Americas Politics

The Organization of American States, half a century older than the United Nations but laboring in obscurity for most of its life, could achieve new prominence in the post-Cold War era by intervening more aggressively to resolve regional conflicts.

BRATTLEBORO, VT. -- Sunday morning, I was having breakfast at a funky café that prides itself on organic food and the languid preparation thereof. With time to observe the locals passing by, I came to an epiphany about why this green wedge of America feels so unique: Vermont is what the whole country would be like if the hippie ideals of the 1960s and '70s had matured and taken root everywhere. By this I do not mean the state is just a big groovy commune. The cultural differences are subtle.

BRATTLEBORO, VT. -- Sunday morning, I was having breakfast at a funky café that prides itself on organic food and the languid preparation thereof. With time to observe the locals passing by, I came to an epiphany about why this green wedge of America feels so unique: Vermont is what the whole country would be like if the hippie ideals of the 1960s and '70s had matured and taken root everywhere. By this I do not mean the state is just a big groovy commune. The cultural differences are subtle.

Political novices Re "Romney, Perry again trade accusations," Sept. 15 I recently took a cruise to the Galapagos Islands. I met wonderful people from all over the globe. It was embarrassing that they all knew so much about events in the United States, yet we knew so little about their countries. They were amused about our never-ending presidential election. When I returned home, I was amazed to learn that, although no one had yet cast a vote, the media has declared this to be a two-man GOP race.

Political novices Re "Romney, Perry again trade accusations," Sept. 15 I recently took a cruise to the Galapagos Islands. I met wonderful people from all over the globe. It was embarrassing that they all knew so much about events in the United States, yet we knew so little about their countries. They were amused about our never-ending presidential election. When I returned home, I was amazed to learn that, although no one had yet cast a vote, the media has declared this to be a two-man GOP race.

There was a time in American presidential politics when courting the ethnic vote was simple. Gangling senators from Midwestern farm states would don yarmulkes and wolf down blintzes on New York's Lower East Side, or would put on outsized sombreros and address crowds at fiestas in Southern California.

To most Americans, the epitome of hunger is the Third World child with bloated belly and spindly limbs, too weak to brush away the flies that land on drooping eyelids. The notion of that happening here--a body cannibalizing itself for want of food in a country so rich--is hard to imagine. But that extreme image is beyond hunger. It is hunger's end result: malnutrition. Hunger came long before.

It is a little difficult to declare oneself a patriot these days without running the risk of being considered under the influence of euphoriants. To be sure, unthinking patriotism needs always to be eyed with great suspicion--exploitative patriotism being well known as the last refuge of the scoundrel. And, certainly, all is not well in America. Job layoffs and hiring freezes tell us that.

The views concerning the character of the current stage of social evolution and proposals for possible steps to improve international relations, voiced by Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev at the 27th Communist Party Congress, were addressed not only to the Soviet public. Instead, they were addressed to the whole world--the United States included. What is the core of the Soviet Union's approach to the current global problems?

Cast your mind back to the Clarence Thomas affair. You know, Phyllis Berry, Anita Hill, Long Dong Silver--that whole crowd. During the week when network standards and practices guys were crying in their manuals, and in the days after, the most frequently used word was process. Everybody and his senator, whatever their position on The Question, agreed that the process stinks.

Is our political speech really more bitter and poisonous than it's ever been? No, though it's certainly more debased and lacerating than it was just a few short years ago. We've been through eras of bitterly expressed politics more often than we'd probably care to admit. The Federalists and anti-Federalists bickered ferociously. Contention over the Bank of the United States during the Jacksonian era was fierce. The political rhetoric leading up to the Civil War was murderous. Franklin Roosevelt's policies were the target of vile opposition.

"The State Within," a new, imported political whodunit on BBC America, is something less than perfect, but if you have a taste for high-level skulduggery and do not mind being totally confused much of the time, it's an enjoyable enough ride -- fun, sometimes exciting, basically intelligent, occasionally preposterous.

I At perhaps no time since the Progressive Era, lasting from the late 19th century until the onset of World War I, have prosperity and a general sense of well-being so sharply contrasted with worried, negative diagnoses of the state of our democracy. The new American dilemma presents the picture of a highly prosperous, explosively inventive nation alongside one with a new, or updated, critique of the contrasts between contemporary euphoria and certain less satisfying realities.

Tony Beegle slides the receiver off the phone and dials yet another number. In the last half hour, he's gotten nowhere. Answering machines. No one home. People hanging up. It's a typical Friday night at Schulman, Ronca & Bucuvalas Inc., a New York-based market and public opinion research firm with phone centers in Fort Myers and two other cities. Tonight, Beegle and two dozen colleagues are taking the political pulse of America.

Like converging weather systems, the old and new politics of gun control collided over Michigan this spring. Predictably, turbulence followed. Michigan has long been a stronghold of the National Rifle Assn., and few were surprised when the state Legislature approved bills that would make it easier for state residents to carry concealed weapons--a top NRA priority. Then came the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. Suddenly the weather changed.

An eclectic group of Latin American politicians and intellectuals, including potential presidential contenders from the region's biggest nations, met here recently for the fifth in a series of freewheeling discussions about politics and economics. The group is dominated by center-left opposition leaders who see themselves as the coming wave of Latin American politics.

Free the freedom-fighters, the left demands. Don't turn the terrorists loose, the right protests. President Patricio Aylwin is caught in the middle. Nearing the end of his four-year term, Aylwin faces some of his hardest decisions yet on the tough issue of what to do with "subversives" convicted for violent crimes under the former dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

Tony Beegle slides the receiver off the phone and dials yet another number. In the last half hour, he's gotten nowhere. Answering machines. No one home. People hanging up. It's a typical Friday night at Schulman, Ronca & Bucuvalas Inc., a New York-based market and public opinion research firm with phone centers in Fort Myers and two other cities. Tonight, Beegle and two dozen colleagues are taking the political pulse of America.

Like many other Latin Americans, Peruvian Raul Linares conceded the need for drastic action to tame an out-of-control economy when inflation in his homeland hit 7,000% a year in the early 1990s. Then a mid-level bureaucrat in the Agriculture Ministry, he grudgingly accepted the loss of his job as part of an economic "shock" program that included widespread layoffs. Four years later, he runs a bare-bones photocopy shop, and his income is less than a quarter of what it was.