For Program On: Tuesday, August 30, 2005 at 4:00 PM

Peter Donalds gets an insider’s view of the Iraq constitution negotiations after four. He'll talk with a constitutional expert who recently returned from Baghdad to advise the Iraqi Kurdish delegation. Guest: Karol Soltan, associate professor of government and politics, University of Maryland. Constitutional expert and consultant to Iraqi Kurdish leaders.

In the mid-1990s, long before oil prices topped $60 a barrel, U.S. companies sought access to Kazakhstan, a Central Asian nation that the U.S. State Department says will be among the world's top 10 producers of crude by 2015.

First, they had to win approval from Jim Giffen, a New York investment banker who became an official in Kazakhstan's government and held sway over its energy deals.

"You couldn't go to a Kazakh minister, particularly if you were an American company, without going through Giffen," says Ed Chow, who managed external affairs at Chevron Overseas Petroleum Ltd., a unit of San Ramon, California-based Chevron Corp.

Chevron, the second-largest U.S. oil company, avoided Giffen by arriving in the country before he amassed power, says Chow, 55, who's now an oil and gas consultant in Leesburg, Virginia. Others couldn't.

Now, federal prosecutors say Giffen, 64, cemented his power by bribing Kazakh leaders with $84 million that Amoco Corp., Mobil Oil Co., Phillips Petroleum Co. and Texaco Inc. paid to win access to Kazakh fields. In January, Giffen goes on trial in federal district court in New York in one of the largest overseas criminal bribery cases ever.


…Giffen lavished gifts on the Kazakhs, prosecutors say: [President] Nazarbayev got two snowmobiles, an $80,000 Donzi speedboat and his daughter's tuition at George Washington University in Washington, then $22,625 a year.

“Black-and-white photographs of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Samuel Cooleridge, Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Henry Miller, Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway looked down on the approximately 350 attendees who wrote down their thoughts once they climbed a large black staircase that led into an open-air tent. Chandeliers and mounted wild-game heads decorated the booze-ridden ceremony.”

"Editor: Just rode up Lenado, past Hunter launch site. Rent-a-cops everywhere, some peering into hills with binoculars—looking for invaders? Twice, I got stopped on my bike and told, 'Don't loiter, keep moving, don't take any pictures.' The guy who made his reputation opposing authority exits the planet completely surrounded by authority. Who'd have thunk it?"

“[Jimmy Ibbotson] made the wire services when he opened fire with his shotgun on what he termed a 'paparazzi,' who wanted to park on his property."

But the cries for help appear to have other causes, too. The quest to get into a top college has grown so cutthroat for many that more students are emerging from it emotionally damaged. "Kids are burning out sooner and sooner," says Leigh Martin Lowe, director of college counseling at Roland Park Country School in Baltimore. "They're not being allowed to enjoy their teenage years, and many of them end up in college and they don't have the energy or stamina to really turn it on." At MIT, Jones, the admissions dean, gives preference to students who are "self-driven" (read: not being pushed by their parents), based on her belief that self-motivated students are better able to cope with failures. "Our culture has become insane — we're making people sick," Jones says.

[T]he Democratic Party is a vehicle of reaction, not out of error or lack of wit, but because it is a machine largely controlled by the super-rich, who are perfectly capable of understanding their own interests.

For all his spirited retorts to hucksters like David Brooks, [Thomas] Frank [author of What’s the Matter with Kansas?] flinches from acknowledging the core of cold truth in their legends and demagogic stereotypes. In the recent Presidential election, the Democrats picked the wealthiest individual since George Washington ever to run for the White House as their candidate, outgunned the Republicans 59 to 41 per cent among donors with assets over $10 million, outspent Bush in every swing state of the Union, and hit an all-time financial record for a senatorial campaign: $17 million in a failed attempt to get Daschle back on the Hill.

Moreover, there is little that is new in this: since the nineties virtually all of the richest electoral districts in the country have been Democratic bastions, Clinton’s cash-mountain easily topped Dole’s in 1996, and the Democrats have regularly received larger individual donations than Republicans, whose strength has been among smaller donors. In this situation, workers who vote Republican may be less deluded than Frank seems to believe. Putting it in sociological language, since there is so little to choose ‘instrumentally’ between the two parties, each of them dedicated to capital unbound, why not at least get the satisfaction of voting ‘expressively’ for the one which seems to speak for their values, if not their interests?

[U]niversities have permitted in the last 40 years and all the media sat on its hands on this, the growth of a bureaucratic master class of administrators. More and more deans who are making fortunes and also the salaries at the Ivy League are astronomical. People are making $200,000 and families are bankrupting themselves to pay for these bills. There should be a national outrage...

SETON HALL DROPS
FELON’S NAME
FROM BUILDING

Liz Willen
Bloomberg News


SOUTH ORANGE -- Seton Hall University, a Catholic institution named for a saint, removed the name of Dennis Kozlowski, convicted felon and former chief executive of Tyco International Ltd., from a building on campus.

The name was removed today at Kozlowski's request, Seton Hall spokesman Thomas White said in a telephone interview.

The building has been renamed Jubilee Hall.

Seton Hall, a school of 10,000 students in South Orange, has had at least three buildings named for convicted felons. Kozlowski, a 1968 Seton Hall graduate, faces as many as 30 years in prison after being convicted of larceny for looting Tyco of more than $150 million and defrauding shareholders. His name also came off a rotunda in the library, White said.

Poor Bob Schrieffer. A brilliant research scientist, the pride of Tallahassee, Fla., snatched from the laboratory before his time. One of America's foremost theoretical physicists, a man of boundless mathematical curiosity and imagination, gone.

All because of a galling, tragic collision on a Central California freeway 11 months ago.

If Schrieffer, who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1972, sounds like the victim here, the confusion is understandable. Some newspaper accounts, riding a narrative arc built around the incident's baffling incongruity, have in effect portrayed the 74-year-old verifiable genius as the party for whom we should be grieving.

Somewhere down in the last few paragraphs, if at all, we catch the barest glimpse of the other party, the only person in this story who, as a direct result of the events of that September day, won't be returning to any labs, scientific or otherwise.




When Schrieffer, the pride of Florida State University's National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, crashed his new Mercedes-Benz sports car into a Toyota van last Sept. 24 near Santa Maria, it killed 57-year-old Renato "Rey" Catolos of Ridgecrest and injured seven others.

Schrieffer, who taught at UC Santa Barbara for 12 years and directed its Institute for Theoretical Physics in the 1980s, was zipping down the coastal highway at an estimated speed of 110 mph when he barreled into the van, prosecutors say. He fabricated a story blaming another, nonexistent vehicle. Then he owned up to it himself.

Amparo Mangapit, a 77-year-old passenger in the same van, died a month later,but Schrieffer was not charged in that death. A third passenger was partially paralyzed and remains in a skilled-nursing facility.




Schrieffer pleaded no contest to vehicular manslaughter on July 25 and probation officials recommended an eight-month sentence in the Santa Barbara County Jail. But at his Aug. 8 sentencing hearing, Superior Court Judge James Herman said Schrieffer might deserve "a taste of state prison."

Now he's the smartest inmate at Wasco State Prison -- or will be, if Herman decides to keep him there after his three-month pre-sentencing evaluation period concludes. Sentencing has been rescheduled for Nov. 7.

Colleagues on both coasts are shocked and puzzled. This is an aberration, they say with unanimous incredulity. They never saw this coming, despite Schrieffer's having piled up nine speeding tickets since 1993, including 18 bad-driver points in the 18 months prior to the accident, prompting the state of Florida to yank his license.




Back in Ridgecrest, Estelita Catolos is too gentle a soul to rage at the injustice of the wreck -- or the injustice of its postmortems. She just misses her husband.

"He was a hardworking man and a good provider," she says, "When we first came to the United States (from the Philippines) in 1971 he worked three jobs. He was a very hard worker who cared about his family very much."

For a time, Catolos did commercial janitorial work early in the morning, cleaned apartments in the late evening and, in between, went to his regular job with the U.S. Navy. He retired in the early 1990s after 20 years of military service and got a job as a warehouse manager, most recently for General Dynamics.

He liked Ridgecrest. Thought it was a good place to raise kids.

He drove his wife into Los Angeles on regular buying trips for her Ridgecrest store, Lita's Fashions -- which over the course of her 16 years in business evolved into an Asian market with no "fashions" to speak of. At night he often cleaned the store for her.

It was the classic tale of a father who busted his backside so his children wouldn't have to.

"He believed in education," said his oldest daughter, Agnes Ysselstein, a registered nurse who lives in the Bay Area. "He made sure his three kids all went to college. ... He was one of 10 children, and he sent a lot of his brothers and sisters to college too."

Catolos and his wife -- two days shy of their 33rd anniversary -- were traveling with friends that day almost a year ago. They had visited friends in the town of Guadalupe and were on their way to the Chumash Casino in Santa Ynez, northwest of Santa Barbara, when Schrieffer intervened.




Inexplicable behavior, agonizing results.

Each man was passionate about his perceived purpose in life. Each gave all he could muster, exercised all of his gifts. In both cases the results were admirable.

Nobel Prizes and international acclaim have a way of skewing things, though. Genius attracts headlines. Accompanied by a fall from grace as precipitous as Schrieffer's, the story can only move in one direction on the page -- up.

But for one humble, grieving Ridgecrest family, the wrong man got top billing -- no matter how many honorary doctorates line the walls of John Robert Schrieffer's empty office.

[GW] proposes to hire a pair of classy developers (Boston Properties and KSI) and a world-class architecture firm (Cesar Pelli & Associates) to design and build a $250 million, mixed-use development with offices facing Washington Circle, high-end apartments in the back and plenty of ground-level retail all around. [There will be] about 450,000 square feet [of office space], compared with 250,000 for residential and 80,000 for retail. With office rents at least 25 percent above apartment rents, that balance makes sense for the university, as landowner, and Boston Properties, as the project manager and office developer.

[The] university argues that with its Pennsylvania Avenue address and its proximity to the Foggy Bottom Metro stop, Square 54 is simply too valuable as a site for high-end commercial development to be used for its own purposes.

I didn't more than glance over the original report in The Bookseller. It said that the Bloomsbury bestseller Rock Me Gently - Judith Kelly's memoir of a traumatic childhood in a Catholic orphanage - was being rewritten after "similarities" were spotted with Antonia White's 1933 novel Frost in May. Then a couple of weeks later Hilary Mantel, a novelist with whom I'm friendly, got in touch to say that she, too, had been gently rocked by Rock Me Gently.

“Judith… has read very widely and has a remarkable memory, and during the decade in which she was working on her own book, some of her wide-ranging reading emerged in her own prose without her realising it. There is no question of infringement of copyright," she wrote (that last steely, lawyerish phrase being the letter's real payload), "but Judith is naturally very upset that this has happened and is rewriting those passages for the next edition of the book."

South African poet Melanie Grobler has relinquished the Eugýne Marais literature prize and offered to pay back the prize money after it emerged that she had presented an unacknowledged translation of a poem by Canadian author Anne Michaels as her own work.

Although her poem Stad (Die Waterbreker, 2004) reads as an almost direct translation of Michaels's There Is No City That Does Not Dream (Skin Divers, 1999), without any reference to Michaels, Grobler denies allegations of plagiarism.

She told the Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns, who gave her the prestigious award, that the resemblance was due to "pure negligence" and the "absorption that takes place naturally when one is an avid reader".

Marilyn Biederman, director of rights and contracts at McClelland & Stewart publishers in Toronto, on Thursday said she was not prepared to comment without more information.

"We represent Michaels both in Canada and where she is published abroad. At the moment we are looking at what course to take. We understand that the SA author had rescinded her prize, which also has bearing on how we will deal with the matter."

Loftus Marais, a young poet studying at Stellenbosch University, blew the whistle on Grobler on the website litnet.co.za, creating heated debate over Grobler.

Grobler initially refused to give up the prize, but later said in a statement she would take full responsibility for the harm she had caused by failing to credit Michaels, whom she said was one of her favourite poets.

Chief executive of the academy Jacques van de Elst said an investigation into the matter would no longer be necessary, although a report would be compiled about the incident.

It was also decided against passing on this year's prize to another poet.

In letters to the award's chief sponsors, Absa bank and Rapport newspaper, Van de Elst expressed disappointment at the turn of events and said Grobler had offered to pay back her prize money of R11 000.

"It is the first time in the academy's history that such a thing has happened. We firmly believe the poet had no cruel intentions. Besides a literature commission that assumes original work is presented, it is very difficult in an ocean of literature to identify alleged cribbing from a remote literature such as the Canadian," he wrote to both Absa sponsorships director Angela Bruwer and Rapport editor Tim du Plessis.

He also requested that this year's prize money be saved for next year's winner.

Van de Elst said the academy's council would discuss the matter at a September 23 meeting and would probably decide to scrap the author's name from their awards list of over a hundred years.

The volume of poetry containing the contentious poem is still for sale in book shops, but Tafelberg Publishers has since August 3 placed an embargo on any more stock going to retailers.

Bragg appears to be guilty of three counts of editorial deceit in hiring an unpaid, undisclosed, and unauthorized helper — essentially subcontracting his work to others without his bosses' consent. [He visited] Apalachicola for a couple of hours solely to claim the dateline and foster the illusion that [he’d] seen the story [himself].

The Apalachicola text reveals how Bragg infused the piece with its fraudulent sense of immediacy. He repeatedly invokes the word "here" to imply an intimacy with his subjects and the environs, even though he didn't do any of the interviews with the oystermen.

More and more, life here feels temporary. …
As in any society, there are layers here. …
A man has to get very drunk not to think about the future here. …
While environmentalists call the bay pristine, people who have lived here the longest say change has long since come. …
The people have a toughness in them here. …

Obviously, the journalistic profession should better codify 1) exactly how much work a stringer must do before earning a byline credit and 2) how many minutes a reporter need occupy the city limits of his dateline in order to claim it. But the lack of a hard-and-fast standard doesn't mean I don't know journalistic scamming when I see it. Reconstituting a "you are there" story from somebody else's notes and conducting a touch-and-go landing to claim the dateline violates not only Times policy, but any sober person's elemental sense of intellectual honesty.

Every reporter makes mistakes, but Bragg's gargantuan goofs defy explanation—often making you wonder if he even visited the scene of his own story. Take this hilarious extended correction for Bragg's June 1, 1998, story about a small Alabama newspaper's crusade against corruption, in which he appears to have gotten more facts wrong than right:

'An article on June 1 about a small-town Alabama publishing couple who exposed corruption by a county sheriff misstated the sentence received by the sheriff, Roger Davis of Marengo County, for extortion. It was 27 months in prison, not 27 years, and is to be served concurrently with another 27-month sentence, for soliciting a bribe and failure to pay state income taxes.

The article also misstated the age of the editor and publisher, Goodloe Sutton of the weekly Democrat-Reporter in Linden. He is 59, not in his late 40's.

In addition, the article referred imprecisely to the timing of a Democrat-Reporter article about Sheriff Davis's use of county money for an all-terrain vehicle for his daughter. That article was published after the sheriff had repaid the money, not before.

The Times article also misstated the process by which the sheriff took money from the county mental health center. He had the center write a check to him for each mental patient who was transported by sheriff's deputies; he was not cashing checks that had been intended for the center.

The article also misstated the circulation of The Democrat-Reporter. It is 7,125, not 6,000.'

Or this Page One March 14, 2002, Bragg story about a town that allegedly banned Satan:

'A front-page article on March 14 reported on a proclamation by the mayor of Inglis, Fla., population 1,400, banning Satan from the town. The mayor, Carolyn Risher, had prayers encased in posts at the entrances to the town. The article said that while the proclamation was signed by the town clerk and stamped with the official seal, other town officials had said the mayor was speaking only for herself.

The article should have added that those officials, members of Inglis's town commission, took that position in late January after the American Civil Liberties Union threatened to sue the city. The commission ordered the mayor to reimburse the town for the cost of issuing the proclamation and had the posts removed from public property. Officials of the civil liberties union in Florida brought the later developments to The Times's attention in a letter to the editor published on Thursday.'

Such errors cry out for public pillory — or at the very least careful policing by editors. Instead, Bragg continued to live his enchanted life at the Times.

“What’s in a name?” Shakespere asked.

Make that “Shakespeare.” Miami artist Maria Alquilar, much maligned for 11 misspellings that popped up in the educational mural she designed for the Livermore public library last year, spent today under the hot sun correcting her mistakes.

In addition to fixing the bard’s name, she changed “Eistein” to “Einstein,” “Gaugan” to “Gauguin” and more.

But Alquilar, who at first claimed artistic license and said she wasn’t going to return to fix the faux pas because people were being too mean about it, was giving no media interviews as she worked under a broad-brimmed straw hat and blue tent. She sliced and diced the tiles with power tools, protected from the public by a barrier.

She wagged her finger at a television cameraman and threatened to throw a rock at a print photographer.

“No pictures of me!” she yelled. “If I’m in it, I’m going to sue you.”

Apparently, Alquilar wanted to return quietly to do the edits, for which city officials are paying her $6,000 plus travel expenses. That’s on top of the $40,000 she received for creating the 16-foot circular mosaic, made up of 175 historical names and cultural words.

But after she arrived Sunday, word spread, and today she had a consistent audience for her work, which she expected to complete today or Wednesday.

Assistant City Manager Jim Piper assured reporters that city officials were spell-checking Alquilar’s replacement tiles.

“We certainly believe they are spelled correctly,” he said.

Livermore officials selected Alquilar in 2000 to create a mosaic at the entrance to Livermore’s new library, which opened in May 2004. Icons representing science, art, literature and history surround a tree of life in the center.

Library patrons were of varied opinions about whether a name by any other spelling smelled as sweet.

A woman named Betty, who wouldn’t give her last name for fear of reprisal from her stickler school-teacher chums, said she didn’t mind the imperfect art.

“I feel sorry for her out in the heat,” she said. “It was kind of fun to have something unique. I thought it was very nice.”

But Jarod Vash, 17, who was borrowing videos with his girlfriend and her family, said he thought the misspellings were embarrassing.

“When the story first broke, I thought, ‘Oh, Livermore, the town that misspells stuff,’ ” he said. “The only thing we’ve got in Livermore, and it’s misspelled.”

But he added, “Everybody makes mistakes.”

“Not this bad,” said his girlfriend’s 13-year-old brother, Eric Smyth.

Greg Boebinger, director of the mag lab, notified staff members of new legal developments in Schrieffer's case in an e-mail Tuesday. "This is a very sad time. Bob Schrieffer will apparently be sentenced to serve time in connection with an automobile collision in California late last year," Boebinger wrote. "This is a terrible human tragedy, for the victims of the collision and their families as well as for Bob and his family."

David Swensen, who manages Yale University’s …endowment, was paid $1.03 million in compensation and benefits in the year ended in June 2003. And Bob L. Boldt, chief executive of the University of Texas Investment Management Company… was paid $1.28 million. … Top [private sector] money managers can earn more than $250 million a year running hedge funds, making the Harvard post a hard sell.

we had joy we had fun we had seasons in the sun






Twice a week, UD’s daughter goes to Washington Children’s Chorus practice in a church on the campus of American University. UD, while she’s waiting for her, drinks coffee and reads at the Starbucks at AU; or, if she’s feeling energetic, walks around campus.

As a native Washingtonian, UD has witnessed AU grow in size and popularity. She has watched it gussy up its buildings and landscape and, like most things in Northwest DC and Montgomery County (AU is located close to Montgomery County, where UD lives) get rich.

Now AU is running into one of those problems that rich universities tend to run into: overcompensation of administrators. Universities “are not in the for-profit world,” an expert on the subject reminds the Washington Post in an article about AU this morning. “If there is some unusual perk, it has to be justified.”

AU’s president’s base salary for 2003-04 was $633,000. He gets a free house plus other value-added goodies. On top of this, an anonymous letter to trustees and the Post claims, “the Ladners charged the university over the past five years for their son's engagement party, presents for their children, a personal French chef, vacations in Europe, maintenance of their personal residence in Maryland ‘including garbage bags,’ and wine up to $100 a bottle for lunch and dinner.” An investigation is underway.



The Engagement Party

Let’s start with the engagement party. There are “things that look on the surface like they are personal, but turn out to be donor cultivation,” another expert explains to the Post. “You might have a big wedding party, but maybe 70 percent of the guests are major donors.”

Consider the pathos of an engagement party for one’s beloved child, seventy percent of whose guests are business connections. Consider, more broadly, a family with absolutely no personal life.

If a set of human beings, connected by blood and some sort of history, end up living a wholly institutional life, then compensation for most aspects of that sort of life doesn’t seem out of line to me. You only get one lifetime, and people who miss out on having their life deserve not only pity, but some form of compensation for their loss. If I couldn’t go to the john without taking donor cultivation calls, I’d expect compensation. The question is how much.



Father Flanagan/Dennis Kozlowski

The conceit in the particular case of university presidents is that, having chosen the public over the private sector, they are motivated not merely by greed and vainglory but also by duty.

The university president is located somewhere between a priest and Dennis Kozlowski. He or she is expected to want good money, but is also expected to demonstrate a commitment to non-profit values.

Yet our wealthy country, as the director of research for the American Association of University Professors points out to the Post, increasingly compensates its university presidents “like private sector CEOs,” and CEOesque presidents in turn “often reflect their compensation in their management of the institution.”

This is a delicate way of saying that they often give themselves as stupendous a salary and as perky a set of perks as they can get away with. The AAUP’s Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession notes that “presidential salaries have risen much more rapidly than faculty salaries in the last ten years,” and “the trend apparently continues. This development is one further indication that a more corporate organizational hierarchy is emerging in colleges and universities, in potential conflict with the mission of institutions of higher education to operate for the benefit of society as a whole.”

The AAUP researcher calls “the rapid growth of presidential compensation” a “morale crusher for other staff and faculty members.”



The Red Corvette

It’s hard for most university presidents to get away with truly truly gross and blatant greed. Ask Peter Diamondopoulous. No one tried harder than he.

This rule does not hold true for the University of Florida system, however. There, a university president can do just about anything and be rewarded for it. The current president of the Florida Institute of Technology, for instance, left his last university presidency in disgrace, but got another university presidency right away. Here’s his story, in the Miami Herald:

SOLD: RED CORVETTE WITH PURPLE PAST

It is possibly the most infamous car in the history of South Florida higher education. A former Florida Atlantic University president has sold a red Corvette bought as his retirement gift with money that was supposed to be used for students.

The little red Corvette that former Florida Atlantic University president Anthony Catanese got as a going-away present turned out to be nothing but trouble.

His reputation was sullied. So was that of the school's foundation. And an FAU vice president was criminally charged and forced to resign.

All of that, and it turns out that Catanese barely drove his shiny red bauble. He averaged about 23 miles per week in it. Now, after less than three years of ownership, Catanese has gotten rid of the car.

"Obviously it's very ironic that so much harm was caused to so many for so little," said Kenneth Lipman, an attorney who represented Carla Coleman, who lost her job in the scandal's fallout.

Catanese traded in the car on March 30 to a Melbourne car dealership and bought a silver 2005 Mercedes-Benz SLK350 roadster. Like the Corvette, it's a luxury sports car that sells in the low to mid-40s. Catanese also has a 2003 BMW.

The Kelley Blue Book car buyer's guide lists the trade-in value of a Corvette comparable to Catanese's at $26,100.

A Melbourne engineer and his schoolteacher wife, Randolph Hines and Teresa Baggett-Hines, bought the Corvette on April 12. The odometer read 3,285 miles.

"It looks showroom new," Randolph Hines said. "It was like buying a new old car."

GOING-AWAY GIFT

Catanese, 62, did not respond to an e-mail asking why he hardly drove the car and traded it in.

He requested the car as a going-away gift in July 2002 following his resignation after 12 years as FAU president to assume the same job at Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne. He told investigators later that he wanted a Corvette because it was a favorite car of astronauts on the Space Coast, where he was relocating.

Coleman, a top FAU administrator, funneled $42,000 from the FAU Foundation to Catanese's wife, Sara, so that her husband could buy the car.

STUDENT MONEY

Foundation money is supposed to be spent on programs that benefit students, faculty or the university. Coleman concealed the Corvette purchase by having an interior design firm pay Sara Catanese for "consulting" work on FAU's new presidential residence.

Coleman then reimbursed the firm with a check from an FAU Foundation account.

The scheme succeeded until The Palm Beach Post and then the Florida Department of Law Enforcement began scrutinizing foundation spending in 2003.

In June 2003 Catanese sent a check for $42,000 to reimburse the FAU Foundation, along with a letter insisting:

"I believed the gift was completely legal and appropriate."

NOT CHARGED

The FDLE thought there was enough evidence to charge the Cataneses with felonies, but the state attorney said there was insufficient evidence to obtain convictions.

Coleman, however, who resigned her $185,000-a-year job, was charged with a third-degree felony, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and was sentenced to a year of probation.

When the Hineses, who live in Melbourne, bought the storied car on April 12 they knew none of this.

"They told me it was somebody who got it as a retirement gift," Randolph Hines said.

Now that he knows the Catanese connection, one mystery about the Corvette seems less cryptic to Hines.

"I guess it answers the question as to why there were so few miles on it," he said. "He probably felt bad driving it around."

On Garrison Keillor's Good Poems:

"No Antonin Artaud with the Flapjacks, Please"

by August Kleinzahler


Readers may remember how the U.S. military blared Van Halen and others at the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, when he took refuge in the Vatican Embassy in Panama City during our invasion of Panama years ago. This method of rousting the wicked proved so successful that it was repeated during the recent Afghan experience, when heavy metal chart-busters were unleashed on caves thought to be sheltering Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters. The English Guardian newspaper reported last year that we were breaking the wills of captured terrorists, or suspected terrorists, by assaulting them first with heavy metal followed by "happy-smiley children's songs." The real spirit cruncher turns out to be the "Barney, I Love You" song played for hours on end. Even the most hardened, sadistic killers buckle under "that kind of hell," or so asserted a reliable source. But if that fails to work, I suggest a round-the-clock tape of Garrison Keillor reading poems on his daily Writer's Almanac show.

Now, had Keillor not "strayed off the reservation" and kept to his Prairie Home Companion show with its Norwegian bachelor farmers and Lutheran bake sales (a sort of Spoon River Anthology as presented by the Hallmark Hall of Fame), comfort food for the philistines, a contemporary, bittersweet equivalent to the Lawrence Welk Show of years past, I'd have left him alone. But the indefatigable and determined purveyor of homespun wisdom has wandered into the realm of fire, and for his trespass must be burned.

If it were up to me, I'd suggest we borrow the U.S. military's tactics and lock Mr. Keillor in a Quonset hut, crank up the speakers, and give him an industrial-strength dose of, say, Albert Ayler saxophone solos until this "much beloved radio personality" forswears reading poems over the airwaves every morning. Ayler's music is not a particular enthusiasm of mine. The late poet Ted Joans described Ayler's solos as shocking as hearing someone scream "Fuck!" in St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. But Garrison Keillor could do with a little Albert Ayler in his church, and church is what Keillor is all about. Everything that comes out of his mouth in that treacly baritone, which occasionally releases into a highpitched, breathless tremolo when he wants to convey emotion, is a sermon. The homily runs something like this: we are good, if foolish and weak, and may gain redemption through compassion, laughing at ourselves, and bad poetry badly read.

Albert Ayler could only be a tonic for Keillor — a tonic we will force-feed him as they force-feed a goose in Perigord for foie gras — because Ayler's art is opposite to Keillor's shtick. Everything Keillor does is about reassurance, containment, continuity. He makes no demands on his audiences, none whatsoever. To do so would only be bad manners. Gentleness and good manners are the twin pillars of the church of Keillor.

Ayler is all about excess, anger, challenge, exploration, risk. Even when his improvisations fail, they fail bravely. His mission is to explode conventions and expectations. It would never have crossed his mind musically to be ingratiating or reassuring, or polite. Nor should it have done. That is not what music or poetry is for, especially in times like these. There is a passage from a William Carlos Williams poem, "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," dear to the hearts of those who would peddle poetry, or the idea of poetry, to the masses. I have heard it read on NPR in that solemn, hushed tone that is a commonplace among poetry salespersons, not least Mr. Keillor:

Of asphodel, that greeny flower,
I come, my sweet,
to sing to you!
My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something
that concerns you
and concerns many men. Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

A pretty sentiment, to be sure, but simply untrue, as anyone who has been to the supermarket or ballpark recently will concede. Ninety percent of adult Americans can pass through this life tolerably well, if not content, eating, defecating, copulating, shopping, working, catching the latest Disney blockbuster, without having a poem read to them by Garrison Keillor or anyone else. Nor will their lives be diminished by not standing in front of a Cézanne at the art museum or listening to a Beethoven piano sonata. Most people have neither the sensitivity, inclination, or training to look or listen meaningfully, nor has the culture encouraged them to, except with the abstract suggestion that such things are good for you. Multivitamins are good for you. Exercise, fresh air, and sex are good for you. Fruit and vegetables are good for you. Poetry is not.

Especially most of what Garrison Keillor reads on his Writer's Almanac, which, as a rule, isn't poetry at all but prose arbitrarily broken into lines masquerading as poetry. The typical Keillor selection tends to be anecdotal, wistful: more often than not a middle-aged creative writing instructor catching a whiff of mortality in the countryside — watching the geese head south, getting lost in the woods, this sort of thing.

John Ash, writing of the brilliant, fellow English poet Roy Fisher, speaks of Fisher's "rage, his refusal to be politely depressed." There is a virulent strain of the "politely depressed" in American poetry. There are other, equally obnoxious and resistant strains, but the "politely depressed" is a pertinacious little bugger, and Garrison Keillor is only helping to spread it.

Poetry not only isn't good for you, bad poetry has been shown to cause lymphomas and, in extreme instances, pancreatic cancer, in laboratory experiments. (I'll have to dig around in my notes to find exactly what study that was....) I avoid Keillor's poetry moment at nine a.m. here in San Francisco as I avoid sneezing, choking, rheumy-eyed passengers on the streetcar, lest I catch something. But occasionally, while surfing for the news, I get bit and am nearly always sickened, if not terminally, for several hours.

Keillor means well. Of course he does. That's his problem. His execrable Almanac begins with a few bars of hymn-style piano. And how could it be otherwise? We are in church. Garrison is ministering culture. A series of four or five capsulized, and trivialized, biographies of writers born on that same day follows: "Emily Dickinson was born on this day in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts. She wasn't a picture, God knows, and was reclusive in her ways. She wrote small, puzzling poems that no one read until she was dead." Keillor then proceeds to read a poem, of Ms. Dickinson's, if we are lucky, or of one of his stand-bys like Billy Collins, if we are not. It doesn't really matter. Keillor embalms whatever poem he reads within the burnished caul of his delivery, a voice one friend of mine describes as "probably taken out at day's end and left to stand all night in a glass of bourbon." Keillor then signs off: "Be well, do good work, keep in touch." You bet, Garrison, I'm right on it.

I have little doubt that a Keillor staffer picks the poems for the show, a superannuated former M.F.A. from the Iowa Workshop would be my guess, one familiar with Keillor's appalling taste, sentimentality, and the constraints of format. Keillor will deny this, as will his staff. But there's no way he'd have the time, either to read poetry or even sift casually through volumes current and old, to choose an appropriate poem. He not only has his weekly radio show, he's busy producing rotten books on what seems an almost seasonal basis. Also, judging by the introduction to Good Poems, a selection of poems from five years of those read on The Writer's Almanac, Keillor is infatuated with the idea of poetry but knows and cares little or nothing about the art, what's good, what's bad, and how it's made. But that doesn't stop him, oh no. Keillor is all appetite, irrepressible, the hardest working "thoughtful person" in show business.

In his introduction to the collection, Keillor warns us:

"The goodness of a poem is severely tested by reading it on the radio. The radio audience is not the devout sisterhood you find at poetry readings, leaning forward, lips pursed, hanky in hand [?!]; it's more like a high school cafeteria. People listen to poems while they're frying eggs and sausage and reading the paper and reasoning with their offspring, so I find it wise to stay away from stuff that is too airy or that refers off-handedly to the poet Li-Po or relies on your familiarity with butterflies or Spanish or Monet."

"So I'll be feeding you mostly shit," is what Garrison could well go on to say. No Antonin Artaud with the flapjacks, please.

Actually, Good Poems isn't as bad as one might think had one been listening now and then to Keillor's morning segment over the years. Its principal virtue is that one doesn't have to endure Keillor's poetry voice. But the range of the selections suggests more variety than the show customarily offers, and there's a healthy dollop of Anonymous, Shakespeare, Ms. Dickinson, Burns, Whitman, et al. There are surprising and delightful choices I would never have credited Keillor in making (he probably didn't) like Anne Porter, an excellent and little-known poet published by the now extinct Zoland Press. And the volume contains enlightened selections of the work of well-known contemporaries; I'm thinking here of a particularly good C. K. Williams poem. Of course, on balance, it's a rotten collection I wouldn't recommend to anyone, but it's not so bad as it might have been.

Keillor is not the first to offer the masses reassurance and diversion through poetry on the radio. Edgar Guest (1881-1957) broadcast a weekly program on NBC from 1931 to 1942, and his topical verses were syndicated to over 300 newspapers throughout the U.S. in his daily "Table Chat" column. Known as the "poet of the people," Guest published more than twenty volumes of poetry and was thought to have written over 11,000 poems, almost all of them fourteen lines long and presenting "a sentimental view of everyday life." Guest's Collected Verse appeared in 1934 and went into at least eleven editions. "I take the simple everyday things that happen to me," Guest wrote, "and I figure it happens to a lot of other people and I make simple rhymes out of them."

Are we not yet adult enough as a culture to acknowledge that the arts are not for everyone, and that bad art is worse than no art at all; and that good or bad, art's exclusive function is to entertain, not to improve or nourish or console, simply entertain. And in this, Moby Dick or Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier" are not different than the movie Cat in the Hat or Britney Spears wiggling her behind on stage; the former being more complexly entertaining and satisfying, but only for those who can appreciate the difference, and they are the minority.

Let me quote from a lecture the British poet Basil Bunting gave in Vancouver in 1970:

"Poetry is no use whatever. The whole notion of usefulness is irrelevant to what are called the fine arts, as it is to many other things, perhaps to most of the things that really matter. We who call ourselves 'The West,' now that we've stopped calling ourselves Christians, are so imbued with the zeal for usefulness that was left us by Jeremy Benthem that we find it difficult to escape from utilitarianism into a real world."

In America, usefulness is indissolubly wed to profit, increased capital. Poetry is no exception. It is worth reflecting during National Poetry Month that creative writing, over the past forty years, has subsumed American poetry and become a 250-million-dollar industry, a rather seamy industry, and an off-shoot of the rather seamy Human Potential Movement industry. American poetry is now an international joke. And not just internationally: American novelists, nonfiction writers, scholars, the enlightened general reader who a generation ago read poetry as a matter of course, for pleasure, rarely attend to it anymore. Poetry is seldom, if ever, reviewed in mainstream journals like the New York Times, the New Yorker, Harper's, the Atlantic Monthly, and when it is reviewed at all, it is reviewed in a cursory or inept manner.

Publishers will cheerfully volunteer — at least last time I checked — that poetry has never sold so well. Surely, never have so many written it and sought to publish it. I have every expectation that Keillor's Good Poems is doing land-office business. It's that kind of book and has the editor's broad public appeal behind it. I expect Mr. Keillor's morning show has legions of faithful listeners as well, who feel nourished and broadened by his daily reading of poetry, as countless Americans once felt about Edgar Guest and his more homely product.

But I, for one, have never in my lifetime seen the situation of poetry in this country more dire or desperate. Nor is the future promising. Cultural and economic forces only suggest further devastation of any sort of vital literary culture, along with the prospects of the very, very few — it is always only a very few — poets who will matter down the road. What little of real originality is out there is drowning in the waste products spewing from graduate writing programs like the hog farm waste that recently overflowed its holding tanks in the wake of Hurricane Isabel, fouling the Carolina countryside and poisoning everything in its path.

Let me put it starkly: the better animals in the jungle aren't drawn to poetry anymore, and they're certainly not tuned in to Keillor's Writer's Almanac. Just as the new genre of the novel drew off most of the brilliant young writers of the nineteenth century, movies, television, MTV, advertising, rock 'n' roll, and the internet have taken the best among the recent crop of young talent. Do you suppose for a moment that a spirited youngster with a brilliant, original mind and gifted up the yin-yang is going to sit still for two years of creative writing poetry workshops presided over by a dispirited, compromised mediocrity, all the while critiquing and being critiqued by younger versions of the same?

Boosterism of the sort Garrison Keillor participates in on The Writer's Almanac will succeed in shifting more than a few books of poetry, not least his Good Poems, and in encouraging countless more people to write. But there exists a surfeit of encouragement of this kind in America at the moment, and there's very little to show for it. The merchandising of poetry, or at least the slick, sentimental idea of it, is the problem, not the solution.

Allow me to conclude with a poem called "National Poetry Day" by the Scottish poet Gael Turnbull, which is timely and also reminds us that this sort of foolishness, though endemic in the U.S. of A., is not altogether unique to it.

"Transform your life with poetry"
the card said, and briefly I fussed
that this overestimated the effect
until I remembered how it had thrust
several old friends,
plus near and dear,
into distress and penury,
how even I, without the dust
of its magic, might have achieved
peace of mind, even success,
so maybe the advice is just,
not to be ignored, a sort of timely
Health Warning from the Ministry
of Benevolence
at the Scottish Book Trust.

Syllabum Omnium, o melle dulcius,
Puris amicum mentibus
Puris amandum professoribus
In corde regnes omnium. Amen.

Syllabum Omnium, sweeter than honey,
Friend of pure minds,
Loved by true professors,
May Thou reignest in the hearts of all who love. Amen.

As George W. Bush has learned, Harry Reid [of Nevada, the Senate Minority Leader] does not ignore slights. “I believe in vengeance,” he once told a reporter. In May, he began a commencement address at George Washington University Law School by saying that the last time he had set foot on the campus was January, 1964 — the year he graduated from the school. “I’ve been holding a grudge,” he said.

Law school was difficult. “We managed to get by, but just barely,” he said.

At one point, while Landra was pregnant with their second child and he was working six days a week as a Capitol police officer, the transmission of their car, a 1954 Buick Special, broke down. He was desperate. “No car,” he continued. "No way to get to work. Too many bills." When he approached a dean for help, he recalled, the dean said, "‘Why don’t you just quit law school?’ I don’t remember exactly what I thought he would say, but that was not it,” he said. "Since that day, I’ve harbored ill will toward this school."

Reid told the graduates that he regretted his pettiness, but it’s fair to say that payback has been a factor in his career.