Back in 1983, I sold my own wedding. My mother, a lifelong New Yorker, refused to make a trip to California, so in exchange for moving the location of my wedding to Long Island, I received from her a tidy cash payment.

At the time, I found nothing strange about selling my wedding because I was deeply cynical about marriage as an institution. As a child of the '60s counter-culture, I equated marriage with the Vietnam War -- some sham ceremonial act, like saving the world from communist hordes, that actually had nothing to do with mental health, romance or commitment, but was rather one more way that mass society sought to colonize our minds.

I am not kidding, and, believe me, I wasn't alone. Back in the day, most of my friends saw marriage as a strange ritual, honeycombed with contradictions. Marriages were stultifying, burdened by adultery and inequality. They were invitations to divorce. Of course, as the idealistic 1970s gave way to the pragmatic Reagan years, some of my best friends also got married, though like me with the stipulation, "I don't need the government to sanctify my relationship."

In the context of my own cynicism about marriage, the current fervent pursuit of the right to marriage by gays and lesbians is perplexing. But equally perplexing is the defense of heterosexual-only marriage by judges and religious conservatives. In the debate over who can marry, both sides imbue the institution of marriage with sanctity and an importance that it neither deserves nor possesses.

I don't say this simply because I had the most painful divorce in human history. (Well, maybe not as painful as the fellow in Manhattan who recently blew up his home -- with himself in it -- to stop his wife from getting the place in the final dissolution.) Certainly, failed marriages are no justification for the end of marriage itself. Even I remarried, three years ago, though once again cynically, in order to help my new life partner gain permanent residency in the United States. There are unquestionably practical benefits to marrying. That's why I'm in favor of gay marriage as a legal matter. But in favoring a more liberal criteria for marriage, I worry that we lose sight of the wider and weirder problem of permitting government to validate our most personal social partnerships.

During my lifetime, many good people expended much effort trying to stop the government from lording over the private lives of romantic partners. When I was 12 years old, for instance, a court struck down the ban on blacks and whites marrying. In my 20s, laws against homosexual sex began to collapse. The whole trend seemed downright sane: Get the government out of the bedroom.

By my later 30s, in the 1990s, the privileged status of marriage as an institution had nearly vanished. Children of unmarried parents, once stigmatized as bastards, were now born "out of wedlock," which sounded much nicer and reflected an end to the stigma of unmarried women bearing children. Employers and government, meanwhile, began to recognize "domestic partnerships," handing out equivalent benefits to couples who claimed to have the same sort of binding commitment and mutual regard as husbands and wives. Later, these same benefits were extended to same-sex partners, and for good reason. Gay couples deserve the same effective legal protections and benefits as straight ones, married or not.

All these changes highlighted the essential arbitrariness of marriage, undermining fatally the claims that romantic partnerships must be endorsed by God in order to qualify as moral or legal. The government accepted that marriage was purely civil and subject to the same rules of procedure as any other. Of course, the implications of this principle have delivered us to our present conundrum. If we do not exclude gays from adoption, or employment in a police force or attendance at Giants games, then we cannot exclude them from marriage either.

I accept the implications of the principle. At the same time, I pine away from the good old days when it seemed marriage was doomed as a legal institution and a social ideal. Obviously, the challenge to marriage has receded, if not vanished altogether. As a ceremony and a social reality, marriage reigns supreme. But, rather than celebrate the hegemony of marriage, I submit that we are rather stuck with this peculiar institution in much the same way as we are afflicted by death, disease and taxes. In the battle over who gets to marry and who doesn't, we would be wise to remember that, wide or narrow, the circle of marriage brings pain as well as joy and sometimes more of the former than the later.

Jared Bernstein is the conscience of the American economy. In his new book, "All Together Now: Common Sense for a Fair Economy," he advocates an increase of government involvement in American life: primarily our economic lives. Given the public's current low expectations for government effectiveness, it sounds like a leap of faith. Bernstein says it's a leap well worth taking. Government, he says, is the only institution that can enable us to meet the challenges of health care, globalization and rampant economic inequality.

A strong country puts people's needs before corporate profits, he says. In order to make that happen we have to ditch what he calls the Bush administration's YOYO philosophy ("you're on your own") and replace it with a kinder, gentler alternative: WITT ("we're in this together").

G. Pascal Zachary: You're all about bringing fairness to ordinary workers and having an economy that serves people over profits. In your book, you say that unions do a good job of achieving many of the goals you favor. If the benefits of unions are so clear -- higher wages, stronger benefits -- why don't we have more?

Jared Bernstein: A majority of work force say they'd like to be part of a collective bargaining unit. The desire is pervasive. The problem is in the difficulties in forming such units. The playing field is very steeply tilted against those who wish to form a union. The power to tamp down a union organizing drive is very large. Employers have lots of tools to tamp down a drive to form a union. It's a steep uphill climb.

Zachary: How can the playing field be leveled? How can more workers get unions?

Bernstein: We can start by making them jump through fewer hoops. Card check, where a majority of employees sign a card saying they want a union and the union comes, is important. Then there would be fewer chances for employers to oppose a union drive and retaliate against pro-union workers.

There should be much tougher penalties on employers who fire workers who are trying to form unions. Employers who do this should be quickly punished. Right now all they get is a slap on the wrist. To get more unions, you need to increase the cost of illegal behavior by employers.

Zachary: In the absence of stronger unions, what can working people push for?

Bernstein: One of the most important sources of bargaining power these days is a full job market. When the job market is tight, the job market itself serves a similar role as unions. Workers have more clout over matters of pay, benefits and working conditions. They can switch jobs more easily. The clout workers have is severely diminished in a weak job market. So what workers can do is to advocate for better macroeconomics. This gets to the heart of my book. Workers should sign onto an agenda that elevates full employment to a critically important national goal.

Zachary: How can they do that?

Bernstein: For example, they can press the Federal Reserve to show concern for higher employment. The Fed really doesn't do that, though they are supposed to. No one calls them on this failure. The pressure on the Fed tends to be to keep inflation low and much less to keep employment full. The question gets back to whose economy is it? If a lousy job report helps to boost the stock market [because high unemployment undercuts demands by workers for raises and thus promotes corporate profits], ask yourself which market has the most constituents, the stock market or the job market?

Zachary: In your book you pit individualistic approaches against communal, cooperative approaches to government. But aren't you really talking about Republicans versus Democrats? Aren't you really against everything the Republicans stand for economically and fiscally?

Bernstein: There are ways that Democrats also are failing to pursue the agenda I outline. But it is definitely true that the Republicans are failing more often. They have no clue when it comes to eco-management, actually. The Republicans are promoting a kind of Robin Hood in reverse. They are trying to enrich their friends and donors. Along the way they're shifting risk from government's shoulders onto individuals. The Republicans are pretty much dividing the spoils among themselves and their donors and leaving the rest of us to fend for ourselves.

Zachary: What about the Democrats? Aren't they in favor of your approach, and haven't the voters rejected it?

Bernstein: I don't think either Kerry or Gore [the last two Democratic nominees] sold a program of economic fairness in a way that reached people. A presidential candidate needs to communicate to the electorate that he or she understands the economic insecurities they face and has a plan to reconnect their living standards to the growing economy. Bill Clinton did that. [John Edwards, Kerry's 2004 running mate,] can do that. Barack Obama does that. Hillary Clinton comes to mind. She can connect with people on these issues, but for some reason it doesn't come across in the media. She convincingly expresses the kinds of thoughts I'm talking about.

Zachary: With the economy booming, with housing prices still healthy, why should voters embrace economic alternatives? Or is our perceived economic health a fraud? Is the economy simply held together by foreign investment, high deficits and low-interest rates? Do we have a Ponzi scheme economy, as the economist and columnist Paul Krugman repeatedly suggests in the New York Times?

Bernstein: Fundamentally I don't think we have a Ponzi-scheme economy. One of most important variables is productivity growth [whereby the economic value of a worker's time is growing at a much faster rate than in the past]. But even though I believe we have a new productivity growth curve, there are absolutely some shaky fundamentals. You hit on them. The extent of exposure to foreign debt in particular. That's one of our major exposures. We're depending on outsiders to finance 7 percent of our spending because we as a country are consuming more than we are producing. That's unsustainable. So the question is how does this unwind … with a bang or a whimper?

Zachary: What do you think?

Bernstein: I see a middle ground, somewhere in between a bang and whimper. That still isn't pretty. We'll be looking at slower growth.

Zachary: This new Bush tax cut, moving through Congress this week, seems like madness. Can the government simply keep piling up more debts and nothing happens? When is the day of reckoning coming, and how bad will it be?

Bernstein: The day of reckoning is far enough away that these guys feel they can cut taxes with impunity. No one has proved to them that they can't. Maybe this November the electorate will send them a message that this profligacy won't stand. You can't justify this latest tax cut on any rational economic grounds. Yet it is hard to see what stops them. Where are the political forces that are pushing against this craziness?

Zachary: You say in your book that you want our very divided country to come together and embrace an economic platform that puts people's needs before corporate profits and gives more help to the poor and disadvantaged. Yet the country seems headed in the opposite direction. Are you sensing some kind of "darkness before the dawn" scenario that other people are missing?

Bernstein: I think I am. What motivates this book is the vision that we're going down the wrong path, and that it is within our power to change. So yes, I think we are at a "darkness before the dawn" moment.

The polls support this idea. There is a growing sense by a majority of Americans that something is fundamentally wrong in how we are running our affairs.

The war is out of hand. There's a large and growing disconnect between the economy and the people in the economy. Add to that a pervasive sense that the Bush administration is incompetent. Even if you like Republican ideas and values, you can't support the administration's actions. Even when government intervention is undeniable, like in the Katrina situation, the Bush administration can't handle the job, and of course that makes people more insecure and unsettled, and they start looking for another path.

Zachary: So there's an opportunity here for progressives?

Bernstein: There are clear openings for progressives. The failure of social security privatization and health savings accounts -- that suggests there are openings. When those initiatives by Bush fell flat, it led me to think that people are rejecting the values embedded in those initiatives and have a desire for alternatives.

Zachary: Why does the majority of the electorate vote against its own class interests? Or even if we grant that a majority of people doesn't vote against class interests, a significant minority certainly does. What's wrong here? Are Americans just dumb?

Bernstein: Not at all. It's not even clear to me that people even do vote against their class interests. I won't believe that until I see a candidate express class interests in a way that hasn't been done yet. When that person loses, then I'll question my belief. For a long time, the economic debate has been so foggy that you can't tell who votes against what. Take the last election. I don't think Kerry was a bad candidate, but he didn't convincingly present economic alternatives. Any candidate who does represent the class interests of the majority will be a winner, I believe.

Zachary: When will the failure to come up with alternative sources of energy hurt the economy and crack the consciousness of ordinary Americans?

Bernstein: I am a complete disbeliever in almost every conspiracy theory, but the energy industrial complex does seem extremely entrenched. It's clear to everyone who looks at the problem that we have to end our addiction to oil. Even Bush has said so. But the question is what are we doing about it. The problem is we can't do anything about reducing our dependence on oil if all the paths forward are blocked by moneyed interests.

Clearly, conservation steps ought to be taken right away. Like better gas mileage in cars. But oil interests keep that from happening. And why not make a big public-private partnership to push for energy independence? Like the Apollo Alliance? Like when we said in the 1960s we'll land on the moon in 10 years? Well, we can't have such a crash program when your political funders are blocking that path. We have pure shortsighted politics in the energy area.

Pricing is another problem. Gas at $3 a gallon apparently isn't the tipping point to change people's behavior. Maybe gas at $5 to $6 a gallon does it. The price right now doesn't cause enough pain to enough people. Unless that changes -- maybe through a higher tax on gasoline -- we'll probably still stay on the path were on.

Zachary: Are Bush and Cheney bent on wrecking the federal balance sheet as part of a nefarious, diabolical plan to permanently cripple the capacity of the U.S. government to get anything done, and thus force the U.S. down a path of smaller government, or are Bush and Cheney incredibly stupid? Or are both true?

Bernstein: I don't think it's diabolical or stupid. It is pure politics. Bush and Cheney have made a political calculation that deficits don't matter and that spending helps them. They are very much driven by politics, not economics. Besides, spending helps them. So does cutting taxes for your rich supporters.

Zachary: But isn't the legacy of this to permanently constrain the federal government, to limit what government can do?

Bernstein: If you have to shrink government politically to live within your means, that's fine with Bush and Cheney, too. But they are leaving that possibility to other generations. That's not their problem.

Zachary: But it is ours as a nation.

Bernstein: There's nothing new in government spending like a drunken sailor. What I've outlined is a different set of purposes. The economic policies we need should not simply be concerned with efficiency or getting out of the way so the individuals can fend for themselves. We need to be concerned with equity and opportunity too.

Everyone I meet is afraid. The chief executive of one of China's largest hotel groups is afraid to complain to the police about the hustlers who sell fake watches outside the lobbies of his hotels. A Buddhist who runs a network of factories is afraid to speak openly about the Chinese occupation of Tibet. A sports marketing official, one of the agents for China's basketball stars, is afraid to speak out against misguided policies of the national sports system.

What is unusual about these people is not that they are afraid; many people in China are. What is unusual about these people is that they are Americans doing business in China -- some even doing business successfully. What they fear, of course, is the same thing that China's people fear: the arbitrary power of government.

For Americans doing business in China, it is a short step between fear and collaboration, as I recently found during a two-week visit to Shanghai and Beijing, the two leading destinations in China for American "expats."

My first meeting in Shanghai was not with Americans, but with Chinese nationals working for them. On a Sunday afternoon I sat in a shiny Starbucks near the city's central park, tucked into the rear corner of the shop, drinking coffee with five young people (three men and two women) who each work for a large American company in China. They all agreed that working for an American company had benefits over employment with a Chinese company. There was more openness at work, more emphasis on performance and more room to take chances. But one thing was the same: If they were caught criticizing the government, or even breaking the petty rules that govern their social lives -- such as the ban on meeting in formal associations that might touch on political and social issues -- the American company would not intervene to help them.

A few days later, an American who used to work for Nike explains to me why he won't stick his neck out for the Chinese or even his own principles: fear of retaliation. The American has his own sports marketing company, organizes amateur basketball tournaments throughout China and even advises China's version of the NBA. He knows Yao Ming, star of the Houston Rockets, personally. When talk comes around to the poor performance of China's international basketball team, the American offers an explanation: China's government officials are ruining Yao Ming and other top players by making them play year-round for China's national team, often sacrificing time for much-needed rest and skills building. The American knows of what he speaks, since he is the agent for the country's leading point guard who, like Yao Ming, is a victim of the government's sports policies.

I say that this is a shame, and the American agrees. But he isn't about to campaign for better treatment of these stars. In his office we are surrounded by posters of leading Chinese athletes. He points to a poster of Wang Zhizhi, a tall Chinese man who backed up Shaquille O'Neal last year for the Miami Heat. Wang rebelled against the Chinese government by refusing to play for the national team at last year's Olympics. He is now persona non grata, not only to the Chinese government, but the sports marketing establishment here. This American won't touch him, nor will anyone else, out of fear of antagonizing the Chinese government and losing lucrative deals.

Free Speech Be Damned

The sports marketer is guilty of keeping his mouth shut. But other Americans actively assist the Chinese government in the maintenance of its repressive regime. Even as I talk to the sports marketer, Microsoft is concocting an Orwellian policy for its new Chinese version of MSN, a news site and search engine. Microsoft has decided (and publicly confirmed this summer) that anyone in China doing a search containing the words "freedom" or "democracy" will be shown a message explaining that those words are banned and the requested search query will not be processed.

Now, Microsoft is one of the richest companies in the world and its founder Bill Gates has spent billions of dollars on a foundation to reduce global inequalities in health and education. And yet his own company is so intimidated by China's government that terms basic to free expression are banned from its search engine.

American collaboration gets even uglier than that, however. In September Internet company Yahoo admitted that its employees in China assisted the government in making a case against a dissident journalist named Shi Tao, jailed since April, apparently for revealing information about a crackdown by the Communist Party.

In response to a question about the journalist's fate at a Beijing Internet conference in September, Jerry Yang, an American co-founder of Yahoo, confirmed that his company had helped the Chinese government arrest and prosecute Shi Tao. Yang didn't give specifics, but Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based advocacy group, has said that Yahoo officials in China helped the government track Shi Tao down using the IP address from which he read his Yahoo e-mail account.

Yang said that Yahoo receives "a lot" of requests for information from the Chinese government. "I do not like the outcome of what happens with these things," he said. "But we have to comply with the law. That's what you need to do to stay in business."

That kind of pragmatic attitude might pass muster in the United States or Europe, where courts are independent and the line between business and government is usually clear. But in China, the American who blithely assists the Chinese government is likely contributing to a heavy-handed injustice.

During my trip, American business people were fond of telling me that they could do more good being engaged with the Chinese than by openly complaining and taking the sort of adversarial position against government that is common in the United States. "The idea is to retain our credibility, our influence in China, so we can work behind the scenes for the right thing," the sports marketer told me.

Naturally, there is some truth to this. In Shanghai, I visited the home of an American who adopted Tibetan Buddhism as his religion some years ago. He first came to China in order to help rebuild monasteries and temples in Tibet that were damaged or destroyed during the '60s Cultural Revolution. His high-rise apartment in a fashionable part of Shanghai is festooned with Tibetan artifacts, and he is clearly pained by the hypocrisy of the Chinese government today, promoting Tibet as a tourist destination while at the same time repressing any authentic expressions by Tibet's people or religious leaders. And yet he tells me, "The price of getting to restore Tibet's cultural heritage is staying silent about China's true aims."

When I bluntly respond that he is a collaborator in China's occupation, he nods his head sadly and says he is "resigned" to China's domination of Tibet. Speaking out on Tibet would only draw the scrutiny of the Chinese government and, of course, doom his growing business of supplying low-priced manufactured goods to American chain stores.

Profits Not Worth the Price

Another troubling part about the collaboration of American business with the Chinese government is that, even in narrow business terms, it is failing. The terms of trade between the United States and China are ever-worsening. Chinese goods are flooding into the country, and manufacturing jobs are still flowing out of the United States and into China. U.S. exporters are selling an impressive $3.5 billion worth of goods per month to China -- twice the amount of goods exported from the United States to China five years ago, and nearly ten times the amount of 15 years ago. But Chinese exporters to the United States are doing even better: Sales topped $20 billion per month this summer, and show no signs of slowing down. The trade deficit in merchandise with China topped $100 billion in 2002, $124 billion in 2003 and $160 billion last year. This year, the deficit will approach a whopping $200 billion.

To be sure, the growth in China's domestic economy offers plenty of opportunities for U.S. companies. For years, spending on China's infrastructure has been rising, and now consumer spending is exploding. An estimated 350 million Chinese -- more than the population of the entire United States -- spend $10 per month on cell phone services alone. For an American company, success in China, even with products that are made in China, can be the difference between survival and failure. Witness, for instance, the great boost that ailing General Motors has had in China, where its cars are top-sellers.

On the other hand, Chinese copycats -- stealing everything from movies and software to plans for machinery and chip-making equipment -- take unfair advantage of the relative openness of American companies. The Chinese are also frantically trying to nurture home-grown businesses that can compete with the best from America. At the same time, the Chinese government has held down the value of its own currency, making it cheaper for American companies to invest in China -- and cheaper for American consumers to buy imported Chinese goods. While recently the country slightly raised the value of its currency (and may do so again periodically), most observers think that China's currency will remain artificially low, or "cheap" in economic terms, for many years to come.

Because of the complex economic dance between China and the United States, the combination of fear and collaboration is a toxic brew for even well-intentioned Americans doing business in the country. As the New York Times editorial page opined recently, "Because China is too lucrative a market to resist, American and European businessmen have ended up endorsing the party line through their silence -- or worse. They are not molding China; China is molding them." In short, "constructive engagement" with China is a myth.

Some senior American executives of leading multinational corporations privately fret that their Chinese experiment will end badly, and not the least because they recognize that their investments in China have helped prop up an authoritarian regime that may be incubating social revolution or worse. Underneath the seemingly stable surface, dissent and unrest in China is rising. Even statistics from the government's own police force show a troubling trend: The number of mass protests reached 74,000 last year, compared to 10,000 in 1994.

With hundreds of unreported protests now taking place in China each week, far-sighted American executives are beginning to ponder what will happen to their investments if China implodes. One chief executive of a Fortune 500 company told me after I returned from China that he has a wait-and-see attitude, but feels increasingly doubtful that constructive engagement with China will bear fruit.

"We're capitalists and supposed to be running a business for a profit," he says. "So you don't want to leave a big market. On the other hand, China has serious political problems and the Chinese people lack basic freedoms. I'm not in China to solve the political problems, but if they aren't solved, foreign companies are either going to get kicked out of China, ultimately, or leave."

So, how should Americans respond to this situation?

First, Americans ought to squarely face their striking cycle of dependency with China, its government and economy. The U.S. government's huge deficits are partly financed by the Chinese government, which, through state-owned banks, buys U.S. Treasury bills with profits generated from exporting goods to the American market and the savings of ordinary Chinese citizens. The Chinese don't need to invest all or even a large part of their savings in their own country because American banks and corporations (as well as European and Japanese businesses) are willing to finance a great deal of the capital needed for the expansion of China's economy. Foreign investors do this because they believe that investment opportunities in both public infrastructure and private enterprise are better in China than in their own countries, and besides, European and North American investors are awash in cash anyway. The Chinese government makes investing in China even more attractive to foreigners by holding down the value of its currency, the yuan.

Ultimately, however, the Chinese end up holding a huge amount of U.S. dollars, leaving them vulnerable to sharing the pain of any American economic setbacks, such as steeper declines in the value of the dollar. Moveover, because America is the largest, most lucrative market for Chinese-made goods, China's business and economic elite are trapped in a dilemma of their own making: Americans are now hooked on cheap Chinese goods, while the Chinese are hooked on selling to Americans. Raising prices could enrich Chinese producers, but also cause a collapse in demand for their products.

This interdependency between the U.S. and Chinese economies means that American business executives, government policymakers and perhaps even ordinary citizens have more leverage with the government of China than they realize. Consider this crucial question: Who can more easily afford a rupture? The Americans, with their vastly diversified economy, or the Chinese, whose economic empire is essentially built on satisfying one single, bargain-hungry customer -- America?

I don't know the answer to that question, but let me suggest that, for Americans at least, the price of having principles may be to test China's resolve more often and more pointedly. I am reminded of this possibility when I turned up at a Web café on one of the last days of my recent visit. It was 8:30 and the café was just opening. I'd been there three mornings running and a woman had helped me navigate the Chinese keyboard and screen prompts so I could reach an English interface. This morning the routine was different. There was a black vinyl binder at the front counter in front of her. Inside was a sheet for foreign nationals who wanted to use the Web. Before I could log in, I had to write my name and my passport number and state the purpose of my visit.

I complained to the woman about the sign-up sheet -- she showed me to a PC anyway. Before I sat down, a man appeared and he said that unless I signed the book, I couldn't use the Web café.

I told him I refused to sign. He waved his hand angrily at me, showing me the door. "American go home," he told me.

And that's what I did.

The announcement of the Pulitzer Prizes usually provoke yawns -- or even sneers -- from media critics. The biggest of the American journalism prizes, the Pulitzers annually ratify conventional wisdom with overwhelmingly safe selections. Prizes are often given to the pooh-bahs from the top daily newspapers, allowing them to burnish their resumes and giving their employers free rein to promote the notion, however committed they are to profit, that they also serve the public good.

And that's largely what happened earlier this week, when the Pulitzer board announced this year's winners. The usual suspects -- the L.A Times, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal -- were named, with one exception. For only the fifth time in the history of the prizes, an alternative weekly was named a winner. The paper, Willamette Week, in Portland, Ore., won the investigative reporting category for an astonishing series of reports on a former governor's long cover-up of sexual misconduct with a teenage girl.

The Willamette Week's report on former Gov. Neil Goldschmidt, written by Nigel Jaquiss, was explosive. Goldschmidt, until the story broke, was considered the most powerful man in the state. Even more astonishing than Goldschmidt's misbehaviors was the cover-up. In a separate article, published last December, Jaquiss describes a tight-knit group of elite Oregonians who knew enough about Goldschmidt's problem to have done something about it. But they didn't.

As one person told the reporter, you could argue that he had an ethical responsibility to act against Goldschmidt but other people had an even greater responsibility to act and didn't, so why should he?

One of those other non-actors, as it turned out, was Oregon's largest daily newspaper, the Oregonian, which had a chance to reveal the cover-up but inexplicably did not. In November 2003, after Goldschmidt was appointed to the Oregon State Board for Higher Education, one of his former staffers met with the Oregonian's senior political writer and gave him the name of Goldschmidt's victim, a chronology of the cover-up and the names of others who could confirm the story.

There's no evidence that the Oregonian ever looked into the tip -- until Willamette Week prepared its own expose. Then on the eve of publication, the daily and the former governor worked together to blunt the charges -- a strategy that ultimately failed to protect his reputation or deny the Willamette Week credit for its scoop.

The prize won by Jaquiss -- a former crude oil trader who took up journalism when he moved to Oregon seven years ago -- is a reminder of the importance of alternative weekly newspapers -- and the continuing tendency for monopoly newspapers to ignore the values of good journalism in pursuit of profit or behind-the-scenes influence. A disclosure: 25 years ago, when I got my start in journalism, I worked for a series of alternative weeklies, including the Willamette Week. It is hard to recapture the spirit that animated these pioneering alternative papers, which worked in the face of open hostility from daily newspapers and the power elites of their cities. In the 1970s and 1980s, when alternative weeklies took firm root, there was no internet and daily newspaper conglomerates routinely excluded entire segments of the community from its pages. Alternative weeklies -- such as the Village Voice, New Times and the Boston Phoenix -- broadened the media landscape against sizeable odds. Ultimately, many daily newspapers revitalized themselves by borrowing forms, methods and even staff from alternative papers -- without giving those papers much, if any, credit.

In a sense, alternative weeklies became a victim of their own success. By the 1990s, it was often hard to tell the difference -- in tone and content -- between alternative weeklies and daily newspapers that increasingly presented lifestyle and cultural coverage over hard news and serious political analysis.

Then came the internet explosion. In recent years, we've all watched with excitement as the web has revolutionized media, making the content of newspapers all over the country (and the world) available to us with a few strokes. And of course, the same forces opening up newspapers are unleashing powerful new forms of citizen journalism. The most celebrated of these, blogs, may not prove to have the stamina and force that its practitioners hope, but unquestionably the proliferation of bloggers has undercut the special role that alternative weeklies have long played in the media landscape.

But Willamette Week's Pulitzer is a reminder that alternative weeklies still have a special role to play. Bloggers may express "alternative" viewpoints with pizzazz but virtually none of them have the resources and skills to do the kind of patient investigative reporting that was required in order to strip a former governor of his apparent immunity from both law and morality. That took the concerted effort, over many months, of a reporter at an alternative paper with a circulation of a mere 90,000 a week. Internet or no, alternative newspapers remain special, and they are needed as much, maybe even more, than ever.

Dismissal is too good a fate for Donald Rumsfeld. George Bush realizes that Rumsfeld deserves better. Faced with demands that he dismiss his Secretary of Defense, Bush vows to keep Rumsfeld on the job.

Three cheers for the President�s endorsement, which opens the way for a more delicious possibility: the appointment of a special prosecutor who will seek and obtain an indictment against Rumsfeld for a variety of crimes. Thank you, Mr. President.

You could have allowed Rumsfeld to go quietly in the night and begin a well-deserved retirement from government affairs. You could have allowed Rumsfeld to beat a hasty retreat into obscurity. But you know he deserves better.

Rumsfeld deserves to be sent to prison for his acts as Secretary of Defense. So the President is doing the right thing: He is keeping Rumsfeld in place in order to give the legal system time to do maximum damage against our country�s arrogant, pompous and unrepentant war chief.

Surely, any legal case against Rumsfeld would be strong. Let�s start with misappropriation of federal funds. As Bob Woodward details in his new book, �Plan of Attack,� Rumsfeld directed funds appropriated for Afghanistan to be used for the preparation of the Iraq invasion. He blithely ignored a requirement that Congress approve any such spending.

That�s against the law. Not a gray area. Not a maybe. It is a crime. Then there are Rumsfeld�s lies to Congress. Weapons of mass destruction, anyone? Rumsfeld�s mis-statements about Iraq�s potential to harm the U.S. can no longer be dismissed as mere �failures of intelligence,� as if the Defense Secretary might have decided differently on the matter had he received other advice. A special prosecutor will clearly document that Rumsfeld knew that Saddam Hussein had no WMDs and that he lied to Congress, repeatedly, in order to obtain the necessary legal mandate to go to war.

Lying to Congress is against the law. There are no legal-pyrotechnics required to make a case against Rumsfeld. His conviction would be a slam dunk.

Finally, of course, there are the cases of torture in U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The evidence is mounting that Rumsfeld knew about the shameful and destructive tactics used against Iraqis by the prison�s guards and did nothing to stop them. His evasive answers on the scandal (he insists he still can�t tell, for instance, whether the abuses were �an isolated instance� or not) suggests that an independent investigation may demonstrate that Rumsfeld created the conditions that led to the abuses of Iraqi prisoners. The Washington Post already has reached this very conclusion, opining on its editorial page that Rumsfeld �helped create a lawless regime in which prisoners in both Iraq and Afghanistan have been humiliated, beaten, tortured and murdered...�

Once again, the Democrats are too timid. Kerry and fellow Senators Joe Biden and Tom Harkin are merely calling for Rumsfeld�s firing. Put him in jail? Surely, the possibility is absurd. Yet a mere three months ago, the possibility that Rumsfeld might get fired was treated as an absurdity. Yet today his resignation would be seen as mild punishment for his crimes.

How much longer before Democrats begin calling for a special prosecutor to take Rumsfeld down? How long? Not long.

To be sure, with or without the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate Rumsfeld�s crimes, his place in history is now secure. As Robert McNamara is to Vietnam, Rumsfeld is to Iraq. McNamara, defense secretary to Lyndon Johnson, ran the Vietnam war in its period of greatest escalation. He lived to regret his decisions and remains haunted by his Vietnam experience. Just as McNamara spent the rest of his life confronting Vietnam, Rumsfeld will be forced to do the same with respect to Iraq.

Is George Bush the first president to give Africa the attention it deserves? Given Bush's poor standing among African-American voters, such a claim sounds strange. Nine out of ten African Americans voted for Bush's opponents in the last election -- and are likely to do the same in the next. But while Democrats are the party of African Americans, Bush is proving that the Republicans are the party of Africa.

Bush's interest in Africa, the poorest region of the world, is profoundly surprising -- and not the least to Africans who realize that America's war on terrorism has distracted attention and money from the region's pressing problems of civil war, HIV/AIDS and chronic under-development. Yet Bush's engagement in Africa may well overshadow in significance the other foreign activities of his presidency.

How is this possible? Won't Bush be best remembered for his pursuit of terrorists? He is, after all, the President who overthrew the Taliban in Afghanistan. He invaded Iraq and deposed Saddam Hussein. He called for the spread of democracy in the Muslim world, giving tacit encouragement to dissenters in Egypt and Pakistan -- the most important American client-states, whose de facto military dictators are truly puppets of Washington.

Yet Bush's most publicized -- and dubious -- actions on the world stage may prove his most ephemeral. Afghanistan and Iraq may return to their historic arc no matter Bush's insistence that freedom is another name for the casual tyranny and relentless chaos of a failed state. Bush's promotion of what he calls "democracy" is likely to be a spectacular failure if only because the president is committed to defending those dictators that do his bidding or at least pretend to. And Bush's war on terror, if it continues to prove inconclusive, will be ultimately discarded, replaced by a more pliable concept such as "peaceful co-existence."

Bush's interest on Africa, by contrast, may contain the seeds of a significant legacy -- by virtue of his decision to give Africa the most sustained attention by any president since James Monroe nearly 200 years ago imagined re-colonizing parts of the "dark continent" with freed slaves.

In the 1800s, the U.S. generally ignored sub-Saharan Africa, merely observing Europe's dominance over the region. The U.S. played a small role even the de-colonization of Africa in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the creation of dozens of independent black African nations helped fuel the civil rights movement.

During the Cold War -- the period of fierce rivalry with the Soviet Union, from the late 1940s until the end of the 1980s -- U.S. intervention in sub-Saharan Africa was destructive and largely concerned with limiting Soviet influence in the region. Americans respected and even pandered to Europe's need to continue its economic exploitation of Africa.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. lost all strategic interest in Africa. War raged throughout the sub-continent and the U.S. did nothing. Inaction proved most shameful in Rwanda, where some have argued that with a small show of soldiers on the ground in 1994, the U.S. could have prevented the massacre of hundreds of people. Less famously, the U.S. failure to intervene in Liberia led to the bloody collapse of this former colony of American slaves. To be sure, the U.S. sent troops to Somalia, but poor planning led to a humiliating scene of a dead American soldier dragged through the streets of a Somali city.

Neither the first President Bush nor President Bill Clinton ever found a reason to engage Africa that went beyond empty rhetoric. To be sure, Clinton visited Africa (the first president ever to do so) and remains popular with Africans. But Africa suffered on Clinton's watch, falling further behind the rest of the world in almost every measure of health, education and wealth.

The story is different under the second President Bush. He has called for increased funding to fight AIDS, and his visit to Africa in July 2003 underscored his desire to integrate Africa into his war on terror. Despite scant evidence of Al Qaeda operatives at work in the sub-Saharan, the region is now blithely described as "the new front in the war on terror" by no less an authority than the august New York think-tank, the Council on Foreign Relations.

Bush needs victories in his terror war, hollow or substantial, and Africa provides him with a stage to play out his gloomy fantasies. By forging links with African leaders, Bush hopes to show that his obsession with battling terrorism isn't misplaced but is essential to improving global security. His recent de-militarization deal with Libya's President Muammar Gaddafi illustrates the public-relations gains Bush hopes to enjoy from his African alliances.

Gaddafi is a North African with deep ties, fueled by his country's money, with sub-Saharan African leaders. While mainly viewed as an Arab and Islamic nationalist, Gaddafi has never held sway over Middle Eastern oil kingdoms. But his influence is great to the south with oil-poor black African nations where Muslims and Christians uneasily share power. Gaddafi's deal with Bush, the most internationally reviled American president in modern history, gives Africans a fresh reason to re-consider their low opinion of America's president.

The U.S. role in resolving the civil war in Sudan may give Africans -- and Bush's domestic critics -- another reason to consider Bush worthy of the name "African president." A country essentially split between Arab Muslims in the north and black Christians in the south, Sudan won independence from the British in 1956 and has seen civil war for nearly its entire history.

Sudan is an immense country that sits across the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia and borders both Egypt and Libya to the North. But the country, while dominated by an Arab elite for generations, stretches into central Africa and borders the Congo, Kenya and even Uganda.

As a bridge between Islam and Christianity, Sudan is a flashpoint for conflict -- and a test case for the how Bush administration plans to peacefully manage tensions between these two antagonistic religions in other parts of the world (most notably in Middle East).

Prior to 9/11, President Bush identified the Sudan conflict as perhaps his top foreign policy objective. He selected a former U.S. Senator, John Danforth, to reconcile Sudan's warring regions. Danforth's appointment was announced only days before the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington and was thus immediately eclipsed by these events.

Yet Bush's commitment to resolving the Sudan war endured, if quietly, because right-wing Christians objected to the Arab practice of taking their black southern brethren as slaves. While slavery is not widely practiced by Arabs in Sudan, the practice persists and created the basis for an unlikely alliance between African-Americans, such as Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice, and the Christian Right.

Secretary of State Powell is central to Bush's efforts to end Sudan's civil war and to forge a power-sharing agreement between Arabs and Christians, northerners and southerners. News reports out of Khartoum, Sudan's capital, suggests that Powell and the Americans are on the verge of engineering a breakthrough. In African terms, the resolution of the Sudan war would be a huge achievement, providing hope that Muslim-Christian relations, badly strained in Nigeria and the Ivory Coast, can be eased.

Sudan is also crucial for another reason: The country began to export oil in 1999 and it holds substantial supply of oil, mainly in its southern zone. Sharing the oil wealth is probably the most vexing question in the negotiations over ending Sudan's civil war.

President Bush prefers to cite altruistic motives in assisting Africa, but oil is the chief reason for his engagement in the region. African countries, notably Nigeria and Angola, already supply an important share of America's imported oil. The African share is growing, too. New supplies are coming on stream from Equatorial Guinea, Chad, Sudan and other African nations.

The needs of Big Oil did not go unnoticed by President Bill Clinton, but following 9/11 -- and the backlash against the U.S. dependence on Saudi oil imports -- the political importance of finding Arab alternatives grew. Through an accident of geology, it turns out that the best hope for reducing American reliance on Saudi (and Iraqi) oil lies with African oil producers.

For Bush, Sudan represents a potential trifecta. By creating a peace out of one of Africa's most intractable wars, he satisfies his Bible-thumping domestic supporters, ignites hope among African-Americans and delivers a victory to his globalist oil friends, who can now pump Sudan's oil without fear of being accused of abetting either warriors or slavers.

Then there is a fourth prize for Bush in Sudan: a victory in the war on terror. In the early 1990s, Sudan gave refuge to Osama bin-Laden and his gang. President Clinton even ordered an attack on the country in 1998, vainly trying to kill bin-Laden. Al-Quad is long gone, but by creating a peace in Sudan, Bush will gain what he wants the most in an election year: another chance to say he's making the world safer, despite the costs in American lives and dollars and despite the evident instability around the world that his policies and actions are generating.

Sudan, then, is one of these obscure places that Americans scratch their heads over and wonder about all the fuss. But then Iraq once fit that description, too.

G. Pascal Zachary served in 2003 as Ghana director for Journalists for Human Rights, a media training group based in Toronto.

To watch U2 singer Bono traveling around Africa, relentlessly advocating for debt relief alongside the secretary of the U.S. Treasury, is to be reminded of the old connection between rock stars and African humanitarian causes. Bono may be imbued with an Irish compassion, but he is only the latest rocker to trumpet the cause of the African poor and afflicted. I was a grade-school boy when the Beatles took America by storm in the �60s, and I will never forget my first images of Africa, which I associated with one Beatle in particular.

The pictures showed gaunt, starving babies from a place called Biafra, which George Harrison had taken a liking to. Biafra was created when a tribe called the Ibo, prominent around the Niger River Delta, seceded in 1967 from the West African nation of Nigeria. The Nigerian army, after initial setbacks, laid siege to the Ibo who, in their desperation, appealed to the rest of the world for help. (This had the perverse effect of prolonging the war -- it lasted more than two years -- and adding immensely to the causalities.) The plight of Biafrans captured Harrison�s conscience and gave birth to a new pattern in pop culture: the singer who cared about the Fate of the Earth and then held a benefit concert to prove it.

Harrison�s concert brought great attention to the cause of the Ibo, giving birth to another iron law of pop culture: The defining images of the South, or of Africa at least, are often constructed by the singers and poets of the North ... and then fed back to the South. The frantic race by rockers to find their own causes among the wretched of the earth almost obscures the fact that the poor of the developing world have their own singers and songs.

The Ibo, for instance, are famously cultivated. Their members include Chinua Achebe, author of Africa�s most literary novel in English, Things Fall Apart, a haunting depiction of the collision between Ibo traditions and European imperialism. Notable for lacking a monarchy, the Ibo instead invested ultimate power in the political structures within each village, giving rise to a form of politics that anticipated the �town hall� democracy of New England. Participation extended to Ibo women, who became a formidable force in public life.

The British, used to getting their way with colonial Africans, were repeatedly stung by loud, angry and even violent protests against their policies by Ibo women. �When the character of the riots themselves is reviewed,� one British observer wrote, �the overwhelming impression is of the vigor and solidarity of the women.� In recent years, militant Ibo activists, in the face of growing tensions within an unmanageable Nigeria, have called for greater autonomy and even revived the secessionist dream.

The Ibo, who number upward of 20 million today, have made their mark on music as well as literature. The Biafrans knew little of the Beatles, but they embraced a swinging bandleader named Stephen Osita Osadebe. Singing in the Ibo language, with a sprinkling of pidgin English, Osadebe began recording in 1958 and cemented his popularity by remaining in Iboland during the war. The �70s saw a transformation of Nigerian music as horn-driven dance tunes -- better known as highlife -- gave way to a funky sound influenced by soul singer James Brown. Fela Kuti was the embodiment of Nigerian funk.

While Fela and the �juju� musician Sunny Ade, a member of the Yoruba people, dominated the music exported from Nigeria to America, within the country Osadebe thrived. He carried on a tradition of highlife associated with the great Nigerian trumpeter Rex Lawson. Osadebe retained a strong brass element in his bands, even when acoustic sounds went out of fashion. He remains partial to trumpet solos of the same sort that Duke Ellington used to give his band a wistful color.

In 1984, as Ade and Fela were giving Nigerian music a ribald and confrontational image around the world, Osadebe retained his folksy roots, releasing his most successful album, Osondi Owendi (�sweetness and bitterness�). A social critic whose language is more polite than Fela�s, Osadebe sings of the joys and disappointments of ordinary life, poking fun at pretension and celebrating the importance of perseverance.

At nearly the age of 60, in 1995 Osadebe made his first tour of the United States and recorded what counts as among the finest West African albums available, Kedu America. Recorded in Seattle under the supervision of Andrew Frankel and Osadebe�s Nigerian-born but L.A.-based manager Nnamdi Moweta, Kedu contains new recordings of some of Osadebe�s classic songs. The music is thrilling throughout. The session opens with the entire band engaged in raucous chatter -- and then bursting into a blistering guitar line. Somebody mutters, �this is very nice music,� and the guitar trades parts with stuttering drums until the horns enter. By the time Osadebe joins with his groaning, bluesy voice -- reminiscent of John Lee Hooker in its gruffness -- the band has turned every soulful phrase in the Ibo songbook.

While a critical triumph, Kedu failed to gain Osadebe anything like the stature achieved by Sunny Ade. But among Ibo living in America -- there are large numbers in places like Houston, Los Angeles and Oakland -- he is exalted. When he tours these cities, as he did last fall, he plays only private clubs, gatherings of Ibo faithful who come to hear a dose of their homeland. An Ibo group in Houston, say, rents a hall for him to perform in. Only Ibo show up, because the performance goes completely unpublicized.

In these performances, Osadebe always sings what the Ibo call �praise songs,� where he improvises lyrics about the people in attendance. The connection between West African singers and their audiences has always been intimate, with the dividing line between stage and seat blurry at best. In response to the success of these invitation-only concerts in U.S. cities, Osadebe last fall released Club America (for which I wrote the liner notes). While recorded in a Seattle studio, the album has the feel of a night in an Ibo social club, where people who spend their days trying to fit into America unwind with their own kind.

Club America lacks the raw energy of Kedu but is more typical of the lilting, swaying dance music that Ibos, young and old, find infectious. A third album, Sound Time, also released last year, contains 70 minutes of songs first released by Osadebe on cassette tapes between 1970 and 1985. This music, previously only available in Nigeria, conjures up the moments of relief and even ecstasy in the post-Biafra years. The civil war had been the first indication that post-colonial civil wars would be barbaric (the debasement of the war -- and all wars -- was captured by Ken Saro-Wiwa in his 1985 novel Sozaboy). In the aftermath, a grittier yet still joyous strain of highlife emerged, with Osadebe as a leading exponent.

Osadebe�s popularity is immense in Iboland: He is Frank Sinatra and Bob Dylan rolled into one. In the United States, he is lionized in Ibo social clubs, where I was fortunate enough to see him perform last October. Except for my guests and me, the crowd in Oakland�s California Ballroom was all Ibo. At the age of 67, Osadebe showed no signs of tiring, even when the band kept on past 2 a.m.