Dear Tim,
You are a sick puppy, and this obsession must stop. Let’s try to get through the next 24 hours without mentioning a certain chic New York weekly, shall we?
To the news: I like today’s stories about the guilty verdict in former Assistant D.A. Steven Pagones’s decade-long effort to hold Al Sharpton and his fellow demagogues C. Vernon Mason and Alton Maddox, Jr. accountable for their defamation in the Tawana Brawley case. (They repeatedly charged him with being among Brawley’s nonexistent rapists.) The New York Times has a somewhat gleeful–but I suspect over-optimistic–analysis piece arguing that the verdict will complicate Sharpton’s efforts to go mainstream. (He’s planning to run for mayor, for the second time, in 2001.) He, of course, denies this, saying that the verdict will “do for me what the indictment did for Adam [Clayton] Powell.” To this deeply pessimistic resident of the District of Columbia, it’s hard to counter him when he points out that “If Marion Barry can come back,” so can he.
The Times also gives front-page play to an important story the Washington Post ignores: A coalition of 25 major H.M.O.’s, including Kaiser Permanente, has concluded that legislation ruling their business practices is inevitable, and has therefore decided to endorse a fairly far-reaching compromise plan being floated in the Senate. This version, jointly sponsored by Republican John Chafee and Democrat Bob Graham, is tougher than most of the Republican alternatives, but avoids what H.M.O.’s see as the biggest threat in the Democratic leadership’s plan: it doesn’t provide patients the right to sue H.M.O.’s and their insurance companies over the denial of care. Most organizations representing managed care companies are still vainly trying to resist any legislation, pouring all their energies into “Harry & Louise”-type ad campaigns. But now that at least one group of H.M.O.’s has acknowledged the inevitability of pretty dramatic regulation, it’s going to be increasingly impossible for the industry to resist all reform. (Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch.)
But my very favorite story of the day takes us back to Nigeria, where a “Letter from Lagos” by the Post’s Karl Vick sketches the wild scene at the funeral of the late Chief Moshood K.O. Abiola. It seems that under Muslim law, a man may have four wives. In Abiola’s case, only two of these survived him. But in addition to these “house wives” who had their own wings in his sprawling home, Abiola followed the custom of taking on a great many more unofficial “yard wives,” who came to his home with their children to mourn. (One Lagos paper pegged their number at 40.) What starts out as a sort of deft social comedy–the “yard wives” getting tired of their hard chairs in the front yard, and finally storming the lavish indoor armchairs of the “house wives”–turns into a poignant piece, noting the class disparity between the two sets of women and their children. As the yard wives force their way toward the center of the mob scene surrounding the actual grave, a family friend concludes simply, “They want to be seen”–one of those moments in which a news story magically connects the foreign to the familiar. (All of Vick’s coverage, by the way, has inclined me to question my assumption that the Times is always the paper of first choice in foreign news. His initial reports of Abiola’s death, in about a third of the space the Times assigned, offered a much clearer narrative and only a bit less raw info.)
I seem to be in a chatty mood, so I’d best rein myself in here.
Volubly,
Marjorie
