of his supporters had sneeringly suggested that his Democratic opponent was gay.

Seven new Republican senators were elected last week. Two are unremarkable. Mel Martinez, of Florida, was George W. Bush's first secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Despite a poor record on the environment, Martinez deserves some thanks from Democrats: he and the White House intimidated Congresswoman Katherine Harris (yes, that Katherine Harris) into not running for the Senate this year. In Georgia, Republican congressman Johnny Isakson will succeed Democratic senator Zell Miller, who's retiring. Isakson – a moderate who's pro-choice (except when he isn't) – may well be more a voice of reason than Miller has been. That said, Isakson's outburst earlier this year that Bush is "the best president the United States has ever had" was certainly embarrassing, if not nearly as embarrassing as Miller's red-faced rant at the Republican National Convention.

What remain are five genuine specimens of right-wing Republicanism. Keep an eye on these guys. They're dangerous.

1) Tom Coburn: Keeping us safe from condoms and the 'gay agenda'

Fresh from helping to save Oklahoma from the scourge of teenage lesbianism, Tom Coburn arrives in Washington with perhaps the most bizarre set of right-wing credentials of anyone in the Republican Class of 2004. A former three-term congressman who was swept into office 10 years ago on the coattails of Newt Gingrich's Contract with America, Coburn – who succeeds retiring Republican senator Don Nickles – is an obstetrician possessed of an obsessive fascination with other people's sexuality.

In 2003, George W. Bush named Coburn to co-chair the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV and AIDS. Coburn's very first act was to speak out against the one preventative behavior (other than abstinence) that actually works. "I will challenge the national focus on condom use to prevent the spread of HIV," he said upon his appointment. Earlier, as a congressman, he had sought to force condom manufacturers to label their products as "ineffective" in slowing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

But that doesn't begin to plumb the depths of Coburn's so-called thinking. In his successful Senate campaign against Democratic congressman Brad Carson, Coburn called for the death penalty for doctors who perform abortions. That certainly gives new meaning to the term "pro-life." As a physician, Coburn himself performed abortions, although he says it was always to save the life of the woman. Tell it to the judge, Doc. Nor is that the only dissonant note from his career in medicine: Coburn was once accused of having sterilized a young woman without her permission. He says she had asked him to perform the surgery, though he conceded that he had lacked the written authorization that the law required.

In the 1990s Coburn criticized NBC for broadcasting Schindler's List, the Oscar-winning film about the Holocaust, charging that it would encourage "irresponsible sexual behavior." That particular outburst was so odd that even one of his ostensible allies, self-appointed morals czar Bill Bennett, felt compelled to label Coburn's remarks as "unfortunate and foolish." Coburn is also an outspoken opponent of the "gay agenda" in general and same-sex marriage in particular; as a member of Congress, he refused to allow the city of Washington to fund its program for domestic-partnership benefits.

Earlier this year, Coburn said that lesbianism is "so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they'll only let one girl [at a time] go to the bathroom." Coburn's source: a campaign worker. He later said his remarks had been taken "out of context," whatever that was supposed to mean. His spokesman gamely insisted that Coburn was worried that "our kids are getting mixed messages about sexuality." Mixed-up, rather, if they've been listening to Coburn.

Sources: Salon, September 13, 2004; AlterNet, March 28 and October 13, 2004; the Associated Press, October 12, 2004.

2) Jim DeMint: 'The Family' values, homophobia, and tax chicanery

If Tom Coburn is #1 on our list of exotic senatorial specimens, South Carolina's Jim DeMint might qualify as #1A rather than #2. Congressman DeMint, who defeated Democrat Inez Tenenbaum in the campaign to succeed another retiring senator, Democrat Ernest Hollings, belongs to a secretive religious organization with anti-Semitic leanings, and is a tax-cut hypocrite and an outspoken homophobe to boot.

The decades-old religious group, best known for sponsoring the annual National Prayer Breakfast, is generally known as "The Family," "The Foundation," or "The Fellowship." A magnet for high-ranking conservative Washingtonians, it is said to have supported some vicious Third World right-wing dictatorships over the years – as well as performing the occasional good deed, such as helping to foster the relationship between Menachem Begin and Anwar el-Sadat. Members also reportedly believe that God's covenant with the Jews is broken, and that they are "the new chosen." DeMint is close enough to the inner circle to have lived, along with five other congressmen, in a million-dollar Capitol Hill apartment subsidized by "The Family."

During his campaign against Tenenbaum, though, DeMint's membership in this little-known group was far less of an issue than his mouth was. At a debate in October, DeMint said, "If a person wants to be publicly gay, they should not be teaching in the public schools." Even a local Christian Coalition official and DeMint supporter named Bette Cox said, "I wouldn't have said that. It's a civil rights issue with me. You can't cut off someone's civil rights." DeMint refused to apologize – although he did apologize for saying that unwed, pregnant women should not be allowed to teach either. And he declined to fire an aide who'd sent out an e-mail referring to "fags" and "dykes" (or, to be more precise, "dikes").

One of DeMint's key issues during the campaign was getting rid of the federal income tax and replacing it with a 23 percent flat national sales tax. It's an idea that President Bush himself has been cozying up to in recent weeks. The simplicity of such a system is undeniably appealing, but, unless carefully designed, it would be the mother of all regressive taxes, biting deeply into the poor and the middle class for everything they buy. So it's pretty amusing to learn that DeMint is a serial tax scofflaw, repeatedly making late payments on his federal, state, and local taxes between 1987 and 2001.

If nothing else, a flat federal sales tax would prevent well-connected people from gaming the system. People such as Jim DeMint.

Sources: Harper�s magazine, March 2003; the Associated Press, April 20, 2003; the Columbia State, October 4, 2004; 365Gay.com; Salon, October 7, 2004.

3) David Vitter: Putting young men and women in harm's way

The election of Louisiana congressman David Vitter to the Senate is an ominous sign of the problems facing the Democratic Party, especially in the South. Vitter won more than 50 percent in a multi-candidate election last Tuesday, thus avoiding a runoff next month. The retiring incumbent, John Breaux, is a Democrat who's conservative enough to inspire teeth-gnashing among liberals. But unlike Zell Miller, who these days sounds more Republican than Dick Cheney does, Breaux is a Democratic loyalist capable of pulling off the occasional bipartisan compromise. Vitter, though, is a straight-down-the-line ultraconservative.

According to rankings published by the National Journal, a nonpartisan political magazine, Vitter is the most conservative congressman elected to the Senate this year – more conservative than 87 percent of his peers. He has a 100 percent ranking from the National Right to Life Committee; a zero percent ranking from Human Rights Campaign, a leading gay and lesbian civil rights organization; a zero percent ranking from the League of Conservation Voters and the Sierra Club; and an "A" from the National Rifle Association.

Vitter's opposition to reproductive choice is so unwavering that he has co-sponsored legislation to require doctors who prescribe RU-486 – a drug that, if used properly, can induce a safe, nonsurgical abortion – to have both the ability and the necessary equipment to perform a surgical abortion should one become necessary. As James Ridgeway observed in the Village Voice, "That's a little like asking a doctor who prescribes heart medicine to be able to do open-heart surgery, right there in the clinic."

Vitter was also responsible for inserting a provision into the No Child Left Behind Act that requires public high schools to supply the names and phone numbers of all juniors and seniors to military recruiters – an invasion of privacy that could have tragic consequences for impressionable, economically stressed young men and women. (To be fair, generous opt-out provisions are included.) When asked to explain his reasoning, Vitter said the previous nondisclosure policy "demonstrated an anti-military attitude that I thought was offensive."

Somehow, no right-wing success story is complete without an example of grotesque hypocrisy. So let the record show that, for several years now, Vitter's supporters have been denying the claims of a Louisiana prostitute that she'd had an 11-month affair with Vitter when he was a state legislator. For the record, we don't care whether the story is true or not. But you'd think the Christian Coalition, which gives him a 100 percent rating, and the Family Research Council, which grades him at 92 percent, would care quite a bit.

Sources: AlterNet, September 29, 2003; the Village Voice, March 27, 2001; Louisiana Weekly, December 29, 2003; National Journal, February 27, 2004. Interest-group rankings from Project Vote Smart.

4) Richard Burr: Corporate errand boy scoops up PAC money

North Carolina has come a long way since the days of Jesse Helms. Its Research Triangle is as sophisticated and well-educated as – well, as in any blue state. So it's only appropriate that John Edwards's successor in the Senate stand out as being somewhat different from his fellow Republican freshmen. To be sure, Congressman Richard Burr is as anti-choice, anti-gay, and pro-gun as the rest of them. But he comes from that strain of Republicanism more interested in sucking up to corporate interests than in joining hands with the godly.

How in the tank is Burr? With $2.4 million in donations, this distant relative of Aaron Burr received more money from political action committees than did any other Senate candidate this year. "The main people he looks out for and answers to are the large corporations. That is the most troubling thing about Richard Burr to me," says Berni Gaither, a North Carolina Democratic Party official. Democratic activist Hayes McNeil puts it more succinctly: "Burr's record in Congress looks like a whore's bed sheet."

The good life, Burr-style, can be awfully good indeed. In April 2002, the National Association of Broadcasters – the fine folks who brought you corporate media consolidation – flew Burr, first-class, to Las Vegas for its annual convention. The amenities included poolside drinks and a massage, although Burr reportedly reimbursed the association for his spa stay. "It's extremely valuable for members to get that overall snapshot of their particular industry," said Burr, who at the time was vice-chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee. "If not, we rely on everyone to come up here and tell us how things have changed."

North Carolina remains a place apart. Burr and his unsuccessful Democratic opponent, Clinton White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles, were falling over each other to take credit for a federal buyout of the state's struggling tobacco farmers. But there is an area where Burr stands out: his contempt for the environment. The League of Conservation Voters has named Burr one of its "Dirty Dozen" (along with fellow freshmen senators-elect John Thune and Mel Martinez). The particulars: he supported President Bush on an energy bill provision protecting manufacturers of the gasoline additive MTBE from lawsuits over groundwater contamination; he voted six times against a ban on drilling for oil off North Carolina's Outer Banks; and he has opposed efforts to reduce mercury contamination and greenhouse-gas emissions.

"He has one of the worst environmental records on clean air and clean water in the U.S. Congress," says Mark Longabaugh, the league's political director. "That's one. Two, throughout his entire career he has shown a bias toward special interests, oil and gas or other polluters."

Sources: the Raleigh News & Observer, October 27, 2004; the Durham Independent Weekly, July 7, 2004; the Washington Post, March 11, 2003; Grist magazine, October 26, 2004; National Review Online, September 22, 2004.

5) John Thune: A simple-minded campaign of flag-waving and heterosexuality

Of all the freshmen Republican senators-elect, there is one celebrity – John Thune, of South Dakota, who knocked off Senate minority leader Tom Daschle. But though Thune, a former congressman, is an ultraconservative with ties to the religious right, he doesn't stand out for any particular policy outrage. Rather, Thune is a master of the sort of political cheap shot that excites the imaginations of those who like their symbolism both simple and stupid.

Take, for instance, a debate between Thune and Daschle on NBC's Meet the Press. Thune was agitated over something Daschle had said in March 2003, just before the war in Iraq began – that is, that "this president failed so miserably at diplomacy that we're now forced to war." Never mind that a) Daschle was speaking the truth, b) he had voted in favor of the war resolution and later backed the $87 billion in reconstruction money for Iraq and Afghanistan, and c) he was a veteran and Thune was not. Thune took the opportunity to accuse Daschle of something close to treason, saying, "What it does is emboldens our enemies and undermines the morale of our troops."

Or take a proposed constitutional amendment against flag-burning – a cause that you might have thought had gone out of style with George H.W. Bush way back in the 1980s. Not, apparently, in South Dakota. "Unfortunately, Senator Daschle has consistently voted against this amendment. My record on this is very clear," Thune said at an event in Rapid City featuring some three dozen veterans, the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, and the singing of "The Star-Spangled Banner." Don't you wish you'd been there?

Or, finally, take a radio ad that the Thune campaign broadcast this past summer that attempted to lump together Washington, Massachusetts, gay marriage, and Daschle in one unsavory stew. "The institution of marriage is under fire from extremist groups in Washington, politicians, even judges who have made it clear that they are willing to run over any state law defining marriage," Thune intoned. "They have done it in Massachusetts, and they can do it here."

This is just ugly, nasty stuff. The intellectual dishonesty of it all is matched only by its sheer brazenness. By appealing to voters' fears and by demonizing anyone who would get in his way, Thune, unfortunately, demonstrated that he is well-qualified to join the Republican majority.

Sources: the Washington Post, September 20, 2004; the Rapid City Journal, South Dakota, September 22, 2004; Salon, September 30, 2004; the Advocate, July 16, 2004.

Progressive Democrats were out in full force on Thursday afternoon – the final day of the Democratic National Convention – at their own "shadow" convention, held across the Charles River, at the Royal Sonesta Hotel, in Cambridge. The three-day-long rallying effort, dubbed "Take Back America," had made headlines on Tuesday, when more than 1000 people turned out for pep speeches delivered by the two rock stars of the left wing of the party – former Vermont Governor Howard Dean and "Fahrenheit 9/11" filmmaker Michael Moore.

On Thursday, by contrast, the scene was far more subdued. The afternoon session, "Organizing to Take Back America," offered up the nuts-and-bolts of good grassroots action to several hundred loyal progressives. Leaders of the well-heeled political groups registering and mobilizing voters nationwide – from America Coming Together to the Campaign for America's Future (which sponsored the shadow convention) – expounded on the secrets to their voter-mobilization strategies, as well as a few election predictions for the 2004 presidential race. The general consensus among them? Never before has there been a more cohesive, more effective get-out-the-vote effort from the left. Indeed, they optimistically conclude that progressives (some 20 million Americans) represent the constituency that will lead the John Kerry and the Democratic Party to victory.

But the most interesting (and unusual) part of the panel came with the appearance of the Reverend Jesse Jackson, a veteran of the progressive movement. I had attended the session specifically to hear Jackson. But when he ascended the podium, I had a hard time discerning his message. He gave a rambling, off-the-cuff speech that covered such disparate topics as the Iraq war, the disenfranchisement of black voters in Florida in the 2000 elections, the ongoing civil-rights struggle, and the use of "liberal" as a dirty word. Suffice it to say, Jackson's speech lacked any real focus and no connective tissue. But he did manage to spit out a fair share of juicy sound bites. Some of them included:

o "There cannot be a monochromatic progressive movement in this country."

o Progressives are "heavy in the thought department, but have no power shaft. To get from here to California is hard to do without an airplane."

o "In an environment of stolen and frozen votes [a reference to Florida in 2000], the Bush administration has now suggested the idea of suspending the elections. What if they find bin Laden suddenly on October 31. Or on Halloween. Will they say we need to suspend the elections? You might say to me, 'That's absurd.' But is it? ...I'd say we're operating under a real cloud over the integrity of our voting ability."

o "We can win this election and still lose. If our votes count, we can vote in a civilized government. If they don't, we can't."

o "When Kerry wins, the anti-war movement will get bigger by the day."

o "The power we seek doesn't come from the top down. It comes from the bottom up, from people like you.... The people's movement made Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, and Clinton make the right choices."

o "I want the Democrats to get some definition of who they are. I'm not going to run away from being called a liberal. America is a liberal idea! America is a liberal idea! America is a liberal idea!"

Whatever Jackson said, he fired up the progressives in the audience, all of whom responded with a rousing standing ovation. Now, apparently, they're ready to go back to work.

Ladies and gentlemen, please remove your shoes for inspection." The command booms out over the thousands of people queued up on Causeway Street, waiting to enter the FleetCenter for the first session of the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

"Ladies and gentlemen, please be prepared to present your dental records."

Vermin Supreme, long-time political-protest gadfly, pauses for a moment, then brings the bullhorn back to his lips.

"Please be prepared for a full-body-cavity rectal search. Remember, it is in the name of national security, and is part of your Patriot Act."

"Oh my God!" squeals a pleasingly pump young woman in a lavender pantsuit, as dawn – finally – breaks over Marblehead. "And I'm ready to take off my shoes!"

It was the intent of the convention organizers to keep Vermin, with his ratty fake-ocelot fur hood and natty red, white, and blue-sequined vest, firmly caged. And the cage they constructed for that purpose is a fine one, indeed. Cement barriers, eight-foot-tall chain-link fencing, hardware cloth, heavy black monkey netting, and razor wire are all contrived to keep demonstrators "from throwing things" at conventioneers, according to one published report. Delegates leaving the buses and walking into the FleetCenter can hear, but only dimly see, the shadowy figures inside the Cage.

However, convention planners failed to take a few things into account. The exit from the protest-zone Cage opens on to Canal Street, where access is not restricted. And instead of arriving at the FleetCenter on shuttle buses that would have whisked them by the back of the Cage to the main entrance of the FleetCenter, thousands of convention delegates and guests decide to take their own transportation and walk up Causeway Street. The Causeway Street entrance to the FleetCenter was designed as a secondary entrance, and only one person can enter at a time. The line backs up for blocks. So on Monday night, the protesters seize the opportunity to engage the delegates directly and head out the back gate of their Cage for Causeway Street. (Indeed, shortly after seven, the Cage is largely empty, occupied primarily by tourists having their pictures taken with the Is this what democracy looks like? signs pinned to the wire.)

At first, the protesters wait until the attendees pass through the gate and into their own enclosure – not too different from the first layer of the Cage – to engage them. A man on the other side of the enclosure wears a press pass identifying him as Robert Gurley, of Indyradio in Santa Cruz. He yells at those entering the FleetCenter: "Quit posing and stand up for something. Stand up!" Sometimes a protester can be defined simply as someone who has an opinion and no convention credential. "This is how we get to talk to you," he says, his fingers wrapped through the mesh.

Robert O'Brien, a Dean alternate from Maine who is attending his third convention, stops and talks with Gurley. Afterward he explains, "I just feel that these are people who are passionate. They're behind a fence." But their sense of disproportion concerns O'Brien. "What I am worried about is we're talking about fixing the kitchen when the freaking roof's on fire. We've got to make sure that George Bush doesn't have the chance to appoint three Supreme Court justices."

As time passes, and the few cops on hand do nothing, the protesters grow bolder, come closer. They jam the intersection of Canal and Causeway, spilling for several blocks down Causeway.

Most heckles are generic, although a Free DC protester with a tricorn hat and roller blades targets Washington, DC, mayor Tony Williams for special abuse. Two women dance as they hand out Planned Parenthood's STAND UP FOR CHOICE stickers. The supporters of Lyndon LaRouche, now specializing in streetside a cappella music, sing the Freedom Riders' anthem "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody (Turn Me Round)." Several movement veterans burst into laughter. "Not bad, not bad at all," says one as he holds up his credential for inspection.

An agitated young Kerry supporter walks up and down, armed with a campaign sign and a lot of frustration. "The hard left continues to be hostile to me," he complains. "Think about it. The people on the far left do not understand that if we do not unite together it will be a hard fight." A Free DC supporter bangs a drum in his ear. Chain-smoking National Lawyers Guild observers in fluorescent-green T-shirts watch quietly. Another young man, demonstrating there is an imperceptible line between half drunk and half-wit, keeps screaming "V-Tek for president! He beat A-Rod!" "Enough already," snaps the cop, in one of the evening's few displays of official temper.

Finally, a few minutes after nine, police reinforcements show up with barricades. It's growing dark, and some of convention-goers still in the creeping line are growing a bit nervous. A cop asks Vermin to step back behind the barricade. Vermin, in a routine he and the cop know well, asks what happens if he doesn't. The cop cheerfully explains that he will have to call a wagon and have him arrested. That's okay by Vermin; he just wants to make sure the cop is playing by the rules. He steps behind the barricade, and shortly thereafter decides to call it a night.

Professor Don Mitchell of Syracuse University's Maxwell School calls the growing trend of creating demonstration zones at political events the "ghettoization" of protest. Indeed, where once protesters were rigidly segregated only at major events and where not too many years before that, they were barely segregated at all, the confinement of protesters has now become commonplace. It is now routine at Bush-administration political events for police and Secret Service agents to create special protest areas, typically located beyond viewing distance from the actual event. The policy applies only to protesters with dissenting views. Recently, the ACLU sued the Secret Service over allegations that anti-Bush protesters were removed from locations where the president would be speaking while Bush supporters were allowed to remain. That case was dismissed after the Secret Service, which never admitted to the segregation policy in the first place, said it would not differentiate in the future.

During convention week, however, it's hard to avoid the impression that free speech is breaking out all over. Despite Democratic organizers' best-laid plans, these protesters managed to get closer to convention attendees than had any protester in recent memory. Indeed, during Teresa Heinz Kerry's speech at the FleetCenter Tuesday night, Medea Benjamin of Code Pink, a women's peace group whose members are easily identified by the fact that they wear bright-pink slips with the slogan PINK SLIP BUSH stamped on them, wangled a press pass to get onto the convention floor. She held aloft a US OUT OF IRAQ sign, but was immediately surrounded by delegates from Colorado who tried to hide the anti-war slogan from view. As she was jostled by Democrats from the Rocky Mountain State, a Dennis Kucinich delegate from Alaska came to her rescue ("We're supposed to be better than the Republicans," he explained) before she was whisked out of the convention hall (shouting "US out of Iraq" as she went) by convention security officers and Secret Service agents.

For the most part, nothing was thrown, and nobody got hurt – even if a few delegates did take off their shoes. Meanwhile, members of the Young Republican Executive Committee dress up in rubber sandals and stomp around Faneuil Hall. Falun Gong has taken over Copley Square. And just across from Boston Common, Libertarian Ian Scott, 26, of Mission Hill, wears a hand-lettered sandwich board that says CONSERVATIVES ORGANIZED TO CRUSH KERRY.

"I just wanted a good reason to walk around with a sign that said 'cock,'" he explains cheerfully. Scott is part of the Free State Project, which is trying to get 20,000 people to move to New Hampshire and take over elected politics. Why New Hampshire? "We had a vote, and the second-place winner was Wyoming."

"Essentially, in layman's terms, we're going up there and vote each other into office," Scott says. "It's not essentially a takeover per se," he adds reassuringly.

Inside the convention hall, interested delegates can view a pictorial history of their nominee's commitment to civil disobedience. When the Vietnam Veterans Against the War marched on Washington, in April 1971, Richard Nixon locked them out of Arlington Cemetery. So they took their "military incursion into the country of Congress" to the Capitol, occupied the steps of the Supreme Court, and camped on the Washington Mall. When the Nixon administration tried to evict them, the federal court ruled they could stay on the Mall, exercising their right to free speech, as long as they stayed awake. The vets voted, and John Kerry announced their decision to ignore the order and sleep. The DC police declined to arrest the dozing vets.

Under the Patriot Act, of course, Nixon would have no need to seek court intervention, and the DC police would not have to commit an act of civil disobedience. Today, the vets could be simply rounded up and incarcerated indefinitely. It is, after all, a Time of War.

The feel of protest and the spirit of rebellion infuse DNC-related events, even when there's, well, no protest to be found. At Howard Dean's and the Campaign for America's "Take Back America" conference, the fire marshal has locked things down. No one is allowed to go in; outside, an overflow crowd sits on the grass, as scheduled speakers come out on the patio to reprise their talks for the crowd. They are hoping to catch a glimpse of Michael Moore, but the filmmaker's security team isn't sure they want to let him out in the open air. Too easy to target.

Meanwhile, in the lobby, the air is confident. "We're going to win the election, and we're going to push John Kerry," to make good on his health-care promises, says Congressman Jim McDermott, the Shelby Foote of Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. As he waits for a wink from the fire marshal, which will allow him upstairs, the congressman is optimistic about the Democrats' chances of recapturing the Senate, and maybe even the House. "The House is on a knife edge," he says. "Some of these races are going to be won by 100 votes." The Republicans do not have a clue, he says, because they do not poll the right people. "They poll perfect voters, and these kids are not perfect voters. Kids don't vote in three out of the last four elections." However, it is these kids – those engaging in protest at the DNC, those who backed Dean, and those who worship Moore – who will provide the 100-vote margins in 2004.

Over at the Hip-Hop Summit at Roxbury Community College, Leonard C. Alkins, president of the Boston chapter of the NAACP, is thinking about those kids and strategizing for the future. Hundreds of people have turned out for this event, and each one has been asked to fill out a voter-registration card. If they are too young to vote, their names are entered into a database for future follow-up. Inside the Reggie Lewis Track and Field House, Boston election commissioner Michael Chinetti demonstrates the new optical-scanning voting machines, and shows how they create a paper trail. "Anyone who is partisan in any fashion, we are asking them to step back," says Alkins. "This is for our young people, so they think they are not being used."

Outside the summit, a PETA carrot prances, and the LaRouche volunteers, tired of being under the gaze of Nation of Islam security, break for a pizza. Across the street, Mike Yossarian – "I've heard all the jokes" – has set up shop for Volunteers for Nader. Along with Fraeda Scholz and a woman who calls herself simply Emmia, he awaits the return of Nader ballot petitions, for which they are paid per signature. They have been traveling the country in a Honda Accord station wagon for months now. For these former Kucinich supporters, war is the number-one issue. Backing Kerry simply isn't an option, says Scholz. "Why do I have to compromise everything I believe in and he doesn't have to compromise anything?"

There has been a lot of talk during this convention about free speech and civil rights. But in a world where delegates readily take off their shoes for Vermin Supreme, and attendees at a John Edwards party at the Rack happily hand over their IDs for scanning through a "visitor management system" with recorded name, date of birth, and gender checked against the invite database, it seems that many people have adjusted too easily to the creeping loss of civil liberties. And it's much harder to regain liberties lost than it is to hold hard to them in the first place.

Over at St. Paul's Cathedral, at a forum on the Patriot Act, Dennis Kucinich is calling John Kerry the "kind of politician that remembers where America came from."

"We didn't flee an empire to become an empire," Kucinich says. "We have to continue to challenge the status quo.

"We have to rage against the dying of the light," Kucinich cries, and the house roars.

But perhaps there is an English major or two in the audience who aches to put that line in context. It is not a warrior's call. Rather, inspired by what he witnessed at his father's deathbed, Welsh poet Dylan Thomas wrote those lines about surrender to the inevitable. "Old age should burn and rave at close of day," Thomas wrote, and one hopes Kucinich's use of the line is not prescient: "Though wise men at their end know dark is right,/Because their words had forked no lightning they/Do not go gentle into that good night."

Anyone looking for an escape from the issues of the day in the movie theaters may be out of luck. Shun Fahrenheit 9/11 or any of its coterie of left-leaning documentaries for the cheap laughs of Anchorman and you get an indictment of the lackadaisical news media. The special effects of Spider-Man 2 barely conceal its anxiety about the unholy collusion between science and corporate power. And as much as you might try to forget, the slapdash action of The Bourne Supremacy (and the upcoming The Manchurian Candidate remake) will remind you of those lines blacked out of the official history of the recent past.

Bourne, though, might be the most escapist of the lot. Which is odd, given that its predecessor, The Bourne Identity, drew more from the politically and existentially charged secret-agent tradition of The Third Man than from the fantasy fulfillments of James Bond. Not to mention that director Peter Greengrass's previous film, Bloody Sunday, outraged Tories with its depiction of British brutality in Northern Ireland, or that star Matt Damon is a pal of Howard Zinn.

Nonetheless, Bourne's prime directive is to escape. First from the bloated Robert Ludlum novel, to which it fortunately bears no resemblance. Then from any distracting topical relevance or entangling human relationships. After that, escaping from the agents of the secret and amoral organizations that rule the world is a snap. One moment, Jason Bourne (Damon) is pondering his fate in idyllic Goa, a man tormented by nightmares and comforted by a good woman (Franka Potente, returning as Marie). The next, he's in the first of many car chases, the prey of a sniper whose shot misses its target but triggers the terminator. Bourne goes into the familiar routine of ransacking the man's lodgings for caches of handguns, cash, and fake passports, and the chase, basically a matter of physics at this point, begins.

Too bad about the relationships, though. As in life, you don't realize how important they are till they're gone. In the first film, devoid of memory and identity but possessed of invincible killer instincts, Bourne was appealing in his emotional tabula rasa, his initially feral attachment to Potente's frazzled Marie. He even bonded with the killers out to get him. Not so this time. The closest he gets to a potentially sympathetic person is gazing through the lens of a sniper scope or exchanging clipped threats on a cell phone. It's creepy, perhaps, but wasteful of the talents of Joan Allen as Pamela Landy, a CIA chief who tries to out-macho the boys by pushing a risky operation in Berlin investigating a Russian oil oligarch involved with missing CIA money (how hot a political button is that?). An assassin murders two of the agents, and a fingerprint links the killer to the nefarious Jason Bourne, the missing and presumed dead super hitman for the now defunct, renegade "Treadstone" project. But Landy is no shrinking violet; she gathers together the sputtering, mostly male, agency crew and heads for Berlin to track down Bourne.

"Berlin, Germany," that is, as a subtitle makes clear for those who thought this might be taking place in New Hampshire. The film also takes place in "Naples, Italy," "Paris, France," "Amsterdam, Holland," and other locations here more reminiscent of an airport gift shop than of an atmospheric and savvy thriller. I would have expected more from Greengrass, whose pseudo-verite Bloody Sunday captured 1972 Belfast on the eve of the Troubles with almost unbearable authenticity. All that remains of the sensibility of that film is the director's penchant for hand-held close-ups and quick cutting, which is a shame because one of the greatest treats of this film (and the first) is watching the wit and precision with which Bourne demolishes his adversaries, the same kind of kinetic magic that graces silent comedies and kung fu movies. And since this is nominally a film about memory and identity, jagged flashbacks interrupt Bourne's programmed rampage.

To its credit, Supremacy passes on the glib vigilante scenario and aspires, fitfully, to something more ambitious and ambiguous, something involving conscience, responsibility, and humility. Had it remained true to that impulse, it might have achieved more than mere escapism. Unfortunately, as cynical old agency crony Ward Abbott (Brian Cox, one of the best things in the movie) might say, "You're walking in a deep puddle of shit, and you're wearing the wrong shoes."

For a candidate who failed to win a single presidential primary, Dennis Kucinich has an impressively healthy sense of his own importance. Last month, Kucinich – the only Democrat other than John Kerry still actively running – opened his Democratic National Convention headquarters in a cramped fourth-floor office on Temple Place, just off Boston Common. Addressing his assembled supporters by speakerphone from Oregon, where he was campaigning in the run-up to the May 18 primary, the Ohio congressman promised to push the party to the left when the convention opens in July.

"We'll have dozens of delegates inside the convention, but we'll have thousands of people in the streets of Boston," Kucinich declared. "We can put pressure on the party to take the right positions on civil liberties, health care, Iraq, and the Patriot Act. We're going to be the conscience of the party. And that will help the Democrats win."

Strong words, coming from someone who's heading into the convention with 68 of the party's 4300-some delegates. When the battle for the Democratic nomination was still going strong and televised debates gave Kucinich regular access to a national audience, few voters saw his agenda – which includes immediate American withdrawal from Iraq and NAFTA, and the establishment of a cabinet-level Department of Peace – as viable. There's no reason that should change during a convention focused on selling John Kerry as an electable centrist.

But Kucinich's self-assurance is equaled – and perhaps enabled – by his distinct lack of pragmatism. In a recent phone interview, I asked Kucinich if any Democratic leaders had urged him to quit campaigning. He answered with a loud guffaw and a prickly, pedantic rejoinder that spoke volumes about how and why he persists. "Never," Kucinich said after he finished laughing. "I mean, not at all. I don't even think in those terms. If you don't think in those terms, somehow it just doesn't happen to you." After a pause, he continued: "I want you to think about that now. I don't live in a world like that. Maybe other people do."

It was clear early in the Democratic-primary campaign that Kucinich faced long odds. Some of his problems were substantive: when Howard Dean seized the anti-war mantle, Kucinich – who co-chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus and led opposition to the Iraq-war resolution in the House – saw his most appealing stand co-opted by a competitor. Low poll numbers, small fundraising totals, and a string of poor finishes didn't help his cause, either. Other problems, however superficial in nature, were no less damaging. Kucinich is a small man with lank, unkempt hair and large ears; rather than fitting the standard image of a presidential candidate, he looks like a dour elf – one whose manner is often brittle and who, for good measure, just happens to be a vegan.

Still, Kucinich persevered. And though few pundits or voters ever saw him as a serious contender, his doggedness earned the grudging respect of some once-skeptical observers. Kucinich's shining moment came in a University of New Hampshire debate last December, when he scolded moderator Ted Koppel for his fixation on inside-baseball questions and was cheered by a grateful audience. The relentlessly idealistic congressman also engaged in some old-fashioned horse-trading in the Iowa caucuses, engineering a vote swap with North Carolina senator John Edwards that added intrigue to the event and may have helped Edwards, who finished second, increase his margin over the third-place Dean. And in the "Who Wants To Be a First Lady" contest sponsored by PoliticsNH.com, Kucinich signaled a William Shatner-esque willingness to refashion himself as an ironic pop icon.

Kucinich wasn't the only long-shot candidate in the Democratic field, which included the Reverend Al Sharpton and former ambassador Carol Moseley Braun. But he never seemed to realize that he almost certainly wouldn't be the nominee. Quite the contrary – on the day of the Iowa caucuses, Kucinich pondered a scenario in which he would emerge from a deadlocked convention as the Democratic Party's nominee, telling the Associated Press: "It is inevitable, really." As other, more viable candidates bowed out, Kucinich stuck around, only conceding after Super Tuesday that he would not, in fact, become president.

The cynical explanation for Kucinich's persistence is that he came to crave the media spotlight and the adulation showered on him by die-hard supporters, and merely said what was necessary to justify his continued presence in the race. "This is a guy who would eat publicity morning, noon, and night," says University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato. "I like to call him the House equivalent of John McCain. He can't get enough press or enough TV time."

Even some of Kucinich's ideological compatriots were annoyed by his apparent obliviousness. "The thing that bothered me about Dennis was that he would never admit the unreality of what he was doing," says former Nation editor Micah Sifry. "Had he done that, he would have been more real right away – 'You know what, folks, this is a long-shot bid. I know how hard this may be, and we may not get there.' But he was always saying he was going all the way, that he was going to be the next nominee. And it made a lot of people say, 'This guy is nuts.'"

But neither Sabato nor Sifry takes into account Kucinich's zealous faith in the power of positive thinking. For Kucinich – who surmounted occasional homelessness as a child to become mayor of Cleveland at the age of 31 – conceptual frameworks rather than practical considerations dictate what can and can't happen. The congressman cites the Romantic poets as major personal influences. He keeps an anthology of Percy Bysshe Shelley's work – open to Prometheus Unbound – on the desk of his Capitol Hill office, and often closes stump speeches with a line from Tennyson's "Ulysses": "Come, my friends,/ 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world." In addition, Kucinich is close to Marianne Williamson, a prolific New Age author whose organization, the Global Renaissance Alliance, advocates the creation of a Department of Peace.

(The Global Renaissance Alliance also champions the use of "peace circles," in which participants use prayer, silent meditation, and visualization exercises to create a "grid of mystical power that will shield the world from its own insanity, and move through the fear to the love." The group's former peace-circles coordinator served as California coordinator for the Kucinich campaign and later as an assistant to Kucinich's national-campaign manager.)

These views haven't hurt Kucinich in his congressional district, which includes Cleveland's liberal West Side: in 2002, he was re-elected with 74 percent of the vote, and tallied 85 percent in this spring's Democratic congressional primary. But for most of the nation's voters, this New Age tinge made it easy to dismiss him as a marginal eccentric. Yet Kucinich insists he never finds it frustrating or disheartening to advocate views that don't jibe with the cultural mainstream. "You just have to keep your heart open," he says. "And as long as you do that, anything can happen. Success always comes to those who have the ability to envision different ways of looking at things." Before Kerry gained a mathematical lock on the nomination, Kucinich's continued optimism had a neat and unassailable internal logic: he could still become president for the simple reason that he still believed it was possible.

Although Kucinich admits he won't be the Democratic nominee, he now insists that he can become the Democratic Party's ideological architect – an equally quixotic ambition. How, exactly, does he intend to do this? Partly through a Web-based petition drive aimed at shaping the Democratic platform to suit his priorities: immediate transfer of US military authority in Iraq to UN forces; universal health care; withdrawal from NAFTA and the World Trade Organization; repeal of the Patriot Act; creation of a US Department of Peace; and comprehensive affirmation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights. (Kucinich, who spoke at last weekend's Boston Gay Pride celebration, has been a consistently vocal supporter of full-marriage rights for gays and lesbians.)

His campaign is also planning daily workshops on progressive issues during the July national convention, as well as evening "street actions" and an anti-war candlelight vigil on the closing night of the proceedings. Asked how observers will be able to gauge whether he succeeds, Kucinich answers – true to form – in doubt-free terms: "When the delegates are canvassed, and it's declared that they stand for getting out of Iraq. For ending the Patriot Act. For health care for all Americans. For fair trade."

Yet again, the jaded might say that Kucinich is milking his Warholian 15 minutes a bit too long. His chances of shaping the party's platform aren't much better than his chances of being elected president were. The vast majority of delegates at the FleetCenter will have one priority – helping John Kerry beat George W. Bush – and while some of Kucinich's positions may exercise considerable appeal, it's a safe bet that this year's Democratic platform will be the one Kerry's camp deems most likely to serve that goal.

If Kucinich had more delegates, something unexpected and dramatic might happen. But even some Kucinich boosters concede their candidate probably lacks the leverage to have much effect. "I hope he raises a fuss, because after all, he represents a very large part of the Democratic Party, which is not represented by John Kerry," says Howard Zinn, who belongs to a long list of prominent left-leaning Kucinich endorsers. "But how he can actually make that representation practical and meaningful at the convention.... Can he have an effect on the platform? I don't know. These conventions are controlled by the dominant force in the party, and Kerry is the dominant force."

Of course, Kucinich himself is more sanguine. As he sees it, a Kucinich-engineered makeover of the Democratic Party is not only possible, but has the potential to spur a revolution in American government. "If our party took a clear and strong stand to support universal, single-payer, not-for-profit health care, I think you'd have people lining up on Election Day to vote Democrat," he says. "It's both pragmatic and principled to do that. The question is, will we? I think the Democrats are ready for a real shift. And I think a Democratic sweep" – taking control of the House, the Senate, and the White House – "could be generated out of this convention if it's done right. It's the message that I have been carrying, right from the beginning, that may prove to be the winning combination for the Democrats."

In a statement e-mailed to the Phoenix, Democratic National Convention Committee, chair Alice Huffman praised Kucinich and welcomed his participation in the convention. But while Kucinich dreams of a sort of Gingrichian role, anything beyond a token convention appearance could make him the Democrats' version of Pat Buchanan, who alienated moderate voters at the 1992 Republican Convention by showcasing the GOP's most extreme views. Chances are slim that convention organizers will work to showcase Kucinich next month.

There is one way he might actually manage to affect the 2004 election, however: by convincing potential supporters of independent candidate Ralph Nader to vote Democratic. Last year, Nader urged voters to support Kucinich in the Democratic primaries, and in October 2003 the two headlined a rally in Washington, DC, sponsored by Democracy Rising, Nader's progressive organization. Earlier this month, however, Kucinich said he couldn't remember the last time he and Nader talked. And whatever ideological affinity the two men may share, it seems clear Kucinich sees his role – at least in part – as heading off the challenge Nader poses on the left. "There has to be a place inside the Democratic Party for people who are standing strong for peace, for civil liberties, for health care, for fair trade," he says. "And as long as there are spokespersons inside the party who'll reach out and keep trying to attract people in, as long as we continue to work with the party to try to shape its direction, there's always a chance that we can bring people in to support the Democrats."

If the course of the campaign had unfolded differently – if, say, Dean had decided to remain in Montpelier rather than seeking higher office – might Kucinich have parlayed his anti-war stance into a bigger role, however briefly? It's impossible to say. But it's unlikely Kucinich, even without Dean in the field, could ever have served as this year's Eugene McCarthy, whose near-miss 1968 presidential-nomination bid delivered a stinging anti-war rebuke to incumbent Lyndon Johnson and rocked the Democratic Party. As already noted, Kucinich's look and often testy manner pose serious liabilities. (When I asked him if he might create a new progressive organization, à la Howard Dean, Kucinich offered the following comeback, capped by a derisive snort: "There's no question that I intend to create a new progressive organization. It's called the Democratic Party.")

He also lacks the centrist trappings that helped Dean mitigate his anti-war stance. Instead, his eager embrace of the Democratic Party's far-left elements, as well as his backing from fringe groups like the Natural Law Party, severely circumscribes his appeal. "In many ways, Dennis is an admirable and valiant fellow, and his politics are not the politics of convenience," says Doug Ireland, a veteran left-leaning political journalist. "He is a genuine left populist. But if you're going to run a message campaign, I think he could have had a much more effective strategy for collaring broad swaths of the Democratic electorate. I think Dennis should have spent a lot more time talking to working-class Democrats and a lot less time talking to New Age festivals and vegetarian tofu suppers."

Whatever opportunities Kucinich may have missed, it's almost certain he'll be an obscure footnote when the history of the 2004 campaign is written, a long-forgotten name occasionally dropped by political junkies to showcase their mastery of presidential arcana. "It's irrelevant, it's over, he did miserably," Sabato says. "What else can you say?" Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank – a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus – is gentler, but no less pessimistic about Kucinich's chances of influencing either the convention or the general-election campaign. "The problem Dennis runs into isn't just that he didn't get delegates, but that he didn't get a lot of votes," Frank says. "Jesse Jackson made his candidacy work in 1984 and 1988 in the primaries, and I think Jackson did have an impact on the party, in terms of making sure that the Democrats stayed with affirmative action. In Dennis's case, the problem is that he just didn't do well enough in the primaries to get a lot of clout."

Frank's Massachusetts colleague Mike Capuano, also a Progressive Caucus member, suggests that's a good thing. "I like and respect Dennis's enthusiasm," Capuano says. "But we have a candidate. And anyone who cannot see that John Kerry's victory this fall would better serve the progressive agenda than anything else we can do between now and November, I would strongly disagree with. That's exactly why we lost the White House so many times in the last 30 years."

And after the election? Kucinich supporters hope he'll labor for years to energize the Democrats' left wing. "He's fairly young, and the Democratic Party is going to be badly in need of a gadfly for some time to come," Zinn says. "Just the very fact that John Kerry is the Democratic candidate shows that, and the power of the Democratic Leadership Council within the party. There'll be a great need for somebody like him, and I think he's likely to play that kind of role for a number of years, until the Democratic Party begins to move out of its lethargy."

But Kucinich's optimism about transforming the party may gradually be eroded by a general lack of interest in his agenda among Democratic politicians and voters. Time will tell whether he can reconcile the probable disconnect between his lofty expectations and what he's actually able to accomplish.

Not surprisingly, however, Kucinich is bullish about his legacy. Asked what historians will say about him in 50 years, he offers the following: "They'll say, 'How does the guy keep going?'" In 100 years? "They'll say, 'He's slowing down.'" With any other politician, it would be easy to dismiss these comments as hokey jokes. The perplexing thing about Kucinich is that you can't be sure he's kidding.

In 1993, with the first Iraq War supposedly put behind us, the subject of D.A. Pennebaker & Chris Hegedus's The War Room was spin. With devilish ingenuity, James Carville and George Stephanopoulos maneuvered images and sound bites in the battle between Bill Clinton and the elder George Bush for the presidency. The combat was rhetorical, the carnage abstract, the battleground political.

Eleven years later, Jehane Noujaim, a protégée of Hegedus and Pennebaker (they produced her first film, Startup.com, a look at that distant bubble, the dot-com boom), ponders how spin operates in a war that is as painfully literal as the president waging it. In Control Room, she investigates the news station that is "the most controversial . . . in the Arab world." Banned by several Arab governments because of its criticism of their regimes, denounced by the Bush administration as a "mouthpiece for Osama bin Laden," it is also, of course, the most popular in the region, with 40 million viewers. It is how Arabs see the world.

Is it any more or less distorted than our own network news? And why should we believe this movie? Any film looking at the mechanics of spin, the nature of truth and objectivity, calls into question its own veracity. Some of the same criticisms leveled at both Al-Jazeera and Centcom (the US military's central command in the Middle East, also the central conduit for information about the war for all networks) can be leveled at Control Room. It has an agenda, it lacks context, and it can supersede logic and clarity with incendiary, sometimes gratuitous images. And it is propaganda. What it promotes, however, isn't Al-Jazeera but the value of truth and information. It indirectly denounces abuses of distortion and manipulation. And rather than cajoling audiences with fear and prejudice, it provokes them into reflection and debate.

Not always successfully. One of the biggest problems with the film is its lack of clarity, its failure to answer the basic questions of journalism. It starts out with one subtitled date: "March, 2003" After that, you're pretty much on your own. Fortunately, the "who" is one of Control Room's strengths. If there are obvious villains, there are also sympathetic characters with depth and complexity, such as Lieutenant Josh Rushing ("If I were a woman" an Arab journalist gushes, "I would marry you!"), a blue-eyed, John Agar type of Marine working as a press officer. His ideas -- that the war is being fought to free Iraq and to eliminate an immediate threat to the world; that his role is to deliver the truth without distortion -- are genuine. And contradictory, as he freely admits in moments of reflection. He recognizes that he has trouble seeing things from the Arab point of view. When Al-Jazeera outrages the coalition by showing footage of dead Americans and terrified POWs, Rushing muses on how when he saw the images he felt nauseated and enraged. But when he saw similar images of dead Iraqis, he had no such feelings. "That upset me profoundly," he says.

He has a job to do, however; he is, like so many others in this film, just following orders. One of his duties is to wrangle with the likes of Hassan Ibrahim, a large, jolly Al-Jazeera journalist whose deep suspicion of US motives is balanced by his "absolute faith in the American Constitution and the American people." Another shrewd Al-Jazeera personality is Samir Khader, a senior producer who states early on in the film that any commander who doesn't put the media and propaganda at the top of his agenda is a poor military planner. As a journalist, though, he has different values. When an assistant hooks him up with an American "political analyst" who recites an anti-Bush screed, Khader berates the subordinate and tells him they're looking for someone who's balanced. At another point, exhausted after a 19-hour day, he says that he'd gladly work for Fox News and trade "the Arab nightmare for the American Dream."

The discussions between these opponents are civil, even cordial. On the battlefield, it's a different story. In a still unresolved episode, US forces attack the clearly demarcated Al-Jazeera office in Baghdad, killing one journalist. "We got the message," says Khader. Al-Jazeera withdraws from the front line, watching the fall of Baghdad from its offices in Doha, Qatar, 700 miles away. "With victory," Khader, concludes, "no one cares about justifications." But with the Bush administration's victory proving as dodgy as its justifications, maybe there's still a chance for truth to prevail.

Peter Keough is a film critic for the Boston Phoenix.

Seven weeks ago, in a packed Philadelphia courtroom, protesters making plans for this year�s Democratic and Republican National Conventions won a major battle. You could almost hear the collective sigh of relief when Judge William Mazzola found Providence activist Camilo Viveiros and two co-defendants not guilty of charges that they assaulted Philadelphia police chief John Timoney during the August 2000 Republican National Convention. The "Timoney Three" were the last of 420 arrested demonstrators, including 43 people charged with felonies, to go on trial. They were also the last to prove the "R2K" prosecutions a spectacular failure: not a single defendant was sentenced to jail time, and most had their cases dismissed or reduced to misdemeanors.

But those who think this means activists won the war against police intimidation at the upcoming conventions in Boston and New York should think again. While the lack of convictions may have embarrassed a few Philadelphia prosecutors and police, says R2K Legal Collective spokesperson Kris Hermes, ultimately they were "able to chill dissent, to silence dissent." Not only were Timoney�s repressive tactics widely seen as a response to the successful 1999 World Trade Organization demonstration in Seattle; after Philadelphia they were employed elsewhere, most notably in November 2003 at the Free Trade Area of the Americas meeting in Miami, where Timoney is now police chief. And now, as thousands of New Englanders prepare to demonstrate at the Democratic and Republican National Conventions this summer, many worry that the same tactics will be used again.

Already, anti-war activists in New York City, where Republicans will renominate President George W. Bush during the last days of August, have been told they cannot hold a rally in Central Park, and their legal requests for marches have gone unanswered so far. They fear a replay of the massive February 2003 demonstration opposing the US invasion of Iraq, which, they say, was disrupted by police. In Boston, where Democrats will nominate US Senator John Kerry for president during the last week of July, no protest permits have been issued, and lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts object to a new permitting process, which they say is overly bureaucratic. They also complain that a small "protest zone" is too far away from the FleetCenter to be effective.

Four years ago, similar problems in Philadelphia and Los Angeles led the ACLU to sue police in both cities before the national political conventions began, resulting in the removal of at least some of the obstacles placed in protesters� way. City officials in New York and Boston say, however, that they will accommodate nonviolent demonstrators. "We�re not looking to discourage peaceful protest in any way," says Paul Brown, the New York Police Department�s deputy commissioner for public information. "We�re looking to accommodate it." In Boston, "Mayor [Thomas] Menino has said repeatedly, �What would a convention be without protests?�" says mayoral spokesman Seth Gitell. "That�s democracy at work."

The extent to which local officials are calling the shots remains uncertain, however. The US Secret Service, which imposes a "security zone" to protect major political figures like Bush, Kerry, and Vice-President Richard Cheney, is a shadow presence behind local police departments. The Secret Service, observes Christopher Dunn, associate director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, was "the common denominator" in alleged civil-rights violations in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Miami. In a pending lawsuit the ACLU also accuses the agency of discriminating against Presidents Bush�s critics, confining them to protest areas where the president and media will not see them.

Protesters and police frequently clash at political conventions. Four years ago, at the Democratic National Convention, Los Angeles police attacked what the ACLU of Southern California characterizes as an overwhelmingly peaceful demonstration. During the melee, the ACLU contends, police intentionally fired rubber bullets at members of the press and hit them with batons. Meanwhile, at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, police threw scores of people in jail before they even had a chance to start protesting.

And then, of course, there was the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where police denied protesters a permit to hold a march against the Vietnam War. They then attacked marchers, in what a presidential commission subsequently characterized as "a police riot." According to John McWilliams�s The 1960s Cultural Revolution (Greenwood Press, 2000), some police officers took off their badges and started chanting, "Kill, kill, kill" before wading into protesters with their clubs. McWilliams writes that almost 700 people were arrested and more than a thousand injured.

Thirty-six years later, as activists organize to demonstrate in Boston and New York, many critics charge that the United States has criminalized protest.

The post-Seattle anti-demonstrator strategy, says Hermes, involves four steps.

First, prior to demonstrations, protesters are demonized by public officials, who often emphasize the role of anarchist groups and charge that outsiders are coming to town to engage in violence and destroy property. Two months before the 2000 Republican National Convention, for example, Philadelphia mayor John Street was quoted in local newspapers as saying, "I have strong feelings about First Amendment stuff, but we have got some idiots coming here. Some will come and say whatever obnoxious things they want to say and go home. Some will come here to disrupt, to make a spectacle out of what�s going on. They are going to get a very ugly response."

In addition to discouraging public participation in the demonstrations, Hermes says, pronouncements about violence and arrests help police justify placing severe limits on demonstrations. In 2000, the ACLU was forced to go to federal court in both Los Angeles and Philadelphia to lift protest restrictions.

During the second step in discouraging protest, Hermes says, police harass and intimidate activists by engaging in surveillance, as well as illegal stops and searches. In Philadelphia in 2000, two men were seen taking photographs of weekly protest meetings at the Women�s International League for Peace and Freedom office. Initially, they denied being police, but when the Philadelphia Inquirer traced the photographers� license plates, they acknowledged that they were cops. In Los Angeles � after police harassed protesters by recording the license plates of those who entered the building, and arrested others for jaywalking � the ACLU won a temporary restraining order barring police from entering demonstrators� headquarters without a search warrant.

The third step? "Arrest masses to destabilize the protests and worry about the Constitution later," says Hermes. Perhaps the most dramatic example of this tactic was the arrest of 75 people on the second day of the 2000 Republican National Convention at what has become known as "the Puppet Warehouse." Police surrounded the warehouse as demonstrators were preparing props, all those inside were arrested, and the props were dumped into a garbage truck. High bail � reaching as much as $1 million � was imposed for those arrested by police. This kept key organizers in jail until the convention was over and forced protesters to switch from criticizing the Republican Party to fundraising and jail-solidarity work.

As a fourth and final step, Hermes says, police departments intent on undermining protest "maliciously prosecute, whether or not there�s a viable case." In Philadelphia, nearly all the cases against the convention protesters fell apart in court. During Viveiros�s trial, for example, the city pressed ahead with police chief Timoney�s story about how, after Viveiros purportedly struck him with a bicycle, he wrestled the pony-tailed activist to the street and helped arrest him.

Whether police in New York and Boston will employ all the anti-demonstrator tactics described by Hermes remains to be seen.

Discussions in Boston have centered on three issues, according to John Reinstein, legal director of the ACLU of Massachusetts: where people can march and assemble, apportioning space to demonstrators, and police practices. The ACLU criticizes a new permitting process for convention-week protests, according to the Boston Globe, as a bureaucratic maze that will discourage free speech. The city, however, defends the procedure as necessary to coordinate protests and expedite applications.

The ACLU also objects to a designated protest area near Haymarket Square, two blocks away from the FleetCenter. The area does not meet court requirements that protests be allowed "within sight and sound" of convention delegates. "The convention planners," Massachusetts ACLU executive director Carol Rose told the Boston City Council in February, "appear to have given short shrift to the First Amendment."

Boston city councilor Chuck Turner, a Green-Rainbow Party member who is helping to organize some protests says that although many activists support Kerry, they have no confidence in his ability to change the country�s direction "unless people stand up and demand change." He adds, "Both the Democrats and Republicans are supporting militaristic policies that make it impossible to deal with the needs of people."


Perhaps the most ambitious political action for the Democratic Convention is being planned by the Boston Social Forum. Organized by a variety of groups, including the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Massachusetts Jobs with Justice, Public Citizen, and several unions and peace groups, the event is modeled on the World Social Forum, an annual international gathering of activists. The group hopes that 3000 to 5000 people will attend workshops on corporate globalization, American foreign policy, health care, and other issues. Speakers advertised include black militant Angela Davis and former presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich.

The AFSC will also bring its "Eyes Wide Open" exhibit to Providence before the convention, and then to Boston for the convention itself. Designed to promote understanding of war�s meaning, the exhibit features 770 pairs of boots, representing America�s war dead in Iraq, and a wall listing the Iraqi war dead.

Bridging the month between the two conventions, the Next Step Collective is organizing a 276-mile walk from Boston to New York, by way of Providence, Hartford, and New Haven, to promote a variety of causes, including direct democracy, just and fair labor, sustainable food sources, and an end to corporate power, according to the group�s Web site (www.dnc2rnc.org). The Olympia, Washington, organization says the march will draw attention to "the two-headed Corporate Party," and encourage people along the route to work for change in their communities.

In New York, plans for demonstrations are bigger and fears of police disruption are greater than they are in Boston.

The New York ACLU and protest groups worry most about a repeat of events at the February 15, 2003, anti-war demonstration. As part of a worldwide day of protest against the impending US invasion of Iraq, anti-war groups had proposed a massive march past the United Nations, followed by a rally. The police, citing security concerns, refused to issue a march permit. The ACLU then sued, but it lost in both federal district and appellate court. Defeated, protest groups negotiated arrangements to hold a stationary rally on First Avenue.

What followed, according to an ACLU report, Arresting Protest, was a civil-liberties mess. Police blocked side-street access to the rally site, so thousands of people could not get to the demonstration. As crowds grew, people pressed against police barriers and spilled into the streets. Applying what many witnesses called excessive force, police used horses and pepper spray to get crowds out of the street. More than 350 people were arrested, the report states, most for minor offenses. "Substantial numbers" of arrestees were driven around the city for several hours, the report continues, in dark unheated vans with no food, water, or bathroom facilities. Some were interrogated later about their political and religious activities. Those who made it to the rally area found themselves penned inside metal barricades, with few exit routes.

The NYPD�s Brown agrees that the February 2003 anti-war demonstration was a mess, but he blames the march�s organizers. The event was poorly planned, he says, and organizers did not provide the promised number of marshals to direct protesters. Frustrated that they could not get to the demonstration site, people moved barriers and problems started. "We were left to clean up their organizational mess," Brown says.

Three lawsuits filed after the February 2003 anti-war protest, which challenge the use of pens and horses, and searches of protesters, will go to trial in June. "These lawsuits," says Dunn, "are aiming at problems that are likely to arise at the convention."

Defending the NYPD, Brown says, "There�s this notion the police department has a political agenda. We could care less." Speaking of the upcoming Republican National Convention, he adds, "We want this to be done safely. We�re not going to tolerate any violence." So far, Brown says, 13 anti-war, environmental, abortion-rights, and economic-justice groups have submitted 15 requests for permits for demonstrations. Groups have been urged to apply by June 15, and police will make their decisions after that. Then, if a group is dissatisfied, he says, it can appeal to federal court.

The largest demonstration at the Republican National Convention may be an anti-war protest organized by UPJ. Seeking to be "the curtain raiser" for the event, the group has applied for permits to march past Madison Square Garden on Sunday, August 29, and then hold a rally at the Great Lawn in Central Park. While police have not acted on the UPJ�s march-permit request, the Parks Department, citing probable damage to the grass, denied the group�s request to use the Great Lawn.

Noting that huge events, including a papal mass and concerts, have been held on the Great Lawn, UPJ media coordinator William Dobbs says the group may launch a public campaign to force the Parks Department to change its decision. Organizers hope the march will attract hundreds of thousands of people who opposed "the Bush war-making agenda," Dobbs says, adding, "This is the only public space that can allow people to exercise their constitutional right to assemble in Manhattan."

Critics� right to assemble on the Great Lawn already has the support of the conservative New York Post. " �Keep off the grass,�" the paper commented in a recent editorial, "appears nowhere in the First Amendment."

Plans for even more New York marches are in the works. Still We Rise, a coalition of low-income nonprofit groups, for example, has asked for a permit to march from Union Square to Times Square on Monday, August 30 to protest cuts in low-income housing vouchers and scientifically proven HIV-prevention programs, and the assault on immigrant civil rights. "We are marching," explains Jennifer Flynn, co-director of the New York Housing Network, "so the faces and voices of low-income New Yorkers are heard by this administration, and for that matter, whoever is going to challenge Bush." Not all protests will be marches. On August 31, a group named RNC Not Welcome plans to conduct "creative resistance outside the protest pens," according to its Web site (www.rncnotwelcome.org).

Whether activities outside the convention halls remain orderly will depend largely on protesters and local police. A far less visible factor is the US Secret Service, the federal agency best known for providing a safe zone around the president.

Although the Secret Service�s exact role in policing protesters is unclear, the ACLU alleges in a pending lawsuit that the agency does not play fair � or, in the words of the Massachusetts ACLU�s Reinstein, "Where you stand essentially depends on where you stand." Supporters of President Bush, the suit charges, are consistently permitted to demonstrate closer to the president than opponents are, and all demonstrators are placed farther away than neutral bystanders. By separating Bush from his critics, the suit contends, the Secret Service violates the US Constitution because he cannot hear complaints, and the media and the public are led to believe there is less dissent.

To buttress its case, the ACLU cites 15 examples of such discrimination since March 2001, elaborating on only one. Members of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a low-income advocacy group, sought to demonstrate when Bush visited the US Treasury building in Philadelphia, in July 2003, to celebrate the printing of child-tax-credit-refund checks. While ACORN was told to protest diagonally across the street from the Treasury building, the suit alleges, pro-Bush demonstrators were allowed to gather in front of the structure. When ACORN�s lawyer complained, the activists were ordered to move even farther away. ACORN immediately went to federal court, and won a temporary restraining order allowing the anti-poverty group to return to its previous location. They did, but then, according to the suit, police parked large vans in front of protesters, blocking their view of Bush and his view of them.

Although he refused to comment on the lawsuit, Secret Service spokesman Thomas Mazur said the agency has a longstanding policy of protecting the president without making a distinction "as to the purpose, message, or intent of any particular group or individual."

Numerous protesters at the 2000 political conventions filed lawsuits charging that police violated their civil rights, but the litigation brought mixed results. In Los Angeles, in the aftermath of the 2000 Democratic National Convention, the ACLU collected more than $5 million, according to Carol Sobel, co-chair of the National Lawyers Guild�s mass-defense committee. Protesters sued after accusing the police of firing rubber bullets at demonstrators and strip-searching those arrested.

How police handle peaceful protests in Boston and New York will determine whether this year�s conventions produce another round of police-misconduct charges and lawsuits. As Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York ACLU, put it in a statement last year, "Hundreds of thousands of people will be coming to New York next summer to engage in peaceful protest at the Republican National Convention. They are entitled to be treated with the same respect as those attending the convention itself."

So, what's in the box? The glowing MacGuffin from Pulp Fiction? The plutonium from Kiss Me Deadly? Gwyneth Paltrow's head? Or maybe a suitcase bomb left over from the Cold War? That's the least of the enigmas posed by Andrei Zvyagintsev's first feature, The Return, a huge festival hit and a limpidly accessible excursion into the murky realm of visionary Russian film of such directors as Andrei Tarkovsky and Aleksandr Sokurov.

To the mystic rhapsodies of archetypes, history, family dynamics, and personal history composed by that pair of geniuses, Zvyagintsev adds formal tightness and down-to-earth detail. The questions the film raises may be unanswerable, its meaning irresolvable, but its depictions of the pathology and the desperate love of that basic political and social unit, the family, are wrenchingly acute and familiar.

Sibling rivalry, for example. On top of a dismal lighthouse at the end of a long pier stretching into the Gulf of Finland, 13-year-old Vanya (Ivan Dobronravov), taunted by his pals as a pig and a coward, is too afraid of heights to jump into the water. His older brother, Andrei (Vladimir Garin), at first encourages him, then abandons him in disgust, and Vanya remains weeping and shivering on his perch until his mother (Natalia Vdovina) comes to rescue him. The next day, Andrei grudgingly joins the others in ragging Vanya about his disgrace. The brothers fight and run home.

It's just kids squabbling, of course, but it's also Cain and Abel, or maybe it's the struggle between the fledgling forces vying for control of post-Soviet Russia. Such religious and political subtexts inevitably underlie Russian films, and Zvyagintsev shows no reluctance to indulge in that tendency. Once home, the boys are shocked to learn from their mother that their father (Konstantin Lavronenko, who looks like an evil George Clooney) has returned from a long absence -- 12 years, or since the fall of the Soviet system.

The brothers rush to the bedroom, where dad lays inert under a sheet in a pose reminiscent of some Renaissance painting of Jesus (Andrea Mantegna's Lamentation over the Dead Christ, as it turns out). The boys then troop to the attic to find an old family photo to confirm his identity: The photo is stuck in a Bible next to an illustration of the sacrifice of Isaac. The next morning, after a meal in which the father shares wine (!) with his sons (Andrew and John!), he invites them on a fishing (!) trip.

That's more allusions than you'll find in the average Matrix movie, with many more overlooked and to come. And no special effects. Instead, what follows is an authentic lousy family road trip that takes father and sons to an eerie island in Lake Ladoga where dad digs up the mystery box and things get really strange. But never ungainly or implausible -- all is meticulously detailed and superbly acted and played out against the decrepit Baltic beauty familiar from such filmmakers as Aki Kaurismäki and Sarunas Bartas.

Vanya, played by Dobronravov in a depiction of bullheaded pre-adolescence rivaling that of Jean-Pierre Léaud in Les quatre cents coups/The 400 Blows, is at first the stronger-willed of the boys. He suspects the father and resents his encroachment, and his sullen, passive resistance (refusing to call his father "dad," not eating his soup, constantly complaining) brings increasingly blunt and even brutal reprimands. Andrei is more ambivalent; he wants dad's approval but also needs Vanya's companionship. Vanya calls Andrei a suck-up and imitates his sycophancy. Dad calls Andrei a blockhead and bounces his head against the car door. Both use him as a pawn in their Machiavellian power struggle. Until Andrei discovers his own power, that is, and the circular nature of the story implied by the title begins to emerge.

To what point? Why, for example, is the submerged boat shown in the opening images empty? Why is the father shot in the same pose in the boat at the end as he was in the bed in the beginning? Why does his image vanish from the family photos? Why is he in none of the photos Andrei has taken of the trip? (Marin, who resembles an adolescent David Hemmings in Blow-Up, drowned in Lake Ladoga shortly after the film was finished.) Any answers lead to more questions; for me they're all rendered moot when the two sons look out at the water and shout, in recognition and in despair, "Dad!"

If you've followed the media-consolidation story for lo these many years, you might discern a certain resemblance to the movie "Groundhog Day" -- with one notable difference. Bill Murray was destined merely to live out the same day over and over again. With media concentration, it gets a little worse each time, as more television channels, radio stations, and newspapers fall into the hands of ever-larger, ever-fewer corporate owners.

Thus it was this past Monday, when the Federal Communications Commission -- chaired by Michael Powell, son of the secretary of state -- voted by a three-to-two margin to loosen the few restraints that were still in place. Daily newspapers will now be able to buy television and radio stations in the same communities in which they publish, a heretofore illegal arrangement known as "cross-ownership." Conglomerates will be allowed to own television stations reaching 45 percent of the national audience, up from 35 percent. A company will be allowed to own two -- and in some larger cities three -- TV stations in the same market.

"It violates every tenet of a free democratic society to let a handful of powerful companies control our media," said FCC commissioner Jonathan Adelstein in a blistering dissent. "The public has a right to be informed by a diversity of viewpoints so they can make up their own minds. Without a diverse, independent media, citizen access to information crumbles, along with political and social participation. For the sake of democracy, we should encourage the widest possible dissemination of free expression through the public airwaves."

And so it goes.

But wait. This time it might be different. This time there are signs that the public, as well as opinion leaders of various and diverse ideological stripes, are finally so outraged by this ongoing power grab that they will demand action.

The public snoozed during the 1980s, when the Reagan White House eased the public-interest and equal-time provisions to the point of irrelevance. It looked the other way when the Telecommunications Act of 1996 set off a gold rush, especially in the radio sector, which was taken over almost in its entirety by a tiny handful of owners. And that somnolence was encouraged by the news media, which, whether by design or indifference, served their corporate masters by failing to cover what was happening as anything other than a routine business story.

By contrast, the run-up to Monday's vote was distinctly unquiet. Opposition to the FCC's latest deregulatory moves came from an unusually broad cross section, from liberal and reformist groups such as Common Cause, the Center for Digital Democracy, and the Consumer Federation of America to conservative organizations such as the National Rifle Association and the Parents Television Council.

And it wasn't just special-interest groups that got in on the action. More than a half-million people reportedly submitted comments to the FCC, nearly all of them opposed to deregulation. MoveOn.org, a progressive organization founded to fight Bill Clinton's impeachment, forwarded some 180,000 electronic comments to the FCC. The group, which emerged earlier this year as a leader in the anti-war movement, also took out television commercials that raised the specter of international media baron (and Fox News Channel founder) Rupert Murdoch's extending his global reach even further.

"This really is just the beginning," Eli Pariser, the Maine native who is international campaigns director of MoveOn.org, told me by e-mail. "When we decided to engage on this issue, we knew that Commissioner Powell was probably committed to the approach of railroading the rule change through. We wanted to highlight his contempt for the democratic process and raise the noise level to the point where Congress paid attention."

Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, believes progressives were finally mobilized by their disgust at the rah-rah, unquestioning tone of much of the war coverage. "The most important thing post-June 2 is to take the momentum and broaden this from the coalition that we've been able to create and go after some very serious victories on legislative action," says Chester. "You have the potential for a left-right coalition here to go back to Congress and try to be serious." As an example of legislation that could ameliorate the effects of the FCC's ruling, Chester says media reformers might push for a rule requiring companies that own a newspaper and a television station in the same market to employ separate editorial managers.

Besides that, Chester adds, he and other activists intend to protest every single merger. "We will file petitions to delay. We will slow down the process," he vows.

In a country whose Constitution guarantees freedom of the press, the very idea of media regulation has an un-American ring to it. And in fact, strictly defined, "the press" -- that is, newspapers, magazines, and other print outlets -- are essentially unregulated. By contrast, the rules that govern television and radio stations are grounded in the laws of physics: there are only so many broadcast frequencies available, and they must be divvied up in such a way that one station isn't trampling on space reserved for another.

If you want to start a daily newspaper, you can. It will cost many millions of dollars and you will probably fail, but no one will tell you that you aren't allowed to try. But if you want to own a TV or radio station, you'll need to buy one: nearly all the available frequencies are already being used by other broadcasters. It is this situation that gave rise to the current regulatory regime, which dates back to the 1930s. The airwaves, according to this doctrine, are finite and publicly owned. Licenses to use these airwaves are granted for a limited period of time, and must be exercised in the public interest.

That was the theory, anyway. Starting in the 1980s, though, the system began to crumble. During the Reagan presidency, public-interest programming started to disappear, as regulators made it clear that they no longer considered it a condition for license renewal. The Fairness Doctrine and equal-time provisions gave way to today's reality, in which nationally syndicated talk-show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity can openly call for listeners to vote Republican, with virtually no one on the air to take the other side.

Commercial radio was so thoroughly destroyed by the Telecom Act of 1996 that FCC member Michael Copps -- a Democrat who has emerged as Michael Powell's most outspoken opponent -- cited it as an object lesson in his 22-plus-page dissent to Monday's ruling. "Diversity of programming suffered. Homogenized music and standardized programming crowded out local and regional talent. Creative local artists found it evermore difficult to obtain play time on the air," Copps wrote, adding: "Competition in many towns became non-existent as a few companies -- in some cases a single company -- bought up virtually every station in the market. This experience should terrify us as we consider visiting upon television and newspapers what we have inflicted upon radio. 'Clear Channelization' of the rest of the American media will harm our country."

That last bit is a reference to Clear Channel, a conglomerate that has expanded its empire to some 1200 radio stations since 1996. Companies today can own as many as eight stations in a given market; Monday's ruling did not change that. Perhaps the most infamous case of radio gone bad is the town of Minot, North Dakota, where Clear Channel owns all six commercial stations. According to a New York Times report, when a 1 a.m. train derailment caused toxic gas to leak into the air in January 2002, police attempted to alert the Clear Channel station that was the town's designated emergency broadcaster -- and couldn't get their calls answered, forcing them to rouse station employees at home. Police complained that because the station was programmed by remote control, no employees were actually at the station, a charge that Clear Channel denied. Still, the story has become a cautionary tale regarding the evils of deregulation, and has transformed Senator Byron Dorgan (D-North Dakota) into an anti-monopoly crusader.

Incredibly, Clear Channel criticized Monday's ruling because the FCC announced that it intended to take some mild oversight steps with regard to radio. Then, too, Clear Channel went to great lengths to make sure its stations were on board with the war in Iraq, even going so far as to organize pro-war rallies. Perhaps the company's executives believe that the Bush administration is showing insufficient gratitude.

It's not just news that gets short shrift -- culture suffers as well. Donna Halper, a radio consultant and Emerson College journalism professor, saw what happened to radio firsthand. In 1974, she was music director at WMMS, in Cleveland, when she received a record in a plain brown envelope. It was by an unknown band called Rush. She put the record on the air -- and thus gave a huge boost to a band that has proved to be both highly popular and long-lived.

"If I were a music director doing my job today, I couldn't do what I did in 1974," Halper told me. "I couldn't run down to the disc jockey on the air and say, 'Hey, I just heard this great new band, we've got to put them on the air.'" Increasingly, she observes, radio stations in small and medium-size markets -- the kinds of places where music promoters used to be able to break new acts -- are programmed out of headquarters many hundreds of miles away.

This kind of gigantism can take a more malignant turn as well. Last week, ABC's Nightline -- in a segment for which Halper was interviewed -- reported that Cumulus, the second-largest radio chain (after Clear Channel), banned the Dixie Chicks from all its 42 country stations after lead singer Natalie Maines dissed George W. Bush. Now, you could argue that that was Cumulus's right, or that it might even have been a good business decision. But one company taking a group off 42 stations is considerably different from 42 separate radio-station owners making the same decision.

After all, it is nearly unimaginable that 42 different individuals would make that same decision. Which is, after all, the whole point about what's wrong with media consolidation.

As Michael Powell accurately notes, consolidation is not taking place in a vacuum. For one thing, in recent years the increasingly conservative federal court system has been knocking down various media regulations, meaning that some loosening of the rules was inevitable. For another, there are many more media outlets than ever before -- hundreds of thousands of Web sites, satellite television, and a cable universe that won't stop expanding until it's up against the current technological limit of 500 channels.

The problem with Powell's first argument, though, is that he appears far too eager to do the media conglomerates' bidding rather than test the limits of the courts' forbearance. Powell has encouraged a shockingly cozy relationship with the industry. According to a recent study by the Center for Public Integrity, "FCC officials have taken 2,500 trips costing nearly $2.8 million over the past eight years, most of it from the telecommunications and broadcast industries the agency regulates." Top destinations: Las Vegas, New Orleans, and New York.

The problem with the second argument is that, though there are more broadcast and cable outlets than ever before, the majority of them are owned by five huge companies: AOL Time Warner, Viacom/CBS, General Electric/NBC, Disney/ABC, and Murdoch's News Corporation. Studies show, in fact, that those companies control some 75 percent of the prime-time audience.

To be sure, the notion that big-is-bad is too complicated to be correct in all cases. Local media activist Steve Provizer, the founder of Allston-Brighton Free Radio and the Citizens Media Corps, notes that a study earlier this year by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that TV stations owned by newspaper companies (under "grandfathering" arrangements) tend to produce higher-quality newscasts than other stations. He also observes that WHDH-TV (Channel 7), an independently owned operation (there is a sister station in Miami), introduced the sort of whiz-bang graphics and quick hits that dragged down local news throughout Greater Boston, with the chain-owned stations emulating at least some of Channel 7's style in a desperate bid to retain audience share.

"You can throw around the big terms: democracy, civic discourse. But I'm at the point where I've been doing this a long time, and people's real choices have got to change," Provizer says. "Will people choose their media on the basis of the fact that it's an independent rather than a group owner? They never have." He adds: "In my own mind, I feel like community and alternative media have got to do some real significant work if they're going to have any impact on people's media habits."

These days, Provizer is involved in a project called the Commonwealth Broadband Collaborative, which is aimed at producing high-quality, community-based programming for public-access cable TV and the Internet.

Provizer is right: independent owners aren't always better than corporate chains, and community-based media do no good if people aren't paying attention. Still, there are limits to the amount of damage a bad independent owner can do. The FCC's stated goals of localism, diversity, and competition are far better served by a multiplicity of owners than they are by a handful of corporate titans controlling most of what we see, hear, and read.

So what's next? The new FCC rules won't actually take effect until fall at the earliest. There's been considerable speculation about what might happen in Boston, but the truth is that no one knows. The New York Times Company, which owns the Boston Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, also owns TV stations, and editorialized in favor of dropping the cross-ownership ban. Tribune Company, which owns WLVI-TV (Channel 56), has made it clear that it would like to gobble up TV stations in cities where it already does business. Boston Herald publisher Pat Purcell has publicly stated that he would like to buy a radio station. He might also find a way to do business with his old mentor, Rupert Murdoch, who owns WFXT-TV (Channel 25).

Then, too, there is a possibility -- slight though it may be -- that Congress will seek to prevent some or all of the FCC changes from taking effect. David Moulton, a spokesman for Representative Ed Markey (D-Malden), a key opponent of deregulation, says the congressman might file legislation to retain the 35 percent national-audience cap. Markey himself said in a statement that "all segments of the population will enjoy fewer and fewer options for independent news and information" as a result of the FCC decision.

Most of the Democratic presidential candidates, including Senator John Kerry, denounced the FCC decision. Senator Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), a national leader in the fight against deregulation, said in a written statement that Monday's action would "limit freedom of expression and curtail discourse, which are the very tenets of freedom and democracy our nation is built on." Senator Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin), an outspoken critic of the way Clear Channel muscles musicians with its monopolies in radio and concert promotion, announced that he was considering various legislative options as well. And these progressives have been joined by such conservative Republicans as Senators Trent Lott of Mississippi and Ted Stevens of Alaska.

Like Eli Pariser and Jeff Chester, University of Illinois media scholar Robert McChesney believes the coalition that formed around the FCC's latest deregulatory steps may represent a real opportunity for those who believe in a decentralized, democratic media. McChesney is involved in a new organization, Free Press (www.mediareform.net), based in Northampton, that is attempting to organize around issues related to media concentration and ownership.

"What we've seen this time is an extraordinary amount of activism and interest in this issue. We've had nothing like this in the last 50 or 100 years that's even remotely comparable," says McChesney. "This is not the last battle in a war that is now lost. This is the first battle in a war that is just beginning."

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy@phx.com. Read his daily Media Log at BostonPhoenix.com.

Not a day goes by without the emergence of some new and damaging information in the ever-unfolding pedophile-priest crisis rocking the Archdiocese of Boston. To date, more than 80 area clergymen have been named as child molesters, and thousands of pages of once-secret files have exposed the Church�s cover-up of child sexual abuse by its priests. Bernard Cardinal Law has resorted to hiding from the media crews that have become fixtures outside the chancery.

But what does all this mean for the Catholic Church? Will its influential role in shaping public policy fade? Frances Kissling, who heads the Washington, DC-based reform group Catholics for a Free Choice, will participate in a debate on those questions and more at an upcoming forum titled "Sex, Scandal, and Power: Is this the End of the Catholic Church�s Political Influence?", hosted by the Women�s Studies Program at Harvard, the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at City University of New York, and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. I caught up with Kissling recently to discuss the decline in the Church�s authority caused by the ongoing scandal.

Q: What kind of a Catholic are you?

There are many kinds of Catholics. There are pious Catholics, for whom being Catholic means, "I go to mass on Sunday; I pray the rosary." There are Catholics who follow the social-justice message of the gospel. There are intellectual Catholics for whom theologians like Thomas Aquinas are most important. There are conservative Catholics who believe whatever the pope says. And then, there is what I call "Catholics in resistance." I�m a Catholic in resistance. Changing the Church characterizes my staying.

Q: How has your faith been tested by the clergy sexual-abuse scandal?

My faith has never depended on the institutional Church. There is a profound distinction between the Vatican, the Curia, the Holy See, and my life as a spiritual person. I�ve always seen the sacramental side as meaningful, and the governing side as often corrupt. Abuse of power comes as no surprise, whether it�s sexual, financial, or personal. My belief that the Church�s governing structure is corrupt has only been reinforced. But it doesn�t present me with a problem because I never thought the structure was a divine creation. It has been, to use the buzzwords, an elitist patriarchal entity, and these entities have a tendency to corruption.

Q: What�s your take on last week�s meeting of American cardinals at the Vatican?

It had all the trappings of the way in which large corporations act when they�ve gotten caught with hands in the cookie jar. The pope made a generic statement honoring victims, but victims weren�t there. He chose to meet with upper management. The cardinals went in with a line about what should be done, yet came out with no improvements. They think they can get away with spin. It was a disgraceful show of contempt for victims, with no recognition that the bishops and cardinals are the problem, not the solution.

Q: Five months ago, before the scandal blew wide open, how influential would you say the Church was in matters of social and public policy?

It was an influential force at both the state and federal levels. Take the decision by the Republican Party to make a monumental attempt to court conservative Catholics. The party gave [prominent Catholics] a skybox at the [2000 Republican] convention. One of the first events that George Bush attended after becoming president was dinner at Cardinal Theodore McCarrick�s house. The Church�s power in the State House is also well known. It has access, writes bills, lobbies. On a number of social issues, it wins.

Q: When you consider Church leaders like Bernard Cardinal Law -- an outspoken figure on abortion and other issues -- what do you see today?

One sees a broken man. His physical persona is different. He doesn�t stand as straight. He speaks with less firmness. He�s simply not as visible. His moral authority is profoundly eroded. What will be interesting to see as we move into the 2002 election cycle is how many politicians want a photo op with Law. The number will be far less than it was two years ago.

Q: Articles suggest that people aren�t walking away from the teachings of the Church, so how could this scandal harm the Church�s stature?

The Catholic laity has already rejected the moral authority of bishops on divorce and remarriage, homosexuality, contraception, abortion. So their faith is untouched. But the scandal harms the Church�s stature in the public-policy arena. The bishops have been unable to speak with moral authority on sexual issues inside the Church for 30 years. Now they�ll have great difficulty speaking with authority on those issues outside the Church.

Q: As far as crises go, how would you say this one measures?

It�s not as big as the Protestant Reformation, but it�s close. It will mark the Church in a negative way for hundreds of years. The American Church�s current leadership will never recover. They may never retire, because the drive to protect the patriarchy takes precedence over everything. But this scandal has vastly eroded their authority. Church leaders have misused their power in other ways that have caused suffering. That they have the clout to deny condoms to people with AIDS in the Third World is a scandal. That they could be complicit in the deaths of 600,000 women yearly who die from botched abortions or unsustainable pregnancies is a scandal. If this sex-abuse scandal contributes to diminution of political power of bishops, that�s a good thing.

This article originally ran in the Boston Phoenix.

On the evening of Tuesday, February 26, the ashes of Sylvia Rivera were taken from the standing-room-only Metropolitan Community Church in midtown Manhattan and placed in a horse-drawn carriage. The carriage, along with hundreds of mourners, moved slowly down Christopher Street, past the historic Stonewall Inn where the gay-liberation movement was born. When it came to a stop, Sylvia�s ashes were scattered off the piers on the Hudson River. It was a fitting end for a drag queen who had been in the forefront of enormous changes for the Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgender (GLBT) movement over the past 33 years.

The funeral was exactly what Sylvia would have wanted; indeed, she had made all the arrangements in the months before her death from liver cancer at age 50. Let�s face it: Sylvia -- reputed to have hurled the first beer bottle in the Stonewall Riot -- had learned long ago that if you wanted something done (never mind done right), you�d better do it yourself.

Sylvia had always remained on the outer fringes of the gay movement -- she spent a substantial portion of her adult life homeless and struggling with substance abuse and was famous for her street-smart, no-nonsense, fuck-you-in-your-face brand of politics. But in death she was widely mourned, both by her comrades in Street Transgender Action Revolutionaries, or STAR (which she had co-founded in 1971 as Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), and by the most mainstream of gay groups. Indeed, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) -- one of the most respectable, conservative, and well funded of the national gay-rights groups -- issued a lengthy statement of respect for her that read, in part, "We are deeply saddened by the passing of Sylvia Rivera, a brave pioneer who helped pave the way for the future of GLBT Americans.... We are proud to honor her enduring legacy."

But the love fete didn�t go both ways. Rivera was constitutionally opposed to the top-down politics of HRC -- and that�s putting it mildly. "One of our [STAR�s] main goals now," she wrote in April 2001, "is to destroy the Human Rights Campaign, because I�m tired of sitting on the back of the bumper. It�s not even the back of the bus anymore -- it�s the back of the bumper. The bitch on wheels is back." Just weeks before her death, STAR issued a press release that called HRC "a separatist organization devoted to money and power that has insulted STAR and the transgender community through ignorance, arrogance, and transphobia." Indeed, in light of Sylvia�s Rivera�s true feelings, HRC�s reverential elegy seems not only smarmy, but hypocritical.

But what looks at first glance like a nasty in-fight between scrappy transgender street radicals and Beltway professionals -- the skirts versus the suits -- is actually a fight for the heart and political integrity of the gay-rights movement. While the gay community has always acknowledged the cultural importance of drag queens, cross-dressers, transvestites, transsexuals, and people of variant gender, the political movement has been focused on securing a variety of legal protections for women and men who, as a group, are identified by their sexual attraction to others of their own gender. The idea that the gay-rights movement might also fight for the right to express gender differently -- whether by appearing too butch or too femme, or dressing in clothing intended for (in that quaint phase) "the opposite sex" -- is fairly recent. The term transgender itself -- a very loose concept connoting pretty much anyone who identifies and presents him- or herself in ways outside of socially prescribed gender roles -- came into play only in the early 1990s and was popularized by works such as Leslie Feinberg�s 1992 Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come (World View Forum) and Kate Bornstein�s 1994 Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (Routledge). It was an idea whose time had arrived, but it did not meet with complete acceptance within the pre-existing movement. The gay mainstream may have enjoyed the spectacle of campy drag shows, but it had little intention of fighting for the rights of a group that most "normal" people considered freakish or mentally ill.

When Sylvia Rivera argued for civil rights for transvestites and drag queens in 1971, she was far, far ahead of her time. Although she had support in the fresh flush of post-Stonewall politics, when she was a member of the leftist, radical Gay Liberation Front (GLF) -- whose antiwar, anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-capitalist agenda was, well, liberationist in the widest possible sense -- that window of truly progressive queer politics was short- lived. GLF lasted less than two years. Meanwhile, the national movement became a narrowly focused gay-rights movement that, over the next two decades, would struggle for its members to be accepted by mainstream society as "normal" American citizens who were just like everyone else -- except for the fact that they were homosexual.

Drags and trannies not only ran counter to this image, they exploded it. They were the poster children for the mainstream�s worst possible fears. Though many straight people came to accept discreet homosexuals who practiced their vice in the privacy of their own homes, they had a much harder time with men and women who publicly violated gender norms. This was true in 1972, when the New York�based Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) deleted transvestite and drag issues from the first anti-gay-discrimination bill introduced to New York�s City Council, and to a large extent it is still true now.

Over the past 10 years, mass entertainment -- movies like La Cage aux Folles, Tootsie, and Boys Don�t Cry -- has helped lower fears and raise consciousness about gender expression, and most gay organizations now include "transgender" issues among the litany of their concerns. But when legislative push comes to shove, it is still nearly impossible to draft legislation (never mind get it voted on) that includes provisions to counter discrimination based on gender expression. Two immediate cases in point are the Federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) and New York State�s Sexual Orientation Nondiscrimination Act (SONDA), both of which would ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. First introduced in 1992, ENDA stands very little chance of passing soon, but it has garnered support from the likes of Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Christie Todd Whitman, Coretta Scott King, and the late Barry Goldwater, as well as corporations such as General Mills, Ben and Jerry�s, and Eastman Kodak. SONDA has been up before the New York State legislature since 1971. It has passed the Assembly by growing margins every year, and this January it passed by an overwhelming majority of 113 to 27. After three decades, it�s still awaiting a vote in the Senate, but things are looking up: Republican governor George Pataki mentioned the bill in his State of the State address this year; and the Empire State Pride Agenda (ESPA), a nonprofit lobbying group behind the bill, has hired William Powers, former chair of the New York State Republican Party, to lobby for its passage in the Senate. Neither of these bills covers transgender concerns or protects gender expression. (Rivera was fighting to include transgender rights in both bills at the time of her death.)

If you speak to the supporters of this legislation -- such as HRC and ESPA -- it is a simple case of political expediency: if these bills include gender-expression protection, they simply will not pass. And these supporters are mostly correct. It has taken more than half a century -- since the formation in 1949 of the Mattachine Society, an early homophile-rights group -- for Americans to seriously consider protecting women and men against anti-gay discrimination. But for many people -- homosexual as well as heterosexual -- deviance from accepted gender norms is far more threatening than deviance from standard heterosexuality. While there is some support to protect the jobs of openly gay or lesbian teachers, for example, those numbers plummet when the subject shifts to protecting those who do not conform to gender norms. Indeed, one of the right wing�s favorite scare tactics is to claim that passage of a gay-rights bill would allow drag queens to teach in public schools.

But this desire for expediency is caught in a complicated web of politics with a long history -- one in which nearly all parties recognize that the fight for gay rights cannot be pitched to mainstream acceptance alone. Almost all major gay- and lesbian-rights groups advocate a transgender agenda -- they think that gender expression should not be grounds for discrimination in jobs or public accommodation. It�s just that they won�t advocate it formally in bills such as ENDA and SONDA. Another bill before the New York legislature, sponsored by openly gay Democratic senator Thomas Duane, does include protections for gender expression, but it hasn�t passed the Assembly, and it doesn�t look viable. The bill�s dim future can be chalked up to mainstream gender-expression prejudice, without a doubt. But the fact that it doesn�t have ESPA�s active support is also to blame.

It is no wonder that transgender activists are both frustrated and infuriated by this confusing and, on the face of it, hypocritical scenario. But far from disappearing, the issue of legal protection for transgender people increasingly threatens to rip asunder the already shaky alliance between mainstream advocacy groups and the increasingly visible and vocal transgender activists. A recent acrimonious exchange between ESPA and the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) points both to what is at stake legally for transgender activists and to how quickly the two positions are hardening. In the end, NYAGRA used the specifics of the Dawn Dawson case to successfully refute ESPA�s claim that SONDA would "almost always" protect gay and lesbian transgendered people. Dawson is a butch-lesbian hair stylist fired last year by a Manhattan salon. Because other out lesbians were not dismissed from the salon, NYAGRA argued that it was specifically Dawson�s "gender presentation," rather than her sexual orientation, that caused her to lose her job -- which SONDA would not have prevented.

There are other signs of trouble. Local activist Sue Hyde, who works for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) and is a founder of the Cambridge Lavender Alliance (CLA), notes that her organization has withdrawn its endorsement from ENDA because the bill excludes gender protections. Hyde says that "especially given the slim chance of [its receiving] serious consideration in this session of Congress, a trans-inclusive bill is very much worth consideration and worth fighting for." And she notes that while the Cambridge Human Rights Ordinance was passed in 1984, it was only in 1994, after lobbying by the newly formed Cambridge Lavender Alliance, that an amendment was added to "cover the group of people who would be most likely to be fired, denied housing or denied public accommodation -- people whose gender expression didn�t match their sex at birth."

Obviously, transgender activists cannot always rely on the integrity and good will of gay and lesbian groups like NGLTF or the CLA, and depending on what happens with bills such as ENDA and SONDA, transgender activists may find themselves fighting a serious endgame with the gay-and-lesbian-rights movement. By focusing so intently on securing legislation to ensure civil rights for a portion of the community, mainstream groups may be overlooking the larger picture, they claim. "It is crucial to pass anti-discrimination legislation with the widest possible scope," says New York�based activist Bill Dobbs, "but let�s not forget that it doesn�t guarantee anybody a job or a place to live. It is one small step to much larger social justice. We have to take off the blinders and realize the limits of such laws. We have forgotten our roots as a liberation movement and only see equality or civil rights as a goal."

One of the ironies here is that the transgender-activist community and the mainstream gay-rights movement deeply need one another. People fighting for legal protections for transgender people recognize that without the mainstream movement�s limited but ongoing support, gender activism would not have gotten as far as it has already. Conversely, mainstream groups -- understanding that there is enormous groundswell support in the GLB community for transgender rights -- must articulate support for those rights, both to maintain the moral high ground and to avoid alienating their constituencies. The overlapping connections among sexuality, sexual orientation, and gender are confusing and often difficult to articulate. But if the mainstream gay groups talk the talk without walking the walk, there is going to be trouble.

The death of Sylvia Rivera has re-catalyzed many both in and out of the transgender community. Her bravery, guts, and sheer streetwise bravado were an inspiration for three decades. Whether these activists will -- or can -- continue working with mainstream gay-rights organizations is an open question. But these days, Sylvia�s words are ringing in their ears more loudly than ever: if you want something done right, you�d better do it yourself.

Michael Bronski can be reached at mabronski@aol.com.

A.J. LIEBLING WOULD not be pleased. Nearly 40 years ago, the legendary press critic lamented the rise of one-newspaper cities, a phenomenon considerably less common then than today. Where there is no competition, Liebling wrote, "news becomes increasingly nonessential to the newspaper. In the mind of the average publisher, it is a costly and uneconomic frill, like the free lunch that saloons used to furnish to induce customers to buy beer. If the quality of the free lunch fell off, the customers would go next door."

Since then, things have gotten only worse.

When the first edition of Ben Bagdikian's The Media Monopoly (Beacon Press) was published, in 1983, some 50 corporations were identified as controlling most of our newspapers, magazines, books, television networks, radio stations, and movie and music studios. Twenty years later, in the current "Big Media" issue of the Nation, that list is down to 10 international conglomerates, their vast holdings detailed in a fold-out color chart.

But though media consolidation is hardly a new story, there is a disturbing sense that the pace of monopolization is accelerating, and that the end game, or something like it, is at hand. Particularly distressing is the rapid consolidation of the cable industry, which threatens to turn the wide-open, decentralized, but slow Internet of the 1990s into a corporate-owned, profit-oriented, high-speed network with no room for independent voices. The Net is the last, best hope for a truly democratic media. Yet if we don't act, it may soon be too late to save it.

The most significant recent development took place just a month ago, when AT&T Broadband, the country's largest cable-television provider, was acquired by Comcast, the number-three company. AT&T Comcast, as the new company will be known, will control some 22 million subscribers � more than a third of the nation's 60 million cable households. And if that weren't chilling enough, analysts are already predicting that the most humongous media conglomerate of them all, AOL Time Warner, whose 13 million cable subscribers make it the number-two company, will work out some sort of a partnership with AT&T Comcast.

The AT&T Broadband�Comcast deal did not take place in isolation. Earlier last year, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), whose alleged job is to make sure that media giants do not trample upon the public interest, dumped a half-century-old rule that had prohibited one network from owning another. The result: Viacom, which owns CBS, was allowed to acquire UPN. That's why, in Boston, you can now watch Channel 4's news on Channel 38 (see "Big Media Stalk Hub," sidebar).

At about the same time that the cable giants were consolidating, the French media conglomerate Vivendi Universal announced that it would buy USA Networks for about $10.3 billion. Vivendi owns the Universal movie studios; USA's holdings include a television-production operation and the USA and Sci-Fi cable channels. Earlier in the year, Vivendi acquired Houghton Mifflin, the last of the big, independent, publicly traded book publishers � and the holder of the suddenly lucrative Lord of the Rings franchise.

Moreover, all of this is taking place at a time when a series of pro-industry court rulings and changes at the FCC threaten to sweep away what few restrictions remain in place following passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which greatly relaxed ownership rules. The FCC appears poised to junk such old standbys as the prohibition against a newspaper's owning a television or radio station in the same market, as well as a passel of local and national restrictions on the number of radio stations, television channels, and cable systems any one company is allowed to own.

"The problem is that a lot of this stuff is happening behind the scenes," says Danny Schechter, executive editor of MediaChannel.org, a media-watchdog Web site with an international and progressive orientation. "The FCC may make any concerns about this completely irrelevant when it chooses to lift all remaining regulations, which is certainly possible. I think there really is kind of a tipping point. It's hard to get it back to the way it was, not that the way it was was so great. But what you did have was more of an ethos, at least a lip-service ethos, to public service. And now even that has gone out the window."

At the center of all this is President Bush's handpicked FCC chairman, Michael Powell, who, like his father, Secretary of State Colin Powell, is bright, smooth, and articulate -- but who, unlike his father, espouses the kind of doctrinaire free-market conservatism that Bush favors in his domestic-policy appointees.

Michael Powell has a penchant for saying provocative things, and sometimes the nuances get lost. For instance, when he was asked last year about the "digital divide" � the technology gap that exists between rich and poor -- Powell memorably replied, "I think there's a Mercedes divide. I'd like one, but I can't afford it." The Washington Post later showed that Powell's remarks immediately before and after showed considerably more thoughtfulness than the dismissive sound bite suggested.

Yet there's little question that when it comes to deregulation, Powell intends to outdo even his deregulation-minded, Clinton-appointed predecessors, Reed Hundt and William Kennard. In a little-noticed interview with the Wall Street Journal published last September 10, Powell spoke disdainfully about "what I call the 'Big Fish Problem,' which is this inherent anxiety about bigness in a capitalist economy." He also made it clear that his view of the public interest was not necessarily the same as that of those whose business it is to act as the public's eyes and ears.

"Every decision I make, I will argue to the last day I am here, I am taking in the name of the public -- not in the name of some company and not in the name of some consumer-interest group," Powell said.

Says Andrew Jay Schwartzman, president and CEO of one of those consumer-interest groups, the Washington-based Media Access Project: "He's very bright, very, very shrewd. And although it's a very appealing package, he is in fact a good deal more conservative than his father, and he's hell-bent on lifting ownership rules. I'm always the optimist, and we won't stop working on him. But he's intent on where he's going, he's come in with preordained objectives, and he's pushing very hard to obtain them."


TO BE SURE, not all media bigness is necessarily bad, and even when it is, not all of it can be regulated or outlawed. The most significant obstacle: the US Constitution. After all, the First Amendment says, "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." As my Phoenix colleague Harvey Silverglate, a noted civil-liberties lawyer, likes to say, "What part of 'no law' don't you understand?"

That doesn't mean media companies can engage in illegal predatory practices aimed at putting their competitors out of business. But it does mean that government can't break up media conglomerates based merely on a sense that such conglomerates are somehow not in the public interest.

Besides, there is at least an argument to be made that only big media have the power and influence to cover the large institutions that dominate modern life. In January 2000, Jack Shafer wrote a piece for the online magazine Slate (owned by the extremely big Microsoft Corporation and thus part of a media alliance that includes NBC, MSNBC, General Electric, the Washington Post, and Newsweek) arguing exactly that.

"Small, independently owned papers routinely pull punches when covering local car dealers, real estate, and industry," Shafer wrote, asserting a nasty little truth known by every reporter and editor who has ever worked for a locally owned community newspaper. "Whatever its shortcomings -- and they are many -- only big media possesses the means to consistently hold big business and big government accountable."

And though Shafer doesn't say it, the whole notion of government officials' regulating the size and scope of media companies sounds suspiciously like what's going on in Russia, where the government of President Vladimir Putin has shut down nearly all of that country's big independent media -- in the public interest, of course. To quote Liebling again: "Men of politics cannot be trusted to regulate the press, because the press deals with politics. Pravda is even duller than the Times."

Moreover, despite the dominance of just a handful of huge conglomerates, it's hard to argue that we have fewer choices today than we did, say, a generation ago. US Representative Edward Markey, a Malden Democrat poised to take over the chairmanship of the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet if his party can recapture the House this fall, is worried about media concentration � and says he plans to order a "top-to-bottom review of the ownership rules aimed at restoring diversity and localism as cornerstones of telecommunications policy." Yet Markey is quick to add that, in some respects, consumers have never had more options than they do today.

In the 1970s, Markey recalls, there were just three major commercial television stations in Greater Boston. Now there are five stations with daily newscasts, New England Cable News, dozens of channels on cable, and the Internet. "I don't think there's any question that people are better off today than they were then in terms of total diversity," Markey says. And, because of the increasing ubiquity, speed, and capacity of the Net, Markey sees the situation only getting better -- if, he adds by way of warning, the Internet remains as free and open as it is today.

That brings me back to cable television, which may, in turn, pose most the important media-regulation question of all.

The entire rationale for media regulation is the notion of scarcity. The reason that the government may regulate the number of radio or TV stations a company owns is that those stations make use of the airwaves -- a finite, public resource. The Internet, at least theoretically, is infinite. Seen in that light, there's no more rationale for regulating the Internet than there would be for regulating the number of newspapers Gannett can own on the basis that its papers are made of ground-up trees, which are, after all, a finite, public resource. And since just about all media -- radio, TV, newspapers, what-have-you -- will one day be delivered over the Internet or something like it, then government regulation will, of constitutional necessity, go the way of all dinosaurs.

Except it's not that simple.

Last summer, a small advertising firm in Wakefield called Prime Communications filed a $20 million lawsuit against AT&T Broadband. According to accounts in both the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald, Prime accused AT&T of refusing to sell it advertising time after Prime turned down AT&T's offer to buy an Internet-based business it had developed. Prime president Neil Bocian told the Herald, "I have to have access to all the media. Now I can't buy cable, and I don't have an alternative because they own all the cable systems."

AT&T, of course, denied Bocian's charges, and it remains to be seen how this will play out. But it's a perfect illustration of a much larger problem: cable companies typically control both programming (or some of it, anyway) and the pipeline over which that programming travels. Cable companies such as AT&T claim a First Amendment right to run their businesses as they see fit. The problem is that one aspect of their business -- the pipelines -- is a monopoly, usually granted by local elected officials. That gives them enormous leverage over what content will be allowed to travel through those pipelines. It's as if state highway officials let you drive on the Mass Pike only in cars you rented from them. Neil Bocian may be right or he may be wrong, but this much is certain: he can't take his business to a competing cable company, because there isn't one. And with cable companies emerging as the preferred provider of high-speed Internet access, corporate control of the pipeline is becoming a threat.

As Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig argues in Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (Basic Books, 2000) and his new The Future of Ideas (Random House), the reason that anyone can be a content-provider on the Internet is that the Net was specifically designed to be wide-open, democratic, and neutral. The flip side, Lessig warns, is that it could just as easily have been designed another way -- and big media, having missed out on the first wave of the Net, could take advantage of the dot-com meltdown and the rise of broadband to rewrite the rules to their advantage this time around. In an interview with Newsweek's Steven Levy this week, Lessig said that "every major change that's going on right now around the Internet is a change to undermine that neutrality, so those who control the legal system or control the physical network are able to veto innovations they don't like. So you get the right to innovate depending on whether AOL or AT&T or the music industry likes your innovation."

Without government regulation, in other words, there's nothing to stop the cable companies from excluding Internet content just as surely as AT&T Broadband may be excluding Prime Communications. This private Internet could be engineered in such a way that only content approved by the cable company can be accessed. Or only content for which the cable company is receiving money can be easily found. Or certain types of content that the cable company doesn't want to compete with, such as streaming video from independent media, can't be transmitted at all.

It's not that the old, wide-open Internet will go away, says Jeff Chester, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Digital Democracy. It's that the high-speed Internet is going to become Fun City, and few people will bother with the traditional Net, where nonprofit and independent voices will cry out to be heard. It's at least theoretically possible that the full range of content will remain available only to those who keep a slow dial-up connection --- something most people just aren't going to do.

"While the Internet posed a truly competitive threat in the early 1990s of a much more open and democratic communications system, that promise is now truly threatened," Chester says. "It is not visible, it is not apparent, it is an iceberg sitting in the water. It's not like somebody's going to take away your Internet, but the fact is that the Internet is going to change in subtle ways. Clearly the network owners are going to have the ability to banish certain Web sites if they wish."

Chester fears that when Big Media perfect the high-speed, privatized Internet, with full video, music delivery, personalization, and other features, "people are going to love this stuff. That's the other problem." Independent voices, he says, "will just fade into the digital twilight."

CALL IT THE GREATEST story never told. According to a report by the Center for Public Integrity, which keeps an eye on the unappetizing stew of politics and money, media corporations and their employees contributed $75 million to candidates for federal office and the two major political parties between 1993 and mid 2000. From 1996 to 2000, the report continues, the 50 largest media companies and four of their trade associations lobbied Congress and the executive branch to the tune of $111.3 million.

Among the goodies these media moguls sought were more-corporate-friendly copyright laws, the elimination of the estate tax, fewer restrictions on tobacco and alcohol advertising, a halt to proposals that would mandate free air time for political candidates, and, most important, the elimination of FCC rules aimed at restricting ownership.

Usually the media love such a story of greed and influence -- especially when it's spoon-fed to them in the form of a respected interest group's report, complete with a predigested three-page summary. But chances are you didn't read, hear, or see anything about this one, titled, fittingly, Off the Record. "This is major news about the influence of an extremely powerful industry and its relationship to government and its favors from government," says Charles Lewis, executive director of the center. "And it was basically nonexistent in terms of news coverage. I don't think that's completely coincidental. Of course, what makes the media industry so powerful is not just the amount they spend, but the fact that they control access to the airwaves and newspaper pages."

It was the power of the media lobby -- especially in the form of the National Association of Broadcasters -- that croaked a plan by the previous FCC chairman, William Kennard, to license low-wattage, nonprofit, community-oriented radio stations whose reach is measured in city blocks rather than square miles. The NAB -- joined, believe it or not, by National Public Radio -- argued, against compelling technical evidence, that these small stations would interfere with its members' own signals, even if care were taken to locate the low-powered stations on unused portions of the FM dial. Kennard's vision, limited though it was, got nixed by Congress in the closing days of the Clinton administration, with no prospects of revival any time soon.

"It's been shut down completely in any urban area," says Steve Provizer, who heads a tiny, grassroots outfit called Allston-Brighton Free Radio, which transmits a barely detectable signal at AM 1670. (Some of its programming is rebroadcast on WJIB, AM 740.) "It's really a service that will only be useful in rural areas or exurban areas. God bless it for having that much usefulness, but it's largely been undermined by congressional action as instigated by NPR and the NAB." Previously, Provizer ran Radio Free Allston, shut down by the FCC several years ago for broadcasting without a license. Illegal? Well, yes. But also vital -- so much so that the station had received a commendation from the Boston City Council for broadcasting local political debates and otherwise serving the community in ways that bottom-line-obsessed commercial stations just don't care about.

The media lobby's next target: ownership rules that prevent a company from owning more than eight radio stations in a given market, that prohibit one company from owning a cable system and a TV station in the same market, and that prevent one company from owning a TV or radio station and a major daily newspaper in the same market.

That last regulation -- known as the cross-ownership rule -- had a major role in shaping the Boston media landscape. The Boston Herald Traveler, a predecessor to today's Herald, survived for years on the strength of its ownership of a radio station and a TV station through a waiver it had dubiously obtained from the FCC. The Globe fought back � and in the early '70s, the Herald Traveler lost its broadcast properties. The paper fell into the hands of the Hearst Corporation, and it appeared to be dying a slow, lingering death until international media magnate Rupert Murdoch acquired it in the early 1980s. (So close did the Herald come to shutting down that work crews started ripping vending machines out of the cafeteria.) Murdoch himself ran afoul of the cross-ownership rule when he bought WFXT-TV (Channel 25) in the late '80s, and Senator Ted Kennedy, a frequent target of the Herald, blocked Murdoch's attempts to obtain an FCC waiver. Murdoch sold Channel 25 only to repurchase it after selling the Herald in 1994 to his long-time protege Pat Purcell.

To bring the story full circle, Purcell -- who a year ago bought about 100 community papers in Greater Boston and on Cape Cod -- would now like nothing better than to go into the broadcasting business in order to compete more aggressively with the Globe, whose corporate owner, the New York Times Company, also owns the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and, unless the sale is derailed, will soon own a chunk of the New England Sports Network and the Boston Red Sox as well.

"If the rule didn't exist anymore, who knows what would happen?" asks Purcell. "It's a little early to speculate, but a whole lot of options would open up for us." Clearly, it's a subject close to his heart. His newspaper has come out against the cross-ownership rule on both its editorial page and in its business columns. And Herald reporters are already featured on Channel 25 � just as Globe reporters are featured on New England Cable News and on Channel 4's The Boston Globe/WBZ News Conference.

The cross-ownership rule, in fact, may need some rethinking. Allowing a media executive such as Purcell, who's rooted in the community, to extend his franchise and spread out his costs could benefit not just him but also those who like the Herald's brand of journalism. But simply repealing the rule could be dangerous. Who, after all, would be better positioned to buy a TV or radio station (or both) than the mighty Times Company, thus giving the Globe even more of an advantage in a market that it already dominates?

The Center for Digital Democracy's Jeff Chester says he would have no problem with allowing, say, the number-two newspaper in a market to acquire the number-three or -four TV station. But he adds that Boston -- one of the few competitive newspaper towns left in the country -- "is a unique case." Preventing one media company from amassing too much power in a given community, Chester says, is still a worthwhile goal.

BACK WHEN A.J. LIEBLING was writing about the death of newspapers, he was mainly concerned about the cuts in news coverage that monopoly publishers inevitably ordered. "Money is not made by competition among newspapers, but by avoiding it," he wrote. That's still true today, even when competition at least theoretically exists. Witness the foreign bureaus that were closed and the reporting positions that were eliminated during the 1990s as the Big Three networks fell into the hands of conglomerate owners -- cuts that made it difficult (although not, thankfully, impossible) to cover the war against terrorism following the September 11 attacks.

Just as important as competition or the lack thereof is the dominance of corporate over community values.

Huge radio companies compete fiercely, but they do so by offering lowest-common-denominator syndicated programming in city after city, such as Howard Stern and Opie and Anthony, and right-wing talk shows, such as Rush Limbaugh's. The crude-but-intelligent Imus in the Morning is a notable exception, but even that stands in contrast to the localism that once made radio a unique medium.

A conglomerate such as AOL Time Warner produces the movie Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and then promotes it in its magazines (Time, People, Sports Illustrated), on CNN, and on the AOL Internet service.

NBC News and ABC News have to think two or three times before running any negative reports on their corporate owners, General Electric and Disney, respectively.

Newsweek is owned by the Washington Post Company, which has a content-sharing relationship with MSNBC and MSNBC.com. That will prevent Newsweek from ever again getting beaten on its own exclusive, as it was with Michael Isikoff's revelation that Bill Clinton had had sex with that woman, Monica Lewinsky. But there are weeks when the magazine looks like nothing so much as a print version of MSNBC, flogging the MSNBC.com Web site on every page and, recently, publishing a piece of media criticism by that noted journalistic thinker Chris Matthews. (His verdict: the media are doing a pretty damned good job, thank you very much!)

"Who owns these companies makes all the difference," says Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. "Ownership matters profoundly. It's not just the system of ownership, it's the human values of the people who do the owning." He adds, though, that he is concerned whenever news organizations are acquired by conglomerates whose primary businesses are not news. He notes, for example, that ABC News represents just two percent of profits at Disney.

"There's a lot of reason to worry about the fact that journalism is being subsumed as a minority presence inside conglomerates," Rosenstiel says. "One dark cloud of conglomeration is if you have owners who don't care about journalism. The second dark cloud is if they see their properties as an opportunity for synergy."

Michael Powell told the Wall Street Journal last September, "I think I'm a little misunderstood on the whole area of media consolidation." He added: "The public interest is not always served by strict liability and slavish commitment to a linear judgment made 30 years ago."

Big isn't always bad, and, in some respects, it makes as much sense to rail against media conglomerates as it does to boycott Starbucks, where the coffee is better than it was at the mom-and-pop shop it replaced and where the employee benefits include health insurance and stock options. Nostalgia based on blind allegiance to the past is just stupid.

But Powell needs to understand that the public interest doesn't consist merely of getting the coolest technological advances into the public's hands as quickly as possible. A diversity of voices and a place for independent media are just as much a part of the public interest.

There's a reason that the First Amendment protects the media from government regulation: the framers believed that free and independent media were absolutely essential for the same public interest that Powell claims is his primary guide.

The danger is that Powell will release the media from the last vestiges of government regulation � and then stand back and watch as the media's corporate masters use their power and influence to silence any voices that threaten their economic interests.

Dan Kennedy is a media critic for the Boston Phoenix.

Last fall, The Wall Street Journal published a horrifying article on its front page. Under the headline THE U.S. MAY FACE MAD-COW EXPOSURE DESPITE ASSURANCES FROM GOVERNMENT, staff writer Steve Stecklow reported that the domestic cattle herd is far from safe, and that the government is doing little to test either cattle or people for signs of illness.

Yet despite Stecklow's meticulously detailed findings and the story's prominent placement in one of our most respected newspapers, it pretty much disappeared without a trace. To the extent that any attention has been paid to mad-cow disease during the past month, it was to plug a reassuring report by the Center for Risk Analysis, at the Harvard School of Public Health, that there is vanishingly little likelihood here of a British-style outbreak of mad cow.

What a difference a year makes. In late 2000 and early 2001, network television newscasts and national newsmagazines were filled with terrifying stories about what had happened in Europe, especially in Britain. Cattle in increasing numbers were coming down with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), a little-understood disease that kills by punching the brain full of tiny holes.

Worse -- much worse -- was the likelihood that a similar fatal brain disease affecting humans was spreading through the consumption of contaminated beef. The illness was called a "new variant" of a rare condition named Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and thus became known, for short, as nvCJD. More than 100 people, nearly all of them from Britain, have died of nvCJD over the past five years.

For the US media, the story was made to order, featuring as it did video of wild-eyed, staggering cows, heaps of burning animal carcasses, distraught farmers, and � in a few cases � footage of twentysomething nvCJD victims trembling through the final stages of their awful disease. "I hate to be blunt, but there was a strong visual to go with it," says Boston University communications professor Tobe Berkovitz. "A typical science story doesn't get much play, because you need a visual to be aired ad infinitum or ad nauseam to make it a television news story. And video of shaking, crumbling cows gives you a visual."

There was, though, a problem with sustaining interest in mad-cow disease. First, there was the inconvenient fact that not a single case of BSE or nvCJD had ever been found in the US. Second, federal officials assured the public that steps taken several years earlier -- banning the importation of beef from Britain, and outlawing the use of beef byproducts in animal feed, thought to be the principal means by which BSE is spread -- would prevent an outbreak from ever occurring here. By spring, few mad-cow stories were making their way onto the front pages or the network newscasts, as the media turned their attention to more characteristic obsessions. No, it hasn't disappeared completely -- witness a recent episode of The West Wing in which the Bartlet administration debates how best to spin an outbreak of mad cow. But in terms of public consciousness, this is one potential crisis that has faded far into the background.

"There was a period when mad-cow disease was a very telegenic story in an ugly and disturbing sort of way," says Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse University's Center for the Study of Popular Television. But then, he notes, "the summer of Gary occurred, and all of a sudden we had all of that time being spent in the cable and broadcast media on Gary Condit and Chandra Levy." Finally, Thompson observes, "what Gary Condit did to mad cow and some other stories, September 11 did to Gary Condit."

But if mad-cow disease is, understandably, not as pressing an issue as the hunt for Osama bin Laden, it remains, as the Wall Street Journal article suggests, an important, ongoing story. If mad cow -- and, more crucially, nvCJD -- breaks out into the US population at some point during the next several years, the media's chronically short attention span in covering this complicated scientific and medical story will surely stand out as one of their principal failures of 2001.

MAD-COW DISEASE, "classic" (that is, non-nv) CJD, and a similar illness in sheep called scrapie are all known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, or TSEs. All of them occur naturally, and scientists believe that mammals, humans included, contract TSEs at the rate of one per million in population. Although the exact cause of TSEs is poorly understood, it is thought by many scientists to be related to the presence of "prions" -- proteins that somehow take on a different and deadly shape, and that force other proteins to follow their lead. This process has been compared to "ice-nine," the substance in Kurt Vonnegut's 1963 novel Cat's Cradle that destroys the earth by changing all the water so that it turns solid at room temperature.

Among the best and most thorough treatments of mad-cow disease was an article written for the Atlantic Monthly in 1998 by science journalist Ellen Ruppel Shell. She argues that if BSE arises in cattle naturally at the rate of one in a million, then there would be 100 with BSE among the nation's 100 million head of cattle at any given time. And if any of those cattle somehow entered the food chain -- say, in high-protein animal feed that is later fed back to cattle -- then BSE can spread far beyond those 100 head. Humans are exposed by eating contaminated beef -- a danger heightened by such practices as slaughtering cattle with pressure guns, which blast highly infectious brain and spinal tissue into the edible parts of the animal carcass.

Shell focuses especially heavily on animal-rendering plants, "a series of altogether unsavory places where dead cats and dogs, road kill, the occasional circus animal, and the diseased carcasses of farm animals are mixed into a ghastly, belching stew." Yum. Among the products made by these plants is the aforementioned high-protein animal feed, which turns cows into cannibals by feeding them byproducts of other cows -- including, potentially, cows with BSE. Complicating this considerably is the fact that other animals dumped into the stew may also have TSEs -- especially road kill such as elk and deer, which, in the Western United States, are experiencing an epidemic of a TSE known as chronic wasting disease. Finally, to save on energy costs, rendering plants in recent decades have perfected a system of low-temperature cooking. The problem is that sustained exposure to high temperatures is absolutely essential for killing TSEs.

But if feeding cows to cows is now illegal, well, why should we worry? As it turns out, it's not nearly that simple. It is still perfectly legal to feed cow byproducts to pigs and chickens, which are not thought to harbor TSEs. And it's perfectly legal to toss those same pigs and chickens into the rending vats to manufacture feed that can then be fed back to cows. Also, as the Journal article reports, 13 percent of rending plants do not comply with the new regulations against putting beef byproducts into feed intended for cows -- and the federal government itself admits that "scores of shipments of animal byproducts for use in animal feed came into the U.S. in recent years from countries that now have mad-cow disease in their cattle herds, a potentially serious source of contamination."

There is still, though, the simple fact that no cases of BSE or nvCJD have ever been diagnosed in the US. Right? Well, maybe. Some mad-cow specialists say the problem is that the United States has not been inspecting cattle in anywhere near the numbers or with the rigor that British and European authorities now do, meaning that cases of BSE could be slipping by. As for the lack of any human cases, there is at least some reason to believe that there are, in fact, tens of thousands of cases -- many of them sitting right in front of us when we visit the nursing home.

In the 1990s, researchers at Yale University and the University of Pittsburgh studied autopsy results of people who had died of Alzheimer's disease. Although their sample sizes were small, the results were chilling: somewhere between eight and 13 percent were found to have actually had CJD rather than Alzheimer's. That's far more than the 250 or so cases that would be statistically expected of "classic," or naturally occurring, CJD, meaning that a more likely explanation would be the consumption of contaminated meat.

That would also fit with the decades-long incubation period for CJD and nvCJD. According to the Web site of the Alzheimer's Association, approximately four million Americans have Alzheimer's -- about 10 percent of those who are 65 or older, and nearly half of those who are 85 or older. As Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber wrote in their book Mad Cow U.S.A.: Could the Nightmare Happen Here? (Common Courage, 1997), "If the true number of CJD cases in the United States turns out to be 40,000 instead of 250, the implications for human health would be severe. It could mean that a deadly infectious dementia akin to Britain's problem has already entered the U.S. population. And since CJD has an invisible latency period of up to 40 years in humans, 40,000 cases could be just the beginning of something much larger." (A downloadable version of Mad Cow U.S.A. is available for free on the Web site of the Center for Democracy and Technology.)

Ronnie Cummins, national director of the Organic Consumers Association, whose Web site contains an extensive archive of mad-cow information, says that at a minimum the federal government should launch a program of quick, inexpensive tests of both cattle and Alzheimer's-disease patients to determine whether we may have a hidden mad-cow crisis that warrants further study and action.

"It's not a question of 'Do we have mad cow in this country?' Of course we do," says Cummins. "Every livestock-grazing country in the world has always had it at low levels. The question is 'How much do we have, and how quickly is it magnifying?'"

The conventional wisdom is that we have little to fear from mad-cow disease, and of course the conventional wisdom may be right. Lloyd deMause, editor of the Journal of Psychohistory, says it's not unusual for societies to develop a cultural fear of poisoning at the end of a long period of prosperity -- it's a natural reaction to feelings of guilt over having experienced such good fortune. Seen in this light, last year's media obsession with mad-cow disease -- an illness never detected in this country -- is similar to panicky news stories over West Nile virus, a rare, rather mild, flu-like illness, and this fall's outburst of fear over anthrax, which, after all, killed just a tiny handful of people.

"Why poison? This is pre-verbal," deMause says. "It goes way back to when you were still drinking milk from the mommy's breast or from the bottle." (It's this same dark, guilt-ridden fear of the forces around us, deMause says, that explains what he considers to be our overreaction to the terrorist attacks of September 11. "I'd be glad to shoot bin Laden in the cross hairs myself. I'm not a pacifist," he says. "But it seems to me that we're going to go back and finish the job in Iraq and do all sorts of other horrible things that we should not do.")

But even if fear of mad-cow disease somehow taps into our more primal cultural obsessions, there is the fact of mad-cow disease that must still be contended with. And the fact is that the seeming dearth of mad-cow cases in this country may be the entirely predictable result of our failure to look.

Michael Greger, a Jamaica Plain physician who is a nationally recognized expert on mad-cow disease (he's listed in the acknowledgments of Mad Cow U.S.A.), blasts the US Department of Agriculture for what he calls a "'don't look, don't find' program of surveillance," adding: "Every week in Europe they test 10 times as many cattle than we have tested in a decade. Europe has tested five million at this point. If the US had as high an incidence as Europe, the current USDA testing program would not detect it. It is irresponsible to assert that we have no mad-cow disease in the United States when we simply haven't looked hard enough to tell."

As for what the future holds, Greger replies that "no one knows what the risk of eating American beef is. And by the time we know for sure, it may be too late. I counsel my patients to err on the side of caution and stop eating beef. Better safe than sorry."

For obvious reasons, mad-cow disease remains a big story in Britain. Last September, London's Guardian newspaper published a harrowing two-part series on the small village of Queniborough, where five young adults had died of nvCJD over a period of several years. The reporter, Kevin Toolis, noted that all the victims may have gotten sick because of such antiquated butchering practices as mixing brains and meat. His description of the long, agonizing death of Stacey Robinson was particularly horrifying.

"The howling went on for five months, night and day, from the autumn of 1997 to the spring of 1998, a low, growling, demonic yowl that escaped her lips as if it came from deep within the earth; the cry of the damned," Toolis wrote. "It could be heard halfway along the ward in Leicester's Royal Infirmary as Stacey plunged into madness. She soon lost the power to walk, to eat, to clean herself, to use the bathroom. She turned aggressive, kicking, swearing and assaulting her nurses. She battered her forearm against the bed until it was black and blue. She held her hand under a scalding tap and felt no pain. In the end, the doctors turned her ordinary city hospital room into a padded cell."

Mad-cow disease could be much ado about nothing; it could also turn out to be a scourge for the ages. To date, only 100 or so people in Britain (and just a handful in other countries) have died of nvCJD, even though some 60 million may have been exposed to BSE-contaminated beef. But because of the decades-long latency period, those who have died so far may merely represent the bleeding edge. According to some estimates, the worst-case scenario is that some 100,000 Britons could die the way Stacey Robinson did.

Last winter, when mad-cow disease was all the rage, both Time and Newsweek ran big stories on it. CAN IT HAPPEN HERE? asked Time. CANNIBALS TO COWS: THE PATH OF A DEADLY DISEASE was Newsweek's lurid take. A search of the New York Times' Web site turns up 114 references to mad-cow disease during the first three months of 2001 -- but just 43 during the slow-news months of June, July, and August.

Three and a half months after September 11, the media are gradually returning to normal, however you want to define normal in a country scarred by terrorism and war. The New York Observer last week predicted that the Times may cease publication of "A Nation Challenged," its special section on the war against terrorism, sometime after the New Year. How long will it be before Geraldo, back from misrepresenting his whereabouts in Afghanistan, treats his new viewers on the Fox News Channel to a special on JonBenét Ramsey?

The media have distinguished themselves this year, proving that -- despite a decade of corporate downsizing and a growing obsession with celebrity and scandal -- they can still provide sustained, in-depth coverage of vitally important news. If the reinvigorated media are looking for other important stories to cover in 2002, they should take another, longer look at mad-cow disease. They had the chance in 2001, and they walked away. But discerning the extent of this threat to our food supply is surely as important as describing the threat from Al Qaeda.

Dan Kennedy is Media Editor at Boston Phoenix and can be reached at dkennedy@phx.com

The oldest question about global conflict is why can't we all just get along? But the second-oldest has to be what if women were in charge? Might women bring something to the peacemaking and -keeping table that men do not? The short answer is yes. Qualities universally perceived, often condescendingly, as women's strengths -- an ability to listen, share experiences, empathize with all sides of an issue, and compromise -- while useful in negotiations, are rarely seen in the almost exclusively male circles of international diplomacy, where a premium is placed on the ability to outsmart the person sitting across from you.

Women Waging Peace, a project of the Women and Public Policy Program (WAPPP) of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, works to break open those diplomatic circles "by identifying the essential role and contribution of women in preventing violent conflict, stopping war, and sustaining peace in fragile areas around the world." For three years, the project has hosted an international colloquium on how to involve women in the rarified circles of global conflict resolution. This year's colloquium, currently taking place at Harvard University, has special resonance in light of the war in Afghanistan and the threat of even more terrorist attacks hanging over the United States.

As the wars in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo have shown, and as the current international crisis further attests, geopolitical conflicts in the post�Cold War era test the limits of international diplomacy as never before. Brokering peace in these hot spots is a much different game than the high-stakes chess played by the United States and the former Soviet Union. Wouldn't it make sense to look to the half of the population that has been silenced for so long -- and the one that traditionally uses peacekeeping skills -- to create today's new diplomacy?

"The makers of war should not design the peace. It's a bad habit," says WAPPP director Swanee Hunt, a former ambassador to Austria. "The women in Bosnia said, �If we are going to be the victims, we want to be part of the decision-making.' I go even further: I say, let's draw from a bigger talent pool."

Hunt describes a UN official who recalled that African men didn't want women on their negotiating team because they feared that the women would compromise. She smiles at this notion as if to say, precisely.

This year's colloquium has drawn about 200 women from around the world, many from war-torn regions marked by centuries of tribal and territorial conflict, including Afghanistan, Russia, Pakistan, and the Middle East. While few of these women hold positions in the power structure of their countries, they represent the world's community organizers. These are the grassroots activists, educators, health-care workers, academics, researchers, and religious leaders who keep their countries running even in times of war. They do the unheralded traditional work of women, and, judging from the participants' stellar credentials, they do it with excellence.

But the Women Waging Peace (WWP) colloquium aims to push these successful women from behind-the-scenes support positions into the corridors of power where they can affect change on a much larger scale. Toward that end, many of the panels and talks at Harvard focus on giving them the practical tools to make their voices heard. The cornerstone of this strategy involves sharing personal stories of survival, justice-seeking, and fragile rebuilding efforts in ravaged countries.

Sheenah Kaliisa listened to emotional testimony from a delegation of Cambodian women. Kaliisa, a young journalist working for radio outlets including the South Africa Broadcast Company and the East African Standard in Nairobi, covers her native Rwanda. Most of her stories focus on the aftermath of Rwanda's 1994 genocidal war, during which some 800,000 people were killed in 100 days. The Cambodian women's stories -- detailing how a lack of justice and resolution following Pol Pot's 1970s genocidal regime has kept Cambodia in the stranglehold of unresolved conflict -- helped put her own work in perspective, says Kaliisa. In other words, the political became the personal and vice versa.

"I try to build peace by telling the stories of war, by disseminating information about women because no one else will tell their stories," she says. "Genocide was not committed by the army or the government; it was neighbor cutting up neighbor. Rape was rampant during genocide. Men were shot and cut up, but the women had to be raped first. They saw their daughters raped. I know one woman who was raped by 30 men, one after the other. Then they raped her 15-year-old daughter.... There can be no reconciliation if women who are living and dealing with it are not included."

In sessions that translated personal stories into strategy, women also shared experiences as researchers and experts in a particular region. In a panel discussion on transitional justice and reconstructing war-torn communities, women researchers grappled with the issue of what happens to a country and its people after war or conflict. What is the role of women in countries trying to reconcile with the citizenry and attempting to rebuild? For the panelists, women are the key to the process of rebuilding.

"There is an African saying, 'Women make memory,'" says Paola Cesarini, a political scientist at Columbia University. "Women are often the widows, mothers, and orphans. They have a key role in the passing on of memories of the struggle or the change from a military regime to a democracy. Women live longer. They are the caretakers of children and the elderly."

Women create the narrative for where a country has been and where it will go after a war, adds Vanessa Farr, an expert in women's coalition-building in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. Again, women's traditional role as communicators and memory-keepers isn't just useful, it is essential and underused. "Women are the transmitters of stories, but often women's own stories get lost," Farr says. "When reparations come around, women are recast, no matter what they did. Even if they were combatants or arms smugglers, they become the wives and daughters and sisters of the men whose stories are being told."

This pattern occurred even during the highly publicized and just-completed Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in South Africa. "Women mostly told the stories of men," says Farr. "So much of the brutality was sexualized; it was not easy for the women to talk about it. There was no space for women to talk, so their stories fell off the page."

"Until a woman has told her story, she isn't in a place to think analytically about frameworks and how it relates to policy," says Hunt. "By giving the women space over three and one-half days to talk about the death, destruction, and terror they've experienced, they start feeling like they are not alone and out there on their own." In other words, the colloquium aims to meld '70s-style consciousness-raising with practical skills such as negotiating tactics, conflict resolution, strategizing, and critical thinking.

The immediate impact of the sessions will be felt November 16, when hundreds of mostly male policymakers from the United Nations, the US State Department, and the US Agency for International Development, and ambassadors from India, Russia, the Congo, and other countries come to the colloquium to listen to some of these stories themselves.

Why is this important? Well, says Hunt, "Last year I had a former assistant secretary of defense tell me, 'I've never heard from people who were affected by our policies before.' I find that appalling."

In the end, though, what matters is what's accomplished. While there's an academic, theoretical tone to the proceedings, past WWP colloquiums have delivered results. At minimum, the conferences have given women greater access to diplomatic channels. Last year, for example, three Rwandan women were appointed to the negotiating team for the Congo/Ugandan peace talks in 2000, a move that came after Hunt met with Rwandan president Paul Kagame.

WWP member Aloisea Inyumba, the executive secretary of the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission in Rwanda, visited Harvard with Kagame in February. She is now preparing villages in Rwanda for the reintegration of 80,000 prisoners who allegedly participated in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. More than three million Hutus who fled to the Congo will return to Rwanda and its Tutsi-run government; it will be Inyumba's job to make sure these Hutus are not massacred when they return to the very villages where they committed atrocities.

After the first WWP colloquium and policy day in 1999, members worked with Bill Wood, a deputy assistant secretary at the US State Department, to develop language on the role of women in preventing conflict. They also traveled to Japan for the G8 Foreign Ministers' Meeting in July 2000. This year, Wood advocated inclusion of the statement on women in the peace process in the G8 agenda. The United Nations and European Union, along with the foreign ministers of the G8 countries, have recently adopted measures supporting the involvement of women in formal peace-negotiation processes.

Heady stuff. And it all evolved from simple acts of sharing � and listening. Boston's Jaleh Joubine-Khadem, for instance, told of her work in Ecuador. Born in Iran and schooled in art history, Joubine-Khadem volunteered to go to Ecuador five years ago to help with tuberculosis education. She returns to the country each year to work with indigenous villagers and to facilitate alliances between women of means and the rural poor. The eye-opening experience, with its sense of mission, is one she wants to share with others.

"Once we help them, they take the ball and run with it," says Joubine-Khadem. "Men are simply absent from many of these villages. They go to the larger cities, claiming they will earn money and send it home, but they don't." She notes that it is the women who are left, and the women who want to learn how to protect the community's health, how to purify the water, how to make sure there is enough to eat.

As representatives from WWP prepare to sit down with policymakers in an effort to affect change on the world stage, it's clear that the personal is indeed the political. And if the WWP organizers have their way, the personal will shape policy -- however slowly and tenaciously. Women will have a seat at the peacemaking table. And when they talk, they will be heard.

We'll all be better off for it.