2 THE BOSTON PHOE!

SHORT STOPS

SECTION ONE

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VILLAIN OF THE WEEK

The political TV ad-makers

They're giving us just what we apathetic, apolitical, civically illiterate slobs deserve, and laughing all the way to the bank about it, too. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn't resent and loathe the panderers behind the low-quality political TV ads increasingly littering the gubernatorial-campaign landscape.

It’s not even that we expect them to be more than superficial, intentionally misleading come-ons for the candidates. But lately, the insults to our intelligence have become a bit too flagrant.

First there was Frank Bellotti’s attack ad on John Silber’s comment suggesting “ripe” old people should acknowledge when it’s “time to go.” Silber deserved to have that clever bit of wordplay chucked in his face, but did Bellotti really need to hire gorgeous oldsters who

THE ONE-MINUTE INTERVIEW Richard Dimino on parking in the city

“One of Boston's greatest attractions is this is a walking city,” says Richard Dimino, commissioner of the city’s transportation department. Which is a nice, roundabout way of informing new residents and reminding old ones of a grim reality that the onset of fall brings into clearer focus —there’s nowhere to park, and if you park illegally, get set to pay through the nose.

Starting on August 27 there’s a new wrinkle to the annual onset of musical parking spaces touched off by the return of the students. Legal spaces are being removed and strict regulations will be enforced along Brookline and Longwood Avenues in the Longwood Medical Area between Park Drive and the Jamaicaway. Just one more reason to abide by Dimino’s axiom: driver beware.

“Double parking in Boston is something you don’t want to do. You face the real predicament of having your car towed away. Parking in a no-loading or no- stopping zone — what the sign says is what you get. ,

“We realize that new people come in September and we try to make sure their arrival is well managed, but they need to avoid illegal parking. We've instituted expanded shifts in our parking-enforcement division so we're out there 24 hours a day. For example, we have resident-parking programs.in Allston-Brighton and we enforce them. If somebody thinks they can park illegally in the early morning hours without receiving a parking violation, they're wrong.

“Students who want to use resident parking should register their cars where they're living. Today, through cooperative efforts between registries of motor vehicles and parking clerks in different states, we can find you even if you own a vehicle registered out of state. The best bet is for you to comply with the law and avoid a lot of problems.”

S1GN

Oxfam America is seeking volunteers for its Fourth Annual International Harvest Fair, which takes place on Boston Common September 15 and 16. It features ethnic food, crafts, and live music from

ROGER JONES

look as if they regularly accompany Frank on his workout regimen to play the part of Silber’s candidates for triage?

Then came Silber’s absurd usé of the Boston Globe headline QUESTIONS LINGER OVER BELLOTTI'S CORRUPTION RECORD in an ad that tried to link Bellotti with corruption. (The Globe story was actually about Bellotti’s record of prosecuting political corrup- tion while attorney general.) Particularly sleazy touch- es: use of a faded, Godfather-like photo of Bellotti with partially obscured letters superimposed across his chest that, on casual glance at the TV screen, look like numbers. Numbers across old Frank’s chest — get it?

Now there’s Bill Weld’s latest contribution, touting his environmental advocacy, which opens with a photo of an Egyptian pyramid, terms it “their legacy,” and goes on to say our legacy will be tons of pollution unless we elect Weld. Which makes us wonder about Weld's alternative legacy: huge, useless ceremonial crypts built on the backs of Hebrew slave labor?

wo? Bee es

around the world. Proceeds from the event will fund Oxfam America’s developmental projects abroad. For more information call Clare or Michael, Special Events, at 482-1211.

(om The Buddy Program of the AIDS Action Committee is looking for volunteers to provide emotional and practical support to its clients on a one-to-one basis. An orientation session will be held on Tuesday, August 28. (The sessions are held on the fourth Tuesday of every month.) For more information call 437-

6200, extension 450.

Com Amnesty International, the Nobel Prize-winning human-rights organization, will hold an orientation session for new members on Monday, August 27, from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. at 58 Day Street, Davis Square,

Somerville. For more information call 623-0202.

— Compiled by Cindy Powell

AUGUST 24, 1990

SEND OUT THE SCHOOL-COMMITTEE CLOWNS?

The greatest advertisements for restructuring the Boston School Committee made cameo appearances at last Tuesday night’s public hearing on school-board reor- ganization, held by the Boston City Council’s Committee on Public Education: the school-committee jokesters themselves.

They made such a grotesque attempt at turning the council gathering into typical school-board burlesque that some might accuse City Councilor-at-Large Michael McCormack, chairman of the public-education committee and staunch advocate of school-governance retooling, of having orchestrated the farce himself.

Among those testifying at center stage was school-com- mittee member Rosina (Kitty) Bowman, who deserves base-line credit for being one of the few members who actually has children attending the Boston Public Schools. Nevertheless, status quo supporter Bowman unwittingly purred her way into the hearts of school-committee over- haulers by meandering through a laundry list of school- board deficiencies — a slow-burn barn dance that com- pletely overwhelmed her final conclusion that neither shrinking the size of the school committee (from its pre- sent unwieldy 13) nor changing the way it is chosen (from its current elected position to an appointed-by-the- mayor body) would make a darn bit of difference.

Next up was chief bozo Robert Meany Cappucci, who made a valiant effort to protect the honor of the school committee from the growing body of school-board bash- ers. “Boston is not unique in its struggle to educate” its children, Cappucci protested. “We are no different than all the major cities of America.”

To which McCormack replied, “We're not Boise, Idaho. ... Weare Boston. We are unique. . . . Failure is not acceptable.”

After the showing of the school-committee contingent, even a pro-status-quo partisan might buy the notion that the best restructuring plan would be to have the entire cabal resign en masse.

Unfortunately, that is not one of the options before the council as it seeks to bring before the citizenry a binding referendum question on the November ballot that would redesign the school committee. (Last November's non- binding school-committee restructuring referendum squeaked by overall but was trounced in blue-collar neighborhoods and some communities of color.) Among the proposals that were proferred before the council: to reshape the committee into a smaller, appointed body, a smaller elected body (suggested by a couple of school- committee chums in what some saw as a butt-saving measure), or a smaller elected-appointed amalgam.

Last Wednesday, the city council was expected to vote on a home-tule petition that would push the process of school-committee reform in a legislative direction. Instead, faced with a strong mandate for change but a mishmash of blueprints to choose from, the council moved to hold further public hearings over the next few

weeks. Proponents of reform hope that by the council's

September 12 meeting members can reach consensus around a single plan that will be able to pass muster with the council, the mayor, the legislature, and the voting public. (If supported by the legislature, the measure has to be signed by the governor by the end of September in order to get on the ballot).

What may emerge, McCormack said after huddling with his colleagues, is a shrunken hybrid of a school committee: perhaps a nine-member board with, say, five members elected and four appointed by the mayor. This mix, reformers hope, would silence the grumblings of those in the communities of color (who make up the / majority of Boston Public School parents) who view an all-appointed body as both a mayoral power grab and a swipe at their hard-won freedom to vote. At the same time it would hold the school committee accountable to someone (the mayor) other than its current patron saint — Sam Kinison.

— Ric Kahn

Chief bozo Robert Cappucci

JOHN NORDELL

TALKING POLITICS

Symbolism undeliverable

by Maureen Dezell

ast Tuesday, at about the same time gubernatorial

candidate Evelyn Murphy was at a Boston Globe

forum ticking off a number of very good reasons why a woman candidate ought to take over the corner office come January, I was coercing my two-year-old into putting on clothes before he left the house. I was also try- ing to reach a plumber, checking my office for any early- morning messages, and figuring out when I'd be able to make it to my new home town’s Town Hall that day, the deadline for registering to vote in next month’s primary election.

Had I been listening to Murphy that morning, I probably would have agreed with most of what she was saying. Like the lieutenant governor, I’m a left-leaning liberal. I’m a card-carrying member of the ACLU. I've called myself a feminist for close to two decades. I’m pro-choice, pro- underdog, pro-progressive tax. And I think the inbred bunch of guys in suits and ties who've been playing most of the politics and setting most of the policies in govern- ment lately have botched things badly. Their recent thetoric and inertia has created a cacophony that’s on the brink of causing social chaos in Massachusetts. I firmly believe, as Murphy maintains, that new voices — women’s voices — have got to be heard.

As I beat my fast path to the voter-registration desk later on Tuesday, though (passing a woman holding a Murphy sign who smiled warmly at me — a thirtysomething work- ing mother in a casual suit who looked like a Murphy sup- porter), I realized I’m not going to vote for Evelyn Murphy in the September Democratic primary.

I’m not casting my vote for someone else because Murphy is low in the polls, and I think my ballot might be wasted (which it might). And I’m not going to vote for Frank Bellotti simply because he’s probably more certain than Murphy of knocking John Silber out of the race (admittedly a most compelling argument in favor of Frank).

I'm also peeved that because Bellotti and Silber are men, they can raise money from thousands of other men who'll write $1000 checks without batting an eyelash — a privi- lege no female candidate enjoys.

Nevertheless, I’m not voting for Evelyn Murphy because I don’t think her record shows she'll deliver on the symbols of her campaign — liberalism and and feminism. And I don’t want to cast a symbolic vote for a symbolic candidate and see those critical causes die.

In an otherwise scurrilous campaign season, Murphy has run a mostly clean and issues-oriented race. She’s made blunders, to be suré: But after months of running what looked like a single-issue, abortion-rights campaign, she’s recently taken on the mantle of the disenfranchised. She’s been visiting homeless shelters. Campaigning in minority

i ods. Talking about the plight of the poor.

Silber and Bellotti, by contrast, have conducted a fight that’s about as meaningful as a shoot-out between two cowboys in a spaghetti Western.

The problem with Murphy’s campaign is the problem with Murphy. She's a liberal, but she isn’t a particularly progressive or populist liberal. She’s a feminist, but she appears to consider abortion — rather than socioeco- nomics — the paramount feminist issue.

As Secretary of Economic Affairs in Michael Dukakis’s second administration, Murphy was instrumental in shaping so-called “right-to-know” legislation (governing the labeling of toxic substances, particularly in the work- place). But labor leaders complained continually that they were excluded from critical parts of the negotiations that led to enactment at that law, largely because Murphy con- sidered their presence at the table less vital than that of many business interests.

Secretary Murphy kowtowed to Big Business on the cor- porate-day-care issue, too. The state’s corporate-child-care program expanded, rather than contracted, under Murphy's successor, Joseph Alviani. Murphy also opposed child-care linkage legislation, which would have required companies and developers to include day-care facilities in new build- ings, preferring instead to offer companies “incentives” to open day-care centers..(The incentive approach might make some economic sense. But it’s hardly a progressive — or feminist — stance.)

Murphy never launched job-training or retraining initia- tives while she was economic-affairs secretary, even though, as a trained economist, she no doubt knew an eco- nomic downturn was on the horizon. Nor did she take on key causes of the working poor or of welfare mothers — such as the fight for universal health-insurance coverage.

It isn’t too surprising that while Murphy enjoys the sup- port of the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA), a female-dominated organization, the Service Employees’ International Union Local 509, the social-workers’ union — made up mostly of low-paid women who work with poor women — has endorsed Bellotti.

During the recent state-budget debacle, Murphy only grudgingly got behind Sen. Patricia McGovern’s (D- Lawrence) sane, sensible sales-tax-expansion plan, a pro-

gressive proposal that taxes services provided by highly paid professionals (such as lawyers and accountants) to help pay for social services for the poor.

A number of Murphy contributors are liberal, highly paid professionals. And in a late-20th-century campaign, where the big-bucks are almost certain to win, she’s apparently

on other fronts as well. The candidate's core constituency See MURPHY, page 22

SECTION ONE, THE BOSTON PHOENIX 3

6 OVER THERE by Sean Flynn and Jim Hershberg Flynn examines the mass boosterism and the minority hand-wringing over Operation Desert Shield, and Hershberg gives President Bush seven pointers on bow to turn the crisis to our advantage. 8 OPPORTUNITY LOST by Jon Keller Republican Bill Weld’s gubernatorial candidacy is one of this race’s most becalmed boats. An explanation of bow the SS Weld ran aground and why it’s _ unlikely to come about. 10 RATIONING HARD TIME by Robert Keough Prison overcrowding means not just cramped quarters in the lock-up but more criminals on the street. A look at what the state might do to escape rather than court disaster. 12 SPORTING EYE by Mark Leibovich There's been good news recently in the Celtic camp with the signing of Reggie Lewis, but the team isn’t out of the woods yet. A few ideas on what the Green Team can do to stop the bleeding. 14 DUELING CAREERISTS by Rob French The battlefield for the Middlesex County DA's race is the candidates’ résumés, not their plans for the office.

LIFE ST Y € 5 Emer

2 URBAN EYE This week, Boston’s Bulletin Board checks out a bot new salon-to-be on Newbury Street, previews an exhibit of allergy art, shops with a conscience at the Green Planet, and more. 3 OUT THERE by Caroline Knapp A look at the five men every woman needs to make ber life complete (aside from Kevin Costner). 4 A PROFILE OF CARYL RIVERS by Carolyn Clay With the publication of ber eighth book, a sexy thriller set in Boston, Caryl Rivers establishes ber position as one of our most irreverent local writers. 6 CLOTHES ENCOUNTERS compiled by Ketura Persellin We're beading toward fall. This year, ‘tis the season to buy a rubber purse, stock up on clothes made from stretch velvet and suede, and put away your summer whites. Plus, an ode to the pajama and a look at what the 3 ty are predicting for fall fashion. 8 THE STRAIGHT DOPE by Cecil Adams 9. & ACTION compiled by Eric Zicklin 10. ‘boane OUT by Robert Nadeau : “A look at thé Loading Zone. Plus, the Phoenix Dining Guide and Joseph’s Corner ENCOUNTERS at the Middle East Restaurant. ; 14 THE PUZZLE by Don Rubin

ARTS Ree eee

2 SDAYSA WEEK _. If it’s cool, it’s in the Phoenix, so pay a visit to our listings pages before you step out. If you're movie bound, turn to “Flicks in a Flash,” Boston’s most inventive film guide. For the latest news in the arts world, read up on the “State of the Art.” And in “Next Weekend,” Michael Bloom gets ready for 24-7 Spyz. 6 FIM Robin Dougherty says you'll fall for Darkman, and she talks with director Sam Raimi; Peter Keough is mostly enchanted by The Witches; Gary Susman gets a reasonably clear signal from Pump Up the Volume; but Steve Vineberg thinks My Blue Heaveni 6t stuck in Purgatory. Plus, in “Trailers,” The Exorcist III, Delta Force 2, and After Dark, My Sweet. 9 DANCE Bronwyn Mills talks to the animals in Martha Clarke's Endangered Species, which is previewing in Pittsfield; she also looks in on the Hubbard Street Dance hs : Company’s run at Jacob’s Pillow. And Thea Singer asks whetber modern-dance STRONG MAN companies in Boston aren't themselves becoming an endangered species. 11 TELEVISION. Clif Garboden returns to 1957 with The Nat King Cole Show, 25 episodes of which PBS is bringing back to TV. 12 THEATER Carolyn Clay gets a lift from Israel Horovitz’s Strong-Man’s Weak Child; Gary Susman is all for the Publick’s Three Musketeers; and Bill Marx concludes that Ikaros Theatre's Comedy of Errors bas too many errors and not enough comedy. 16 MUSIC Tim Riley tips bis bat to Prince’s Graffiti Bridge; Ted Drozdowskt says Bob Mould’s Black Sheets of Rain is serious— and good — stuff; Jon Garelick finds splendor in the classroom of Jackie McLean, and be pops into the Regattabar to catch the first meeting of Oliver Lake and Donal Fox; Stephanie Zacharek wants more feel- ing from Gene Loves Jezebel; and, .in “Cellars by Starlight,” Richard Cromonic gets the latest from Vasco da Gama; Mr. Curt, Ed “Moose” Savage, Ron Scarlett, and more. Plus, in “Live and on Record,” Texas Tornados and Anthrax.

27 HOT DOTS 28 LISTINGS 35 ART LISTINGS 38 PLAY BY PLAY 40 OFF THE RECORD 41 FILM LISTINGS

COMING NEXT WEEK

In Lifestyle: an excerpt from Scott Haas’s Hearing Voices: Reflections of a Psychology Intern; Rebecca Nemser reflects on turning 40; and a look at tattoos — body art is going mainstream. In Arts: Carolyn Clay talks with sexually explicit performance artist Karen Finley; Robin Dougherty writes about AIDS plays; Ted Drozdowski on the collected works of blues legend Robert Johnson remastered on compact disc; and Jim Macnie on jazz vocalist Betty Carter.

Credits: John Nordell (with News), Kathy Chapman (with Lifestyle), and Eric Antoniou (with Oliver Lake in Arts).

4 THE BOSTON PHO) SECTION ONE

LETTERS

BECAUSE OF MEDIA DISTORTION YOU MISUNDER- f

We welcome responses from readers. Letters should be typed (double spaced) if that’s possible, and every letter must include the writer’s name and address, as well as a telephone number (wed appreciate one where we can reach you during business hours). The last is solely for purposes of verification: as you can see on this page, only the writer’s name and town are printed, and these may be withbeld if there is good reason.

All letters are subject to editing for considerations of space, fairness, and

literacy.

Regarding the blistering attack on that so-necessary institution of Boston’s “dark side,” the Pine Street Inn, (“Inn the Middle of the Road,” News, August 17), I'd like to add two points not raised in the article.

My basis for these comments is a year of volunteering in a maintenance and engi- neering capacity and for another winter working as a night counselor at the Inn.

Pine Street purchased the building next to it, the Pransky Building, and plans on renovating it. This will increase its home- less population on Harrison Avenue by one-third. The expansion will further turn Harrison Avenue into the “bummy” part of town, and further institutionalize home- lessness in the new “mega-shelter,” much as the mentally-ill population was treated in the ’50s. Pine Street should not expand its size at the same site, but rather sell this

building for commercial use and purchase a building in another area of the city to increase bed space. Most shelter industry people know today bigger is not better. Pine Street opens its door at 4:30 p.m. for the guests and serves dinner at 5 p.m. Guests must stay in the two dining rooms until 6:45 p.m., when Pine Street allows them upstairs to the dormitories. The din- ing rooms are not adequate in size to allow all the guests to eat at the same time. Because the food line is 45 minutes, many guests have finished eating while others are still waiting in line. Guests who have eaten must wait in these lobbies for anoth- er hour while the guests who just got din- ner are forced to stand, crouch, or sit on the floor to eat. This time of the day at Pine Street — when the many guests who

“CARQOT TOP OROPs OvT AWD THEN T = SAY!

| HERDQUARTERS...| EADQUARTERS...

worked all day should be able to look toward a quiet time — is the most hectic, and the time when most fights break out. Often we counselors discussed opening the dormitories during dinner time in order to free up space in the dining rooms, but it seemed to no avail — the organiza- tion has not heard us.

Pine Street is such a necessary institu- tion that serves many hundreds daily, doing a job that is much better served by smaller-scale shelters, but, alas, those kinds of shelters are not around. Until more mini-shelters are established, we will need Pine Street. And we will need to mold it to what we want and need.

Steve Andrews Dorchester

EXPLICIT IMAGERY SUSPECT

David Joselit writes, “[Tlhe strength of Mapplethorpe’s work lies precisely in its Capacity to confront and disturb the main- stream” and that “(MJapplethorpe doesn’t sentimentalize: he makes us look whether we want to see or not.” (“The Body (im)politic,” Arts, August 10.) In other words, Joselit admits that certain .,, Mapplethorpe photos are indeed intimate, explicit, and meant to disturb most people. This is almost a dictionary definition of the word “obscene.” Just because an image invokes a strong response doesn’t auto- matically raise it to the lével of worthy art. I’m sure the Boston Police Department could fill up a dozen ICAs with intimate, explicit, and disturbing photographs that make all sorts of sad statements about the world we live in, but they wouldn’t be great art. Despite all the recent dogmatic verbiage to the contrary, “pornography” and “obscenity” are not just conservative, ad hominem catch phrases of the simple- minded — they do have real meaning and value when applied appropriately.

An after-school job I had during my col- lege years involved looking after a small office building out in Acton. One day I dis- covered some magazines that were not quite cleverly enough hidden in the men’s room. Up until that point and like most college guys, I had thought that “porn,” however explicit, was naughty, but so what? These magazines — these very expensive magazines — were filled with nothing but photos of sad-eyed little girls in various states of undress. None were

I say sun-dried tomato> You say Sun-driecl tomahta. Lets Call the whole thing off.

S’PreEsSE 1970

ROGER JONES

involved in any explicit physical activities — most simply sat posed, gazing back into the camera with joyless innocence — but I was disturbed and pissed off enough by this shit to completely and permanently re- adjust my perspective on these issues.

Mapplethorpe’s two photos involving children, however different the intentions may have been, would not have been out of place in these kinds of magazines. Any piece of purported art eventually has to stand or fall on its own merits, regardless of the intent behind it or the setting in which it is presented. This may seem like one guy’s particular problem with the Mapplethorpe exhibit, but it reflects the fundamental failings I find inherent to all such photographs.

Explicit imagery in general is always

because, like unabashed pornog- raphy and unlike any great piece of art, it takes a short and easy route to evoking emotion and feeling, but it is a quick “high” with seldom any long-term impact. When writing of historical contexts, Joselit conveniently omits (or more likely, never understood) that, traditionally, blunt real- ism has always been the weak sister of the art world. Painters typically begin their craft by first learning how to render realis- tic still lifes and portraits, and then the bet- ter ones generally go on to master more complex and subtle techniques.

It is the lack of subtlety and finesse that has always characterized all pornography and low art. Mr. Joselit, despite his famil- iarity with the vernacular, shows that he and others like him have no more under- standing of the relationship between art and pornography than do a Dapper O’Neil and others of that ilk.

Bernie Conneely Charlestown

IT’S THE LAW — OF 1660

It is not often that an actor has the plea- sure to learn of a reviewer's deep commit- ment to textual analysis and truth in Shakespeare (“Medieval Manners,” Arts, August 17). Due to your eagle eyes and ears, you were able to pick up a “substitu- tion” perpetrated by Inanna Theatre’s cast in Henry IV, Part 1. 1 refer to your quibble on changing “By our Lord” to “I protest.” It warms my heart that this reviewer is so adept at seeking out the minutiae that make a play worthwhile.

Unfortunately, the director had taken Shakespeare’s First Folio and original edi- tion, and not the Penguin Shakespeare, as an authority. The folio reads, “I protest.” However, Mr. Gantz’s efforts do not go unrecognized, and the Shakespeare police commend you. One question though: how did you manage to watch the play with your nose so deep in the book?

Melinda Lopez Cambridge

Jeffrey Gantz replies: Pursuant to the Profanity Act of 1606,

the compilers of the First Folio removed JSrom Shakespeare’s copy mild oaths like “By our Lord” and substituted innocuous inanities like “I protest.” In the current cli- mate, I can’t imagine why Inanna Theatre would be giving us censored Shakespeare. Neither do I understand why they would work from the Folio text of 1 Henry IV when the modern editors are virtually unanimous tn identifying the two Quartos of 1598 as our closest approach as to what Shakespeare actually wrote.

AUGUST 24, 1990

Ph i (ISSN No: 0163-3015) Published Weekly Vol. XVII/No. 33 126 Brookline Ave., Boston, Mass. 02215 (617) 536-5390 PUBLISHER & CHAIRMAN Stephen M. Mindich PRESIDENT & CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER H. Barry Morris EDITOR

Peter Kadzis

EDITORIAL

Managing Editor: John P. Mello Jr.; Design Director: Cleo Leontis; News Editor: Mark Jurkowitz; Arts Editor: Jettrey Gantz; Lifestyle Editor: Caroline Knapp; Arts Editors: Carolyn Clay (theater), Peter Keough (film), Ted E. Drozdowski (music), Amy Finch (events); Staff Editors: Ketura Persellin, Thea Singer; Listings Coordinator: Gail Ross; Staff Writers: Maureen Dezell, Sean Flynn, Rob French, Timothy Gower, Ric Kahn, Jon Keller; Assistant to the Editor: Mark Leibovich.

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6 THE BOSTON PHOEND

SECTION ONE

Marines board 747 en route to Middle Eas

AUGUST 24, 1990

AP/WIDE WORLD

OVER THERE

Random thoughts on Operation Desert Shield

ast weekend, as George Bush’s

intention became clear to ship

the biggest show of US military

might since Vietnam into the

Saudi Arabian desert, a guy named Phillip Wanke was talking with a 19-year-old Army grunt who was getting ready to ship out to the Middle East. Not even old enough to buy a drink, the kid was just days away from finding his young butt in the middle of a giant sand dune where, judging by the latest conventional wisdom, he stands a decent chance of ending up shot, bombed, or gassed to death.

This is what he had to say.

“You've seen Rambo, right?” the kid told Wanke, an analyst at the Institute for Peace and International Studies, a Cambridge think tank. “Well, that’s nothing compared to what we're going to do.”

“He’s just really excited about the chance to go over to Saudi Arabia and, hopefully, the chance to see some real action,” Wanke said a few days later. “He’s really pumped up.”

And so, it seems, is most of America. By last Wednesday, the day Wanke’s young friend shipped out, the polls were show- ing overwhelming, almost unprecedented, support for a looming war. USA Today, Middle America’s barometer, showed 86 percent of the 802 people it polled sup- porting the troop deployment, up five

points from August 8. A few days earlier, that support was made evident by the crowds lining Interstate 75 near Atlanta, cheering as the olive-drab convoys rolled | on to the bases deeper south, whence troops and supplies would be sent east.

Almost two decades after Vietnam, and some 10 years after Ronald Reagan first told a new generation that it was “morning in America,” a threat of all-out war — or, at the very least, a massive military adventure — isn’t seen as a bad thing. Apparently, the nation’s historic penchant for tromping around with a big stick has become honor- able again.

Vietnam hangover is over

I was appalled by the invasion of Panama, which was nothing more than a drug raid on an entire country; like most of the so-called war on drugs, it was a thug- gish, bullying charade, this time, unfortu- nately, one that left a lot of people dead. Similarly, I found the air strike on Libya, essentially an expensive and bungled assassination attempt, equally repulsive. I

Nap.

DMZ, Vietnam, July 1966

also come down on the lefty side of Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Grenada. I thought Ronald Reagan was a menace, and I voted for Michael Dukakis. I am, at heart, a pacifist.

But I’m also in USA Todays 86 percent, though not without heavy reservations. I’m surprised, shocked almost, to realize it, but, like more than eight out of 10 Americans, I don’t fault Bush. Even George McGovern, who ran for president on an anti-Vietnam platform in 1972, says that Bush “took the proper course in standing up to Saddam.”

Support for the latest military action is in fact higher than it has been for the nation’s last three armed strikes. According to the University of Connecticut’s Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, Reagan’s invasion of Granada and his air raid on Libya garnered only 53 percent and 66 percent favorability ratings respectively. And support for Bush’s invasion of Panama, while high (79 percent), still can’t match the boosterism behind the Gulf deployment.

“It’s kind of surprising to see this much support before any action has even taken place,” says Gregory Grant, a military ana- lyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, DC, think tank. “Conventional wisdom has it that the Vietnam syndrome would have

AP/WIDE WORLD

lasted much longer than it has. I think this is evidence that that’s not necessarily so.”

There are, of course, good reasons to explain why America’s Vietnam hangover dissipated so quickly in the wake of Saddam Hussein’s “naked aggression” (the first buzz-phrase of the post-Cold War era). First, there is the practical slant: rather than dragging unwilling 19-year-olds off to a jungle to wage a half-hearted war against a nearly invisible enemy to achieve an abstract goal like stopping communism, Bush is sending well-trained volunteers off to the wide-open desert to beat up a psy- chopath to protect the world’s access to affordable oil. What’s more, Hussein start- ed it.

Better than a mission from God

But that doesn’t explain convoy-cheer- ing crowds or Rambo-esque young men. At best, that reasoning is justification for grudging acceptance of a necessary evil — shooting people.

It’s too easy simply to say that Ronald Reagan, with all his tough Evil Empire talk, reprogrammed the nation’s collective psy- che. But it is fair to say that much of the country — most important, the twen- tysomething generation, which covers most of today’s volunteer military — was influenced by a Reagan-esque view of the world that laid the groundwork for this

kind of jingoistic patriotism.

For the average 26-year-old, there never was a Vietnam syndrome, mainly because that most unpopular of wars was some- thing we heard about only after the fact. We didn’t actually live through the night- mare, which makes it no more real for us than World War II or, for that matter, the American Revolution. Instead, we were fed a steady diet of ass-kicking rhetoric, courtesy of both Washington and Hollywood. The Deer Hunter became Rambo; Jimmy Carter, the wimp who couldn’t free the hostages, gave way to Reagan, who took over Grenada in an afternoon. A decade of “Peace through strength” has left us with the impression that we're back, and big and bad as ever.

That muscle is also the only bit of self- gratification we have at this point. As the United States continues its internal decay, the Iraqi invasion has allowed the country to highlight its one undisputed strength: the ability to apply brute force externally. Indeed, the whole world, with few excep- tions, is essentially peeing its pants while desperately looking to Uncle Sam to straighten things out. It’s better than being on a mission from God; we're on a mission from the United Nations.

Given a chance to reassert ourselves as a world leader, we're happy to oblige. It’s not that we’re simpleminded enough to buy blindly into wanton militarism. It’s just that, right now, playing world cop seems like the right thing to do. And none of us 26-year-olds has ever seen the downside of it up close.

“Sodom” Hussein

Crowded in a room in a church near Harvard Square Tuesday night, a few dozen hard-core peaceniks hashed out the Middle East crisis and came to one firm conclusion: the United States is wrong.

That was not surprising. Sponsored by the Mobilization for Survival, the gathering comprised militant pacifists, people who truly believe that much, if not most, American foreign policy is nothing more than brutal, oppressive imperialism. For more than an hour, the conversation con- sisted of a sophisticated, definitively lefty, analysis of Middle East history and politics, this country’s role in shaping both, and the causes and effects of the current situation. None of it reflected well on the United States. No one was proposing the forma- tion of a Saddam Hussein fan club, but George Bush didn’t rank much higher on

AUGUST 24, 1990

the popularity pole than his nemesis, either. ;

Of course, just as the right wing has its fringe lunatics, so does the left. One par- ticipant suggested, for instance, that the president is sending an estimated 100,000 troops to the middle of the desert in part to deflect attention from his son’s S&L woes. Someone else mentioned that Iraq’s barbaric tack of using captive for- eigners as human shields to deflect an attack is a “demogogic issue that’s been whipped up.” It was even mentioned that the popular pronunciation of Hussein’s first name — “Sodom” — was an inten- tional weapon in some sort of classist psychological war.

But the peace movement is understand- ably freaked by this whole thing. With the Cold War finally melting away, it appeared the world could start disarming itself. The threat of large-scale killing was just starting to diminish, and now we've got two huge armies squaring off in the desert. “The way this thing could escalate is awesome,” says Joe Gerson, the peace-education secretary for the American Friends Service Com- mittee of New England. “You've got nucle- ar weapons, my friend, nuclear weapons on every ship in the Gulf.”

The threat of all-out war is reason enough for peace activists to demand the United States back off. But this crisis is also likely to have a severe impact on domestic spending, and, more specifically, on the peace movement's domestic objectives. With no more Evil Empire to defend against, “bread not bombs” was poised to become more than just a catchy slogan. A peace dividend appeared to be in the making, hard cash that could revitalize long-neglected social programs or, at the very least, whittle away the deficit. But already the Pentagon is pushing to bump defense spending back up. And the cost of prolonged hostilities in the Middle East, some experts say, could easily send the country even deeper into a recession.

“The future of the US is being sold down the river for cheap oil,” Gerson says. “If you expect to have any kind of a future at all, you’re taking losses right now.”

Uncle Sam Bob walks tall

Barry Kaplovitz came back to Boston from Atlanta last week fairly awed, inspired with a vision of the nation’s “exceptional destiny tc lead the world.” He’d seen the c6nvoys trucking down I-75, and he’d seen the crowds — “hundreds, if not thousands” — of Georgians lining the sides of the road and the rails of the over- passes. They were cheering and waving flags.

“I’m telling you, what I saw was fucking unbelievable,” he says. “You're talking about white Southerners cheering black soldiers, black Southerners cheering white soldiers. It was a very, very impressive phenomenon.”

Kaplovitz, a former pollster and political consultant, was 18 in 1972 and praying to God he’d draw a high lottery number in the draft Che did). But 18 years later, he’s lined up with the Southerners, cheering the Middle East deployment. What the Georgians see, indeed, what he sees, is America struttin’ its stuff again after the demoralization wrought by the Vietnam War. “You live in the only country in the world,” he says, “that could stand up.” The mighty soon-to-be united Europe, he insists, has proved to be nothing more than hand-wringing sissies. The Japanese — “the nerds with the best after-school jobs” — have shown themselves to be a second-rate global power, despite their economic might. The only one walking tall is Uncle Sam, and Middle America is cheering him on. ~

Massachusetts liberals, he says, the think-tank types who are now so dis- mayed, those who talk about the Reagan legacy and American imperialism, just don’t get it. “Taking the Red Line from the Kennedy School to the JFK Library is not going to teach you much about the patrio- tism and, in some ways the militarism, of the rest of America,” says Kaplovitz, who's given up politics for movie writing. “To the Southerners, when you have the excep- tional destiny to lead the world you have to have the courage . . . to back it up.”

Volunteering to be shot Cheerleading for this military maneu- ver is made easier by one comforting fact: no one, so far, is being forced to be a soldier. Since 1973, when the last draftee was inducted, America’s military machine has been staffed exclusively by volunteers, people who, for whatever reason, have chosen to accept the inher- See WAR, page 20

.. hight last week former CIA director, Richard

angerous, thuggish, chemical-weapons-packing dictators abroad, it seems, can lead to strange political bedfellows at home. “I can’t believe I just said that, “ exclaimed one liberal friend of mine, a history professor, in shock to find himself agree- ing with Henry Kissinger. Another acquaintance, critical of the rapid dispatch of US troops to the Saudi desert, recoiled in hor- ror when he saw Jeane Kirkpatrick echoing his objections.

Polls show that, at least for the moment, Bush has garnered overwhelming public support for his handling of the Persian Gulf crisis, and frankly, despite the president’s sometimes jin- goistic bluster and golf-course smarminess, it’s difficult to argue with a straight face that Michael Dukakis, say, would be doing better. (One of Bush’s smartest tactical moves, inciden- tally, has been to lock Dan Quayle inside a media-proof closet where he can’t remind the American public that he remains but a heartbeat away from being commander-in-chief at a moment like this.)

As the popular mood grows more hawkish, and the scenar- ios in the Middle East grow more blood-curdling, almost any tactic seems justified to stave off an utter conflagration. One

Armored track vehicle, Fort Bliss, Texas

AP/WIDE WORLD

Helsis was analyz- ing away on the McNeil-Lehrer Report, and I was disappointed when Jim Lehrer failed to ask Helms the historically appropri- ate question: “Sir, as one of the few former senior US govern- ment Officials to acknowledge plotting the assassination of a foreign leader, (Helms helped oversee the Kennedy adminis- tration’s efforts to murder Fidel Castro) how would you advise the Bush administration to go about it in this case? ”

Of course, in such a volatile, fluid situation, with much of the action cloaked in secrecy, the advice of a moderately informed outsider can only be regarded as tentative. Nevertheless, here are seven unsolicited suggestions for US policymakers that seem, so far at least, to have evaded the rov- ing media spotlight.

@ Explore opportunities for Soviet military and intelli- gence cooperation.

Despite a joint condemnation of Iraq’s invasion a day after the event, and al] the talk about this being the first major post- Cold War international crisis, there’s been very little public evi- dence that Washington is seeking Moscow’s direct involvement in militarily confronting Iraq. It’s true that the Bush administra- tion, in addition to jury-rigging a military coalition of Arab and Western European nations, has belatedly made an urgent effort to gain explicit UN backing for an armed blockade to enforce economic sanctions against Iraq — an endorsement the Soviets have said would allow them to lend their ships to the effort.

Yet behind-the-scenes there may be a chance'for greater Soviet cooperation. Here is a possibility for a Soviet role that goes beyond diplomatic démarches and sending a few ships to the blockade line, both of which would be helpful but unlikely to have much impact on the Iraqis.

Ask Moscow to provide intelligence data on Iraq. Over the past two decades, the Soviets have been a close ally and principal supplier of military hardware and advice to Iraq; hundreds of Soviet technical advisers remain in Iraq today. This also means that Moscow is perhaps — with the possible exception of Israel — best positioned to provide intelligence data on Iraqi politics and military activities, as well as intelligence “assets” that could be used to foment opposition to Hussein within Iraq’s regime and military. (Said assets might come down to knowing which generals to bribe, though payment in dollars or deutschmarks, not roubles, would be required.) A joint KGB-CIA (and Mossad?) coup against Saddam Hussein. Robert Ludlum, phone home. Far-fetched? Yep. Interference in Iraq’s internal affairs is unlikely to lead to long-term stability in that country? You bet. Preferable to a full-blown conventional war, with possible escalation to chemical attacks on civilians? I think sO. ’

Jim Hersbberg teaches bistory at Tufts University, where be is a research associate of the Nuclear Age History and Humanities Center.

SEVEN OPTIONS FOR BUSH

by Jim Hershberg

SECTION O

@ Have the US and the Soviet Union stage separate, sym- bolic air strikes against unpopulated targets in Iraq or Kuwait.

Should the current high-wire diplomatic struggle begin to degenerate into military clashes, the US needs to seek an alter- native to resorting to that old crutch — exploiting our air supe- riority by bombing Baghdad or other heavily populated targets. Numerous civilian deaths ( “collateral damage” is the official euphemism) would be inevitable, and history suggests that this sort of aerial bombing could as easily inspire hatred, martyr- dom, and more ferocious resistance as coerce capitulation. Superior air power doesn’t guarantee surrender, as Hitler found out during the Blitz, and as the US government determined after its strategic bombing of Nazi Germany during World War II, and then rediscovered in Vietnam.

A more effective and humane course would be separate air strikes against unpopulated targets in Iraq or Kuwait by US and Soviet planes, followed by a joint ultimatum demanding an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait. For Washington and Moscow to conduct their first coordinated military action since 1945 would be an incredibly powerful statement of the international East- West consensus against Iraq. It might even break through the cacophony of jihad cries emanating from Sadam Hussein and make the Iraqis recon- sider battling the whole world. By enabling the US to “share the hit,” it would also mitigate the inevitable regional backlash that could occur were the US to strike first, and alone.

Why would the Soviets go along with such a plan? Their military, like ours, would like to demonstrate its usefulness to avoid budget cuts. And after storming unwelcomed into Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan (and, more recently, into Armenia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, et al. ), the battered Soviet military would probably relish taking an internationally applauded action for the first time in 45 years. Although it might set back relations with parts of the Arab world, a successful Soviet military collaboration with the United States might also constitute a ticket back to superpower status, at least fleetingly.

@ Publicly or privately, Bush should make it clear to Iraq that a US-led multi-national force — and not an Israeli one — would resist an Iraqi military move into Jordan.

Iraq, which has been in a State of war with Israel since 1948, is geographically separated from the Jewish State by the Kingdom of Jordan. For many years before the current crisis, Israel publicly warned that it would not tolerate any movement of Iraqi military forces across the frontier into Jordan and toward its own border, less than 250 miles away. During the 1973 Middle East war, for instance, Israeli planes flew all the way across Jordan to bomb Iraqi troop convoys before they could reach the front.

This means Saddam Hussein knows that all he has to do to transform the current crisis into an Israeli-Arab conflict is to send military forces into Jordan, where King Hussein is para- lyzed (torn between ties to the West and popular support for Iraq) and would probably be unable to resist forcefully. A blockade of the Jordanian port of Aqaba, through which Iraq usually receives much of its goods, could serve as a handy pretext.

Instead of waiting for this to happen (which could complete- ly undermine Arab support for the Western coalition in Saudi Arabia should Israel attack Iraq, not to mention the horrific prospect of a chemical-armed Arab state fighting a nuclear- armed Israel), the Western forces should anticipate the danger by making it clear that they will militarily prevent Iraq from crossing into Jordan. Unless Bush sends this message promptly and clearly, he leaves an increasingly desperate Saddam Hussein an ace in the hole that he can play at any time.

@ Lay the groundwork for democratic rule in Kuwait and elsewhere in the Gulf.

If war can be avoided, and both Iraq and the United States are looking for a face-saving way to back out of the crisis, one possible solution would entail the Kuwaiti royal family’s gra- ciously consenting to the holding of democratic elections under UN supervision in exchange for an Iraqi withdrawal from the country. Both Washington and Baghdad have rejected this idea, which is exactly why it makes sense as a mutual com- promise. Saddam Hussein, while giving up on annexation, could claim to have brought democracy to Kuwait and to have ended a feudal monarchy.

And the United States, though publicly committed to restor- ing the status quo ante, would probably be willing secretly to put the screws on the emir to accept this solution (and to pro- pose it himself), with the argument that having struggled so valiantly for his country, he’d probably win the elections any- way. In any case, it’s a wise step for the US — the days or years of the Persian Gulf's elitist, filthy rich monarchies are lim- ited, and as in Eastern Europe, it’s better to try to ease the tran- sition rather than wait for the next explosion.

@ Renew conservation policies. It may be wishful thinking to hope that Bush will change his See OPTIONS, page 21

£, THE BOSTON PHOENIX 7

8 THE BOSTON PHOENIX, SECTION ONE

Weld’s

Opportunity lost

How Bill Weld blew a campaign with promise

by Jon Keller illiam Weld strode purposefully across City Hall Plaza on the morning of August 21, a Brahmin On a mission.

For a full, frustrating year, Weld has been struggling to jump-start a well- financed, ideologically moderate guberna- torial candidacy that seemed full of promise at the starting line but has been spinning its wheels ever since. Throughout his accomplishments — graduating with honors from Harvard Law School, making partner at Hill & Barlow, racking up 109 convictions in 111 public-corruption cases as US Attorney for Massachusetts, or walk-

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But as Weld arrived for an hour-long live debate with Republican opponent Steven Pierce at a makeshift WRKO studio on the plaza, he found himself in the uncomfort-

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able position of needing to draw blood. A statewide poll released through the dailies that morning showed him 31 points behind Pierce. His campaign contributions had slowed to a trickle. He’d been forced to funnel hundreds of thousands of dollars of his personal fortune into a TV-ad blitz emphasizing his relative liberalism, com- pared to Pierce, on women’s issues and the environment — a risky move consider- ing the general conservatism of the Republican electorate. And an August 17 TV debate with Pierce — the first to be granted by the opposition campaign after Weld’s summer of clamoring for such

AUGUST 24, 1990

encounters — had been, at best, a draw. So as the WRKO debate began, Weld knew that he needed to play hardball in three key areas — creating a favorable comparison between himself and Pierce; creating the sort of excitement about his candidacy that moves voters and generates contributions; and ramming home the twin messages of his costly TV campaign. But instead, following a pattern familiar to those who’ve been watching Pierce run away with the Republican-primary race, Weld displayed only his serene and gentle- manly persona, tossing up what amounted to a series of harmless political softballs. Weld’s casual attempts to chastise Pierce for ducking debates were buried under Pierce’s aggressive, unrebutted filibuster- ing. The debate was two-thirds over before Weld finally raised the abortion issue, and while Weld noted that “I trust the women of Massachusetts to make that choice,” he failed to turn the issue on his opponent by asking Pierce why be doesn't trust women’s judgment. And the hour was nearly gone before Weld flashed any dis- cernible emotion, responding to Pierce’s complaints about the new Weld TV ads by snapping: “My TV ads are doing nothing more than stating your record.” When it was finished, Weld himself “pleased” with the status of his candidacy. That assessment is not, howev- er, shared by those who once saw such great political potential in Weld, who was known in his US attorney days for fearless, boat-rocking behavior in his prosecution of the Bank of Boston for money-launder- ing, his dogged uncovering of criminal behavior inside the Boston Police Department and the Kevin White mayoral administration, and his landmark unravel- ing of Gennaro Angiulo’s charmed life of On paper, 1990 — the year of palpable public demand for an outsider willing and able to hose clean the stables of state gov- ernment — could have been Bill Weld’s year. But even some of Weld’s closest advisers now concede that his long-shot chances rest on such thin reeds as a last- minute movement of left-leaning indepen- dents into the GOP primary, or a negative Bellotti-Silber campaign so repulsive that it See WELD, page 14

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Rationing hard time

The state can’t build itself out of the prison overcrowding problem

by Robert Keough

© many Massachusetts residents, i prison overcrowding doesn’t seem like a major issue. After all, the fate of miscreants doesn’t generate much sym- pathy among a crime-hardened public. The exceptions, of course, are those places where the state actually wants to put a prison, like New Braintree. But this lack of concern could backfire. For in these trou- bled fiscal times, unless the state stumbles onto a gold mine or comes up with some creative solutions, this budget buster will mean not simply cramped quarters in the lock-up but more criminals on the street. Massachusetts has spent $1 billion in the past decade to build and rebuild prisons and is now spending nearly half a billion dollars per year to run them. But when all that construction is done, Massachusetts lock-ups will still be among the most over- crowded in the country, and getting worse Judges don’t like to admit it, but prison overcrowding influences certain sentenc- ing decisions, according to many observers of the criminal-justice scene. After all, facilities filled to overflowing “may make it impossible to incarcerate somebody else,” says parole-board chair- man Robert P. Gittens. That, in turn, affects attitudes on the street. “People will begin to realize they're not going to jail because there’s no space,” says Gittens. Consequences of a court-ordered cap are more direct: when prison population reaches a certain number, inmates and detainees must be released. Five Massachusetts counties. already operate under court limits. According to the

Robert Keough reports on the state budget and legislation for State House Watch, @ publication of the Massachusetts Human Services Coalition.

Robert Mapplethorpe, Self Portrait, 1980. © The Estate of Robert Mapplethorpe

National Conference of State Legislatures, as of last summer court orders or consent decrees limited prison populations in 37 states. After years of being the most over- crowded correctional system in the nation, can such a cap for Massachusetts state prisons be far off?

“That’s going to happen in Massa- chusetts sooner or later,” says attorney Peter Costanza, of Massachusetts Correc- tional Legal Services. “There are federal judges that will do it. Massachusetts is so far out of line, it is likely to get enjoined even by Reagan appointees.”

When that happens, it will not be the petty hooligans of county lock-ups who are set free and clear. It will be the felons — many with violent backgrounds — who make up what State Commissioner of Correction George A. Vose calls the "grad- uate school” of the criminal-justice system. From that perspective, prison overcrowd- ing becomes a public-safety issue.

Why we'll never have enough dough

The phrase “We cannot simply build our way out of prison overcrowding” has been part of the official vocabulary of the Dukakis administration at least since the governor’s April 1985 “balanced plan to end prison overcrowding,” the second of three requests for prison-construction funds during the 1980s. But the state has acted as if it can.

In fiscal year 1985, the cost of running the state prisons was $112 million; this year it will be $240 million. The state will also pay the counties, in lieu of other local aid, $80 million to support jails and houses of correction (60 percent of the county- corrections budget), plus another $10 mil- lion in grants for prisoner transportation

Supported by a grant from:

SECTION ONE, THE BOSTON PHOENIX 9

State prison system: expanding but still overcrowded oo KEITH W. JENKINS

and special programs.

And that’s not all. This is the year the state is supposed to issue forth its largest expansion of prison capacity to date: 1639 additional beds. for state inmates, plus brand-new Bristol and Essex County jails and an expanded Worcester County house of correction. To staff and operate the new facilities, the state Department of Cor- rection needs $25 million this year. Plus, the county sheriffs will need nearly $17 million to operate their new jails. A total of only $16 million has been a ted so far, but administration and legislative bud- get officials anticipate a further appropria- tion of nearly $30 million later this year. In all, the state is likely to pay nearly $400 million for state and county corrections in fiscal year 1991.

Within another 18 months, all the prison-expansion and replacement pro- jects approved by the legislature will be

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finished: half a dozen brand-new or enlarged county jails and state-prison capacity multiplied two and a half times. That means state facilities will have 7269 beds in 1992, compared with 2800 in 1980, But will that be the end of prison build- ing? Even with all the new space, says Vose, “we're still overcrowded.” The state- prison population late last month was already nearly 8000 — 700 more bodies than beds planned for. By 1992, prison Officials project a population of 9400. The prisons will be operating 30 percent above capacity. And from there, the number of inmates will continue to climb. “There will

be no choice but to add beds,” says Vose. The Department of Correction projects a 1998 state-prisoner population of 11,300 — 4000 more prisoners than there will be room for. Meeting that demand would require eight brand-new facilities the size See JAIL, page 15

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"CHUCKLEHEAD SHOCKRA « STYLIE 2 ke Fri., August 31

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

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ROBERT FRIPP & HIS LEAGUE OF CRAFTY GUITARISTS

SPORTING

EYE

How to change the Green Team to the dream team

by Mark Leibovich

o, Johnny Most, the leg- mw endary Boston Celtic

radio voice, has not signed on with slithery agent Jerome Stanley and has no plans (at this time) to bring his rasp to Italy.

Beyond that, we can’t rule out anything in this calamitous off- season for the Celts, a truly McAdooian dark age that began back in May with a stunning first- round loss to the New York Knicks. A quick review: the corpse of the 1989-90 season was still warm when Brian Shaw made an impressive bid for early entry into the chutzpah hall of fame by announcing his intention to return for a second year with Rome’s Il Messaggero rather than honor his Celtic contract. It was a bombshell that resulted in extensive litigation (swept by the Celts) that embit- tered Shaw to the point where he now seems content to suck his thumb in California all year rather than play for the Green.

Then, Dino Radja — the Yugo- slavian power forward thought to be in the local fold — bolted to Italy to play for Il Messaggero. (Soon after he signed his Italian contract, Radja reportedly suf- fered a broken ankle, restoring faith that maybe there’s a hoop god after all.)

And if that wasn’t bad enough, it was learned a few weeks ago that Reggie Lewis (without Shaw, the Celtics’ only significant link to up-tempo basketball) had signed on with Stanley, the young agent who this summer had managed to inspire in Shaw a sudden love of all things Italian (after a winter of apparent homesickness) and dis- dain for all things Celtic (though certainly not all things green). Stanley (let’s call him Je-“Rome”) did nothing to allay Celtic fans’ initial fears of another gut- wrenching defection when, in his first move as Lewis’s agent, he said Lewis is “not looking to negotiate a contract with the Boston Celtics” and that he in- tended to examine Lewis’s value in the global market.

Fortunately for the Celts, the latest in this summer of shamrock shockers made for better head- lines: Lewis, only hours after telling the local media that he

would “do what's right for me” once his Celtic contract expired after this year, signed a new five- year deal with the home team. Clearly, something’s been eating at Lewis, but for what it’s worth these days, his name's on the dot- ted line. The Celts:can only hope that Je-Rome has taken a refresher course in basic contract law since the Shaw proceedings ended.

But don’t be blinded by a little good news. Notwithstanding a bit of tinkering (the drafting of speedy Dee Brown and the sign- ing of free-agent Eric McArthur), today’s Celtics are essentially the same band of first-round losers of last spring, with another year of wear on their tired old legs. The only thing that should scare Celtic fans more than the prospect of additional catastrophic twists in the ongoing soap opera is the thought of the Green Team stand- ing pat. Because as tempting as it might be to lick wounds, lament the greed of young athletes today, and wait for Bob Ryan to write The Curse of Len Bias, a look at the calender reveals a horrifying fact — training camp is only six weeks away, And a little lep- rechaun tells us (without a trace of an Italian accent) that staying the course would be a sure-fire recipe for the grimmest Celtic sea- son since Sidney Wicks and Curtis Rowe lurched about the parquet. A peek into the crystal ball:

OCTOBER 5, 1990 MEDIA DAY AT HELLENIC COLLEGE. Red Auerbach threatens to put his cigar out on a reporter who sug- gests that these Celtics aren’t what they used to be. “We can win with this team,” he says. “Absolutely.” Shaw, still home in California, tells Channel 4’s Bob Neumeier in a satellite interview that he’d sooner play basketball in Baghdad than in Boston..

NOVEMBER 2, 1990. Cleve- land’s Mark Price drives around Dennis Johnson for an uncontest- ed lay-up at the buzzer to beat the Celtics in the season opener 110- 109 before the 453rd consecutive Celtic sellout at Boston Garden. DJ, the 36-year-old point guard who re-signed with the Green Team after a lengthy courtship by the Detroit Pistons (“a genuine coup,” said Celtic GM Jan Volk),

AUGUST 24, 1990

scoffs at a post-game suggestion that he’s lost a step, noting that he just scored nine points in 45 min- utes. “How many guys my age can do that?” he asks defensively. Lewis leads with a team-high 33 points.

DECEMBER 3, 1990. The Celtics beat the Seattle Super Sonics at the Garden 119-114 behind Lew's's 46, bringing their record to 8-). Before the game, Larry Bird says that former Celtic coach Jimmy Rodgers, in town as an advance scout for the Denver Nuggets, is the best coach he’s ever played for. Talk of a Bird- Chris Ford schism begins immedi- ately. McHale reminds the assem- bled media that “Larry is just being Larry.”

JANUARY 21, 1991. The World Champion Detroit Pistons hold the Celts to 51 points (27 by Lewis). The Pistons score 86, 40 by Isiah Thomas (guarded by DJ). Dennis Rodman, traditionally an offensive liability, scores 41 against Bird and Michael Smith, highlighted by an assortment of easy lay-ups following uncontest- ed weak-side rebounds. The champs out-rebound the Bos- tonians 77-31 as Robert Parish misses his 12th consecutive game because of a badly sprained knee. Celts are now 18-20.

FEBRUARY 18, 1991. Celts’ consecutive Garden-sellout streak ends at 472 as 12,678 (capacity is 14,890) show up for a 112-106 win over the New Jersey Nets.

APRIL 6, 1991. Things look brighter as the Celtics defeat Orlando 121-113 behind Lewis’s 39 and Bird’s 25. The Green are now 39-38 (10-1 against the expansion teams), the first time they’ve been above .500 all year, and it’s a virtual lock for the eighth playoff spot in the Eastern Conference, three full games ahead of the Atlanta Hawks. Celtic senior executive vice-president Dave Gavitt warns that “when we're working on all cylinders, we're capable of serious damage.” Parish adds that the team seems to be “peaking at the right time.”

MAY 3, 1991. Celts are swept by the Pistons (their third first- round exit in as many years), los- ing the third game at Boston Garden 101-78. After the game, Bird says he’s “stunned,” Lewis leaves without comment — he’s said hardly a word to anyone all year — but issues a statement through Je-Rome saying that he’s “deeply disappointed by the Celtics’ early elimination.” After the game, Lewis and Je-Rome are spotted in the North End, working their way phonetically through a menu. Red Auerbach announces his retirement as Celtic president, citing “a growing disenchantment with the game over the last four years.” He’ll stay on as a consul- tant.

Okay, wake up, wipe the cold sweat away. It’s August 1990 again, and maybe none of this has to happen. What will it take to avoid this year what’s become an increasingly ugly Celtic routine? In a word, panic: Yes, we know it’s beneath Celtic dignity to panic, but it’s time to break some eggs to make the proverbial omelette. No lawyers, no military blockade of Rome, and no more whining about the salary cap. It’s time to do something drastic. That means trades. Big trades.

Not that Red, Dave, or Jan asked us, but we have a few ideas. Granted, proposed trades, with their many variables (most notably, whether the other teams are interested) can be a futile exercise in hoopaholic masturba- tion. But dreaming up trades is sure a lot more fun than the prospect of watching the Celtics

as they’re currently assembled. So’

let’s go crazy.

@ ROBERT PARISH AND ED PINCKNEY TO SEATTLE FOR XAVIER MCDANIEL AND DANA BARROS. Okay, so we didn’t exactly dream this one up — Parish, etc. for McDaniel, etc. has

been rumored in the sports pages for a few months now. What's the hang up? Pull the trigger already. The X-Man is a monster — speed, aggressiveness, in-your-face defense — in short, everything today’s Celtics are not. Local prod- uct Barros (Xavarian HS, BC) showed spots of brilliance last year in Seattle — especially when given serious minutes — and his long-range bombing would com- plement the Celtic inside game nicely. The Celts will miss Parish, but how many chances will they have to get significant value for a 36-year-old (37 next week) cen- ter? We wish the Chief well, and we'll look forward to retiring his number in a few years. The only way Pinckney will ever see the rafters is with a good rat disguise.

@ BRIAN SHAW AND JOE KLEINE TO GOLDEN STATE FOR TIM HARDAWAY. Hard- away could’ve been had for free in the 1989 draft if the Celts hadn’t adhered so faithfully to their BMA (Best Mormon Available) policy and drafted Brigham Young’s Michael Smith just before the Warriors scooped up the brilliant young point guard. Anyway, it’s never too late to admit a mistake, and maybe Warriors’ guru Don Nelson — given the prospect of a rejuvenated Shaw’s return to California and Kleine’s muscle anchoring the Warriors’ nasty corps .of big guards (Mitch Rich- mond and Sarunas Marciulionis) and small forwards (Chris Mullin and Terry Teagle) — will let his old friends back in Celticland cut their losses.

@ KEVIN MCHALE AND REG- GIE LEWIS TO PHOENIX FOR KEVIN JOHNSON AND DAN MAJERLE. What would ever pos- sess the Suns to give up KJ, one of the best young point guards in the league? Beats us (a touch of desert fever perhaps), but the Suns have been on the cusp of the NBA finals for the last two years, and maybe they'll decide that it’s time to go for it now. That means going after one of the surest low- post things in the league in McHale. He’d be a perfect com- plement to Tom Chambers. And Lewis would be a great backcourt pairing with sweet-shooting Jeff Hornacek. The Suns would be- come instant favorites to unseat the Pistons. Closer to home, KJ would wake up the locals with his blinding speed, shooting, and charisma. And Majerle in green equals the next Havilcek. The pair solidifies the Celtic backcourt for the next 10 years.

@ LARRY BIRD AND ROBERT PARISH TO INDIANA FOR RIK SMITS, REGGIE MILLER, AND A FIRST-ROUND DRAFT PICK. If the Celts can take a short-term hit — that is, an erosion of the season-ticket base and some heavy losses for Celtic, Inc., stock — they'd be in a much better position to field a competitive team by the mid '90s. The 7-4 Smits might still be in the “project” stage, but he’s young (24) and has shown signs of brilliance (particu- larly against the Celts) in his two years in the league. Miller was an all-star last year, improved defen- sively, and has always been a great perimeter shooter. Also, the Celts need as many high draft picks as they can get their hands on. The Pacers would take a long- term hit, but getting the Hoosier hero Bird, who could probably be elected to any post he wanted in Indiana, would sell out the Market Square Arena for as long as he’s around.

@ JIM PAXSON TO CHICAGO FOR MICHAEL JORDAN. Ten years ago, Red would have pulled this one off. Yes, the Bulls would miss Air Jordan, but Bull’s general manager Jerry Krause has always

dreamed of seeing the Paxson }

brothers (John and Jim) play together in the same backcourt. But this being 1990, the deal hits a snag when the Celts refuse to throw in Charles Smith.

Oh well, if you don’t have good dreams, you have nightmares. OQ

SECTION ONE, THE BOSTON PHOENIX 1 4

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Reilly: “brand new to politics”

AUGUST 24, 1990

JEFF THIEBAUTH

Dueling careerists

The politician versus the prosecutor in Middlesex County

by Rob French

cross the commonwealth,

candidates at just about

about every level are try- ing to use electorate fury toward Beacon Hill to their advantage by identifying opponents with the state’s political and fiscal chaos. Republicans blame the past two years on any Democrat, chal- lengers blame any incumbent. Some of this is logical — Lieutenant Governor Evelyn Murphy, for example, suffers mightily for her association with the Dukakis administration — but some. of it stretches credibility. Even first-time legislative candi- dates in open-seat contests are trying to argue that their oppo- nents are the functional equiva- lent of incumbents. GOP guberna- torial hopeful Bill Weld thinks he can taint Steve Pierce with the State House stench. “I’m absolute- ly untied . . . to Beacon Hill,” says Weld, as if the Republican minori- ty leader is somehow responsible for the state’s budget woes.

One candidate hoping this strat- egy will help carry him to office is Tom Reilly, a contender to replace his former boss, Scott Harsh- barger, as Middlesex County dis- trict attorney. The 48-year-old Reilly doesn’t miss a chance to point out that his main opponent, State Representative and fellow Democrat Joe Mackey, is part of the problem with state govern- ment, calling Mackey “the single individual in this race who has a direct connection to the current state fiscal crisis.” Reilly wants the race to be characterized as “a race between a career politician and a career prosecutor.”

This characterization of the race’s dynamic is true. The chief difference between Reilly and Mackey is their experience — but not necessarily in the way Reilly hopes to portray the distinction. Both Reilly and Mackey are intelli- gent candidates with strong track records within the criminal-justice system. They share similar liberal- to-moderate Democratic ideolo- gies on most criminal-justice issues. Both are committed to strong enforcement of civil-rights laws, cracking down on the drug trade, and stemming the rising incidence of domestic violence and child abuse. Where they dif-

fer is largely the paths they’ve been traveling.

Reilly has served as Harsh- barger’s first assistant, supervising the office of more than 100 prose- cutors, for the past seven years. (He resigned his post late last year in order to enter the race.) In his campaign, he’s playing to his experience and fervently, almost gleefully, denying any contact with Beacon Hill.

“I'm brand new to politics,” he says. “I don’t pretend to know how things on Beacon Hill work. If you asked me to get a bill through the legislature, I wouldn't know how to do it.”

By denying all connections to the State House, Reilly may be running with a winning strategy. (Mackey certainly showed he saw the dangers of incumbency in this election year when he tried unsuccessfully to have the “state representative” label stricken from the ballot after his name.) But in so passionately playing the role of political naif, Reilly is conceding he lacks some of the essential skills for the district-attorney post — fighting for the funding to run an effective office and backing legislation on behalf of the law- enforcement community. Reilly has bent so far over backwards professing political ignorance that he’s raised doubts in some quar- ters as to whether he’ll be able to do the job.

“We're not too sure about his political skills,” says one lawyer and Middlesex County public offi- - cial. “He’s not going to be as effective as Scott.” Indeed, Reilly may be running as Harshbarger’s natural successor, but in some ways, Mackey, with a broader political background and broader vision of the office, may be closer in style to the outgoing DA.

Mackey, 39, a three-term repre- sentative from Somerville, is a solid progressive, one of a hand- ful of legislators to receive a zero- percent approval rating from Citizens for Limited Taxation. A graduate of Harvard and the University of Virginia Law School, Mackey served on the House Judiciary Committee, where he made judicial reform a top priori- ty, and earned the 1990 Legislator of the Year Award from the

| |

AUGUST 724, 1990

Massachusetts Bar Association. He sponsored the bill, passed last year, that allows state law- enforcement agencies to seize the property of convicted drug deal- ers and use the proceeds for drug- interdiction efforts. He also spon- sored the “bad apple” bill, which makes it easier for pubfic-hous- ing-project authorities to evict known drug dealers. A member of the state-wide Anti-Crime Council, Mackey has also been a strong advocate for a state anti-racketeer- ing statute and for tougher en- forcement of the state’s gun laws.

Reilly has made his career in the courtroom, and few doubt his prowess there. A graduate of Boston College Law School and a former law partner of US Attorney Wayne Budd, Reilly has worked as a public defender with the Boston Legal Assistance Project and as an assistant attorney gener- al in the civil-rights division. He served as an assistant district attor- ney in Suffolk County before Harshbarger recruited him to the number-two post in Middlesex seven years ago.

He prosecuted many of that county’s biggest cases himself and earned the respect of virtually everyone with whom he’s worked. He won a conviction for Gerald Clemente, the former MDC police captain who stole millions of dollars from Depositor’s Trust, and Daniel LaPlante, a 16-year-old psychopath who murdered a Townsend woman and her two children in 1988. Drawing on the special child-abuse unit that he helped establish under Harsh- barger, Reilly, who looks like a cross between Terry Bradshaw and George Bush, says he would expand that model to other areas such as public corruption and domestic violence.

On the campaign trail Reilly recites his career history, but he most effective strikes at Mackey by playing on the Beacon Hill anger and harping on Mackey’s lack of prosecutorial experience. At a January candidate’s forum. in Cambridge, Reilly asked his oppo- nent the first five steps he would take as district attorney in re- sponse to a murder. Mackey, unprepared, stammered out a few vague ideas about sending an assistant to the scene, but it was clear Mackey hadn't a clue about the standard procedure. From there, Reilly implored the crowd not to send a politician to do a prosecutor's job.

More recently, Mackey has countered Reilly’s focus on court- room experience by arguing that Reilly misunderstands the district attorney’s role. The former Somer- ville alderman is billing himself as the guy with the vision thing, the

Mackey: the guy with the vision thing

“Scott Harshbarger has not been in the courtroom once,” he argues. “You have to take the fight against crime outside the court- room” to look for ways to stop crime before it happens. The state is deep into a fiscal crunch, with no immediate end in sight, and the district attorney must know how to keep the money coming from the legislature, he argues. The job entails education pro- grams in the schools, training local police departments, and passing legislation such as his bad-apple law.

Mackey has generally refrained from attacking Harshbarger’s record, but he does hit the current administration for what he charges has been an “excessive” use of plea-bargains. In an effort to reduce staff turnover and improve the caliber of the office, Mackey advocates reducing the number of assistant district attor- neys but paying those left more.

Mackey’s strongest counter- offensives so far have focused on a number of hot-button liberal issues — the death penalty, abor- tion rights, and campaign — as well as on Reilly’s messy attempt to discount some negative poll results. He has repeatedly zeroed in on Reilly’s apparently evolving position on the death penalty. Throughout the cam- paign, Reilly has said he opposes the death penalty because a fair, unerring, system could not be developed for its implementation. But during the LaPlante trial, Reilly was repeatedly quoted as saying LaPlante deserved to die, and as late as this spring, the can- didate was quoted saying he could support capital punishment if it could be applied selectively to murderers such as LaPlante.

Mackey also differs sharply with Reilly on the 1989 Levey case, in which Harshbarger’s office filed motor-vehicle-homi- cide charges against a pregnant woman whose eight-month-old fetus died in a car accident the mother caused while driving drunk. (The charges were later dropped when it appeared the fetus may have lived had it not been for alleged negligence on the part of the hospital.) Abortion- rights advocates attacked Harsh- barger’s decision to apply, for the first time, a homicide charge to a group state lawmakers never intended to prosecute — pregnant women. The prosecution was a dangerous infringement on women’s rights, they argued, because it established the prece- dent that women would be

See COUNTY, page 18

JEFF THIEBAUTH

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Weld

Continued from page 8 drives reform-minded voters to Weld.

In short, this race is out of Weld’s hands. And for those mod- erate-to-liberal voters who are unimpressed with the Democratic choices who might have liked a chance to vote for a bright fiscal conservative with some intrigu- ingly progressive social inclina- tions, that’s a sad development. But Weld has only himself to blame. His ideological emphasis has varied to the point of incoher- ence. His campaign has been a demolition derby of strategical mishaps — passive when it should have been active, over- reaching for inappropriate goals, and ultimately lacking any clear sense of purpose. And while there’s a painful irony for some Republicans in the spectre of elec- toral extinction for one of the most accomplished of their parti- sans to come forward as a candi- date in recent memory, it’s the ultimate comment on the Weld campaign’s failure that for most Republicans, Weld’s demise merits little more than a shrug.

“As far as blowing potential,” says GOP political consultant Todd Domke, “I think his cam- paign’s blown it worse than any other candidate in either party.”

“We're just going to keep on doing what we’ve been doing,” said Weld in a brief Phoenix inter- view after his unproductive WRKO debate.

Uh-oh. With the exception of Weld’s longtime friend, political adviser, and campaign manager, John Moffitt, Weld is perhaps the only significant figure currently or formerly associated with the Weld candidacy who thinks staying on course is a wise idea. Perhaps that’s because from day one, when it came to identifying a key issue and message that could gal- vanize voter support, the Weld campaign’s course has been as unsteady as a Lincoln-Continental with bald tires navigating the Jamaicaway after an ice-storm.

Last fall, under the guidance of arch-conservative GOP activist Gordon Nelson, Weld tried to stake out turf among the right- wing activists who control the party’s nominating process. Confident of his appeal to moder- ate Republican voters, Weld’s ulti- mate goal was to establish an early coalition that would pre- empt any serious challenge by Pierce. His first significant media exposure came in early Septem- ber when he called for doubling jail terms for violent crimes and removing TV sets from prisoners’

cells, proclaiming that “there’s not

a great deal of room to my right on the crime issue.” A week later, Weld trotted out a bunch of older party conservatives to endorse him before the assembled news media and declared, “I’m trying to elucidate my motto — tough on taxes, tough on crime.”

But in hindsight, that same press conference exposed a crip- pling flaw in Weld’s right-flank strategy. As some of the resolutely anti-abortion Republicans stood grimly behind him, Weld said he was pro-choice and “in sympathy” with a proposed constitutional amendment to assure abortion rights (though he added that he’d like to “see if Medicaid abortions could be privately funded”). That combination drew prescient criti- cism from Pam Nourse of Mass Choice, who told the Boston Herald: “It sounds like what Bill Weld is trying to do is simply stake out a middle position that will sat- isfy both sides, and I don’t think that will work.’

Indeed, in a pattern that reflects that all-intellect, no-instinct politi- cal comportment of its candidate, the Weld campaign has time and again based its strategy on the questionable results of polling

and focus groups showing that Republicans and Independents likely to vote in the GOP primary are overwhelmingly pro-choice. At the party conference in Fal- mouth last October, Nelson bel- lowed at delegates that 1989 elec- tion results in other states proved an anti-abortion Republican like Steve Pierce “can’t win in Novem- ber.” After Pierce’s sweeping win at the March 10 GOP convention, Weld and Moffitt were sanguine about Weld’s ability to run suc- cessfully against the anti-abortion “extremists” who they claimed dominated the balloting. Even now, the Weld campaign is invest- ing precious TV ad dollars in a spot comparing Weld’s position on choice to Pierce’s.

But Weld’s research notwith- standing, there’s plenty of evi- dence that abortion isn’t nearly as important an issue to GOP prima- ry voters as the Weld people think it is. A Boston Globe poll in March found that while those voters sup- ported abortion rights by a more than three-to-one margin, 66 per- cent also said they could support a candidate with a view different from their own; only five percent cited abortion as the most impor- tant issue, compared, for exam- ple, to 19 percent who singled out the economy and 18 percent who cited education. A non-partisan Herald survey in May showed that voters saw abortion rights as a far less important issue than crime, corruption, or drug abuse. And the most recent Globe poll earlier this month found that neither a summer of Weld’s pecking away at Pierce’s position nor increased attention to the issue following the nomination of David Souter to the US Supreme Court had cut anything off Pierce’s huge lead.

Weld’s focus on abortion-rights support as the key to November electability may, all along, have been an utter misjudgment of what’s really on voters’ minds. “There is one fundamental issue that is driving this primary — con- cern about the state’s economy and fiscal situation,” says Her- ald/Channel 5 pollster Brad Ban- non. “Weld can beat the crap out of Pierce on abortion, but that is not the issue that is driving voters. They look at Pierce and Weld and come to the conclusion that Pierce has more background, experience, and credibility deal- ing with fiscal issues than Weld does.”

In fact, Bannon says, his pre- convention polling of GOP dele- gates showed many pro-choice delegates breaking for Pierce because “they might have been pro-choice, but they were more concerned about the fiscal crisis.”

Given Pierce’s reputation as a long-time nemesis to Democrats on fiscal issues, it may have been wise for Weld to seek out other areas of attack. (Even though, in the March Globe poll, only 36 per- cent of the voters thought Pierce would do a better job than Weld would of bringing the state bud- get under control.) But the obvi- ous alternative — the issues sur- rounding crime and political cor- ruption to which Weld’s prosecu- torial experience speaks so direct- ly — was never successfully ex- ploited by Weld.

Weld’s aw-shucks demeanor and early reluctance to go after such GOP demons as Senate President William Bulger didn’t reinforce his “tough on crime” logo. At the October 1989 party conclave in Falmouth, Weld’s limply delivered anti-corruption rhetoric fell flat in contrast to the fire-and-brimstone denunciations of hacks and insiders delivered by Pierce and talk-show host Jerry Williams. Weld’s major TV-adver- tising campaign on the criminal- justice issue — two well-made but unexciting late-March spots rehashing Weld’s prosecutions of disability-pension fraud and money-laundering — didn’t trans- late into a clear battle plan for cleaning up Beacon Hill.

Weld was given an unexpected

AUGUST 24, 1990

chance to relive his most memo- rable political corruption case last spring when former Boston mayor Kevin White admitted to deceitful fundraising practices during his administration, but Weld’s press conference in response to the former-mayor’s confession (unsupported by any ensuing media buy that might have emphasized his corruption- fighter past) was only a one-day blip on the media radar. And at that, Weld managed to convey only the wimpish message that he had, in essence, been tricked by White. Unless the Weld campaign revisits these issues before prima- ry day, the intellectually trivial slap at TV sets in prison cells last fall may actually turn out to have been Weld’s most visceral anti- crime message. “Weld never struck a campaign theme,” says political consultant Steve Tocco, whose brief post-convention stint with the Weld campaign was itself a public-relations disaster for Weld because of organized labor’s antipathy toward Tocco. “He should have struck the theme John Silber did — the outsider.”

But while the advent of Silber has siphoned money and support away from other candidates — notably Pierce and Bellotti — it’s also been curiously crippling to Weld’s chances. “Most Republi- cans seem to like Silber,” notes Weld campaign chairman Richard Tisei. The Silber phenomenon has distracted attention from the Weld/Pierce race — attention Weld desperately needs and has tried to attract by regularly bash- ing Silber. Weld’s aides insist that their candidate will attract inde- pendents alienated by the Bellotti- Silber bloodbath yet still anxious for change, but it’s hard to imag- ine circumstances under which much of the “angry” vote would desert their alter ego, Silber.

It may be that in an election year when a candidate’s emotions and instincts are at least as impor- tant as his or her substance and intellect, Bill Weld is just the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. While Silber scores with his issue-oriented shockers, Weld wallows with his quirky, irrelevant Weldisms. (The Weld campaign newsletter’s “Weldism of the Month” for March: “Our state has been play- ing with its food too long.”) When moderator Judy Jarvis asked Weld in an August 17 Channel 56 debate to describe an issue he’s passionate about, Weld again had a chance to revisit the corruption battles he fought so doggedly and that stand as his single most unique political distinction. In- stead, clearly programmed by his advisers to tie his message in with the campaign’s pro-environment TV ads, Weld launched into an uninspired description of his love for the outdoors. “I’m a hunter,” he noted. How puzzling, then, that from day one, candidate Weld has lacked the killer instinct. Amid widespread Republican dismay in mid February over revelations regarding Pierce’s failure to file for income-tax returns, Weld ignored advice from within his campaign to attack and instead let the issue die down. When Weld casually mentioned the tax flap during the WRKO debate, he allowed Pierce to get away with characterizing his comment as “negative campaigning.”

So the Weld campaign is left pinning its hopes on the behavior of independents, a group difficult to define and known to avoid pri- maries altogether. And while the independent factor seems a long- shot, Weld himself still believes he can win a horse race with Pierce.

“I really think the question is whether the voters are going to focus on the differences between us,” he says. Unfortunately for (as he likes to call himself) the big red-headed fella, it seems likely they already have — and, due in large part to his own apolitical instincts and temperament, not on terms favorable to Weld. Q

AUGUST 24, 1990

Jail

Continued from page 9

of the New Braintree prison now under construction. And Vose readily admits that “those esti- mates are conservative.” Indeed, for the past few years, inmate population has been rising an average of 700 to 800 persons annually. To accommodate that pace of growth, each year the State would need to build a new prison the size of MCI-Cedar Junction, better known as Walpole.

But now, in the midst of the new and dire fiscal realities, the line “We cannot simply build our way out of prison overcrowding” may be sinking in. “The cost of operating new prison facilities is digging deeper and deeper” into the funds available for the whole range of government programs, says Amy Singer, assistant secre- tary of Human Services for Criminal Justice. Despite the gen- eral clamor to get tough on crime, says Singer, “at some time people are going to say, ‘Enough. We want some money for roads, and schools.’ ” ‘

“My sense is that we're turning a corner here in state financing,” says John Larivee, executive direc- tor of the Crime and Justice Foundation, a non-profit organi- zation that runs community-based corrections programs. “We’re going to start looking at trade- offs.” And if the present rate of prison construction continues, says Larivee, “the trade-offs would be major. Money’s getting tight- er, and other issues are looming. I don’t know if public senti- ment against crime is so strong as to make those other trade- offs.”

In collaboration with the Boston Bar Association, the foun- dation has begun a five-month study of the Massachusetts correc- tional system, guided by the view, according to a Boston Bar Association préss statement, thaf “changes to that system must rec- ognize that there are limited resources for criminal justice . . . and competing demands on the state’s treasury.”

As Vose sees it, “The-time has come to assess the impact [of criminal-justice practices] on cor- rectional resources.”

Why the jails are so full

Making that kind of assessment will require a hard look at crimi- nal-sentencing procedures. The inmate population has been growing steadily primarily because of changes in criminal sentencing that have taken place over the past 10 years, some of them subtle, lots of them not so subtle. The obvious change has been in the proliferation of legis- lated mandatory sentences, pri- marily for drunk driving and drug offenses. In 1981 there were 300 commitments to county prisons for drunk driving; just two years later there were 2400. Now one- third of county inmates are serv- ing time for drunk driving. This rapidly growing group is widely seen as responsible for houses of correction operating at 160 per- cent of capacity.

In state prisons, 20 percent of state inmates are currently serving sentences for a drug crime, com- pared with six percent just five years ago. Twenty-three percent of drug offenders are in for their first offense, and they are serving long mandatory sentences — half of them for five or 10 years, with no deductions for good behavior, no eligibility for release under parole supervision.

A less obvious change is that non-mandatory sentences are also getting longer. In the mid 1980s, there was a sharp drop-off in so- called “Concord,” or reformatory, sentences, which allow for short periods of imprisonment (less than two years) followed by long periods of parole supervision.

Judges increasingly gave offend- ers “Walpole” sentences, under which, for serious crimes they are not eligible for parole before serv- ing two-thirds of the sentence. Both changes in criminal sen- tencing — mandatory sentences

and longer conventional sen- |

tences — reflect nationwide trends away from wide discretion in imprisonment and release and toward more specific jail terms with fewer opportunities for early discharge. But in Massachusetts, these changes happened in piece- meal fashion.

In fact, what push toward sen- tencing reform there was would have made matters worse. Through most of the 1980s, de- bate on sentencing reform revolved around Governor Du- kakis’s 1984 proposal for “pre- sumptive sentencing.” In appear- ance, this proposal mirrored reforms elsewhere, reducing vari- ations in sentencing. In actuality, however, it would have resulted in wholesale increases in prison terms, critics charged.

Dukakis stressed the “truth-in- sentencing” aspect of presumptive sentencing — no more 20-year Concord sentences that meant only 18 months behind bars — but conceded that it would mean more people going to prison for more time.

Presumptive sentencing quite nearly became law in 1985. But after that, the actual prison popu- lation quickly outstripped all pro- jections. Presumptive sentencing became a harder sell, and it was eventually dropped as a Dukakis priority. The prison population continued to rise.

Well running dry The last few months of a lame-

duck administration may not seem like the time for launching a major initiative in criminal justice reform. But there are those in.the Dukakis administration who are saying that the time has come to make those who send people away — judges, prosecutors, get- tough législators — come to terms with the costs of keeping them there. The correctional well is running dry, they argue. It is time to set priorities about whom to lock up, and -what to do with ‘the rest.

It's been done elsewhere. Minnesota was the first to use a commission made up of prosecu- tors, judges, public defenders, and correctional officials to develop its own version of presumptive sen- tencing — one that would not lead to overcrowded prisons. Charged not to exceed that state’s existing prison capacity, the com- mission had to make trade-offs: if justice demanded that some offenses merit longer sentences, other sentences would have to be shortened.

But the most striking parallel to Massachusetts is Delaware. Faced with a mounting inmate popula- tion that filled every new prison as soon as it was completed, Gov. Pierre duPont appointed a com- mission, chaired by a superior court judge, to develop sentenc- ing guidelines that would make punishment not only more certain but also more cost-conscious. The resulting “sentencing and ac- countability” system not only pri- oritized the use of prison space for the most serious offenders, it also wrote into criminal law a series of intermediate punish- ments, tougher than probation but less costly than 24-hour lock-up. In just the second year of the guidelines, the Delaware prison population stayed flat.

That could be just what the doctor ordered for Massachusetts. Despite its bulging prisons, Massachusetts still has one of the lowest incarceration rates in the country (43rd out of 50 states). But only three states and the District of Columbia have a higher proportion of adults on probation. The big money has been going into prisons, but the bulk of crimi-

See JAIL, page 16

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Jail

Continued from page 15 nal offenders are still elsewhere.

Prison and probation use excessive

If there is a part of the criminal- justice system that needs toughen- ing, it is the one that deals with offenders who are not in prison. Massachusetts is not alone in this.

“There has been a failure in this country to develop. and institu- tionalize a range of punishments lying between incarceration and probation,” write criminologists Norval Morris and Michael Tonry in their new book, Between Prison and Probation. “Imprison- ment is used excessively; proba- tion is used even more excessive- ly; between the two is a near-vac- uum of purposive and enforced punishment.” The result, they say, “is that the American criminal jus- tice system is both too severe and too lenient — almost randomly.”

The kinds of intermediate pun- ishments recommended by Morris and Tonry include various forms of “intensive supervision” such as halfway houses, house arrest, electronic monitoring, testing and treatment for substance abuse; orders to do community service; and fines that are more severe but tied to financial ability and rigor- ously collected.

Sources say that the notion of a sentencing commission for Massachusetts has been raised in any number of administration meetings on prison overcrowding and in the governor’s Anti-Crime Council. Dukakis himself has broached the subject, they say. And there are those who have encouraged him to appoint a blue-ribbon panel before he leaves office.

Publicly, correctional officials are more circumspect about whether to appoint a commission in the 11th hour of the Dukakis administra- tion. But they are clear about the need for a cost-conscious ap- proach to criminal sentencing.

“I truly believe we're going to have to look at statutory sentenc- ing provisions,” says Vose. “We have been heading in the direc- tion of more punitive sanctions. The more frequent use of manda- tory sentences will exacerbate the most costly aspect [of overcrowd- ing: building more prisons.] What form that [review] takes, that’s not clear,” but “it has to be a systemat- ic approach” that matches up criminal sentencing with the resources the state can devote to corrections.

“We need a coordinated effort, from the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary,” says Gittens, “that can sit down and look at what our needs are going to be: what percentage of offenders are going to need to be incarcerated, what are our alternatives for the remainder. But I do think the time has come for a coordinated effort with some long-term planning.”

Ironically, the sentencing-com- mission approach would have seemed a natural one for the con- sensus-oriented Dukakis adminis- tration. But then, in the fiscally flush 1980s there wasn’t the same pressure to look at corrections in terms of trade-offs. The political imperative to get tough on crime had not yet been tempered by harsh fiscal reality.

Still, a sentencing commission, even if acting quickly and achiev- ing wild success, will not halt cor- rectional inflation. Even punish- ments short of prison, if they are to be successful, cost money. And no structured sentencing system will eliminate the need for further prison construction; there are too many archaic facilities, state and county, and too few beds. But it would be the start of what correc- tions chief Vose calls a “balanced approach.” In other words, it could be the start of making a cor- rectional suit that fits the fiscal cloth.

AUGUST 24, 1990

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Continued from page 13 responsible for any action, even legal activities, that were later found to harm the fetus. Both Mackey and Reilly are pro-choice, but Reilly defends the Levey pros- ecution, arguing it was a disas- trous drunk-driving case, pure and simple.

Another major flap arose in July over conflicting poll numbers. Both campaigns released poll results that month — Mackey’s showing him with a three-to-one edge, Reilly's showing bim with a 55-23 majority after respondents were told that Reilly is a profes- sional prosecutor and Mackey is a State representative. Reilly still denies that his poll takers ever asked a head-to-head-match-up question (usually one of the very first and most important items in any poll). Reilly’s own pollster, however, has admitted that a horse-race question was asked, but said the response wasn’t meaningful because 60 percent of the voters were undecided.

Friends of Reilly’s attribute his stumbling over his death-penalty stance and those poll results to his political naiveté. “He’s kind of a babe in the woods,” says one lawyer in the district. “I don't think he has a well-developed ideology about politics,” says a Democratic Party official who knows both candidates. “He's a prosecutor. Tom’s not sure what to do about things like the death penalty.”

The nastiest entanglements of the campaign, however, have been over money. Mackey asked the Office of Campaign and Political Finance to investigate Reilly’s fundraising efforts after several public employees helped organize a Springfield fundraiser for Reilly in a mob-affiliated bar.

SECTION ONE

Cit is illegal for government employees to solicit funds for political campaigns.) Mackey also hit his opponent for accepting more than $15,000 in contribu- tions from assistant district attor- neys, the very people he would rule over as DA. Reilly countered that Mackey accepted thousands of dollars from lobbyists who had legislation pending. “You're in no position to call the kettle black, Joseph,” Reilly retorted at a Lowell debate in July.

Beyond making great head- lines, Mackey has good reason to worry about Reilly’s fundraising. Reilly has raised more than $400,000 to date and has around $200,000 on hand, compared to Mackey’s $315,000 raised and $80,000 still available. Mackey held a three-to-one lead in a July poll, but 50 percent of the voters were, at that point, undecided and Reilly hadn’t done much up till then to raise his name recognition among the general electorate. Reilly’s considerable kitty will allow him to be in mailboxes, on radio, and on TV for the home stretch — a time when most vot- ers will be making up their minds. “He’s a person who didn’t have a name before he started, outside a small circle,” says one observer. “After Labor Day, everybody’s going to know about Tom Reilly.”

Reilly also enjoys the benefits of incumbency without ever having held the office. During his seven years in the county, he’s earned widespread respect from lawyers, police officers, and court employ- ees, the people who care most about the DA’s race. His impres- sive fundraising has come largely from the criminal-defense bar. That network, combined with the coattail effect he’ll receive from Harshbarger’s bid for attorney general, give Reilly a big boost. Among the county’s political play- ers, most give the edge to Reilly.

“Tom’s going to win,” predicts

Spartichino: nostalgic, Reaganesque conservatism

Ss. ae, Ss Se ERR AE EOS) A eae ne on Se ee er

County Commissioner Tom Lar- kin. “I think this thing started to break about a month ago for Tom.”

Others aren’t so sure. Jim Shaw, a political consultant who is working two state-senate cam- paigns in Middlesex County, thinks Mackey has a good shot. “If you had asked me a month ago, I would have said Reilly, two to one,” Shaw says. “Now, I think it’s a crap shoot. Reilly’s been able, early on, to get a strong hold among active county politicians. What he failed to do was back that'up with real grassroots Dem- ocratic political activists.”

Reilly may sit on the bigger war chest and have a working rela- tionship with many of the players in the criminal-justice system, but

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the demographics favor Mackey. Reilly lives in Watertown, but has made Lowell his base and devel- oped good ties to the political establishment there. But Middle- sex County’s population lies pre- dominantly in the south, where Mackey has an established politi- cal organization and far superior name recognition. Cambridge and Somerville alone account for 16 percent of the total turnout in Middlesex elections, and of the top-10 Middlesex communities, nine lie along the county’s south- ern border.

The biggest unknown factor in the race is the third candidate, George Spartichino, a Democratic lawyer from North Cambridge. The former staté representative and former assistant attorney gen-

AUGUST 24, 1990

eral is given no chance of win- ning, but considering that he took out a $146,000 loan to finance his campaign, he will be able to get his name around and is expected to pull between 10 and 20 percent of the vote. Spartichino’s big issue is the death penalty, which he supports avidly. His nostalgic, Reaganesque conservatism will appeal to older voters, and he is expected to do well with the Italian vote, which tends to the conservative side. Some see Spar- tichino cutting into Mackey’s geo- graphical base, but others believe Spartichino will siphon conserva- tive votes that would otherwise go to Reilly.

Given that most voters are undecided, and that the DA’s race is probably one notch above county commissioner on most voters’ interest list, most people will be making up their minds about this race late in the game. Endorsements could play a bigger role than they do in elections for higher offices, where voters feel they know the candidates better. Reilly has garnered the majority of endorsements from police chiefs and police unions, while Mackey runs strong with the traditional left — labor unions, gay and les- bian civil-rights groups, and women’s organizations.

It also remains to be seen whether Reilly’s home-stretch media campaign can counter Mackey’s early advantage in name recognition. Reilly’s advertise- ments could easily get lost in the post-Labor Day blitzkrieg of cam- paign ads. Shaw believes Reilly wasted precious time bashing Mackey as an insider when he should have been selling his own achievements to a broad audi- ence. “His focus is so intent on exposing Joe Mackey, he’s not spending enough time telling people what a good prosecutor he’s been,” Shaw says. “I think he might be in trouble.” Q

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| War

Continued from page 7 ent risk of being shot.

By all accounts, it appears that the force in the Gulf will remain a volunteer force. Right now, the military has about 2.1 million active-duty personnel, and anoth- er 1.17 million troops in the National Guard and Reserves — more than enough to fight almost any war short of Armageddon, according to analysts on the right and the left.

The size of the Gulf buildup, however, has led to some reserves being called up (40,000 as of Thursday morning), mostly spe- cialists. But given the structure of the military, says Department of Defense spokesman Major Doug Hart, that’s not surprising. For instance, 67 percent of the mili- tary’s air evacuation forces are Air Force reserve units, he says, 61 percent of the hospital units are Army reserve, and a full 83 per- cent of infantry battalions are Army National Guard troops.

But with more than 3 million

|| total military personnel already

trained and available, it appears the draft, never a popular way to build an army, won’t be coming back any time soon. For that to happen, “we'd have to take some really big casualties,” likes tens of thousands, says analyst Grant. “You start talking casualties like that, and we'd pull out long

'| before it happened.” Adds Hart, “I

don’t know how many steps it

| would take [to necessitate the ‘| resumption of the draft] but it’s

more than I think we'd ever take.”

For the trivia buffs, the Selective Service System’ does have 13.8 million young men, aged 18 to 26, on file right now. If ordered to resume the draft, it could immedi- ately install some 10,000 prepped and trained volunteers onto 2000 local draft boards and get the first

wave of recruits inducted within

13 days. In 30 days, it could add 100,000 raw recruits to the armed forces.

No lines at the recruitor’s office

At the Army recruiting station at Downtown Crossing last Tuesday, a young guy named Wolfgang Fitzjohn was hanging out, talking with some of the staffers, killing time before he headed over to the Howard Johnson’s at Andrew Square. He’d be staying there that night, and then shipping out for Fort Benning, Georgia, in the morning, where he’d be training for the next 14 weeks. His planned specialty: “indirect fire,” meaning he’ll be with a mortar crew behind the first wave of infantry. His job will be to figure out where to point the gun.

He’s going into the Reserves, which means that after this first round of training, he'll be obligated to be a soldier only one weekend a month and for two weeks in the summer. But he wants to go fight in the desert.

“I’m not scared,” he says, more matter-of-factly than with any mil- itary bravado. “If there’s some- thing going on, I'd like to volun- teer.”

The guy who recruited him, Sergeant First Class James A. Terrell, says he’s seen that attitude a few times in the past couple of weeks. There’s no horde of wanna-be soldiers banging down the door and no significant increase in the number of people actually signing up — the station signs up about a dozen recruits a month — “but the indicators are there’s more interest,” he says. A couple of guys have hitched up expressly to fight Iraq. A few more have called to ask what their options are.

“I think right now what you're seeing is a lot more patriotism coming to the front,” Terrell says. “But then again, nobody’s son or daughter has gotten shot yet, either.” Q

Options

Continued from page 7

spots, but it seems clear that no matter how the Persian Gulf crisis turns out, there will be a loud demand for a new look (as after the oil shocks of 1973-’74 and 1979-80) at alternatives to fossil fuels. Instead of sticking resolute- ly to his nozzles, Bush should take a hard look at the energy- guzzling “way of life “ the United States is risking war over and pro- mote environmentally and eco- nomically sound energy sources. If he wanted to, Bush could exploit the fact that Iraq has given the world a giant scare about gasoline at precisely the moment that global environmental con- sciousness is hitting one of its periodic crests.

@ If a long-term military com- mitment proves necessary, give troops political and cul- tural as well as military train- ing.

Over the summer I traveled in Eastern Europe and met several American college graduates who had visited Czechoslovakia but had never heard of Vaclav Havel or of the fact that there had been an anti-communist revolution there the previous fall. It would be astonishing if one in a hun- dred of the American soldiers suddénly dumped in the Saudi desert had much background knowledge about the history, cul- ture, or traditions of the Middle East or Islam, or about Iraqi, Kuwaiti, or Saudi politics, or spoke Arabic. Obviously, staying alive and hydrated and accom- plishing military missions will be uppermost in the minds of the American troops. And yet — if a long stay in the area is required, either to defend Saudi Arabia or to occupy Kuwait — the conduct of American soldiers in their rela- tions with local Arabs will be criti- cal to how the US presence is perceived and thus to future US- Arab relations. Given the some- times disastrous results of cultural ignorance in Vietnam, the Pentagon and White House at the earliest opportunity should start crash courses aimed at preventing US troops from alienating the people they’re supposed to be defending.

@ if all-out fighting begins, get a congressional declaration of war.

The Constitutional provision that Congress shall have. the power to declare war (Article II, Section 8) was last invoked after Pearl Harbor, and since World War II presidents have taken it about as seriously as Prohibition was by everyone. Korea was a “police action, ” Vietnam was never declared a war, and Congress was lied to when the US government sponsored a guerrilla war against Nicaragua and then was barely consulted when the United States invaded the sovereign countries of Grenada and Panama. (Presidents Reagan and Bush have laughed in the face of the War Powers Act, requiring con- gressional backing for potentially dangerous US-military interven- tion abroad.) So far, in the Iraq crisis, Congress has abdicated, once again, its constitutional responsibilities and let the “impe- rial president” run the show. If war erupts between the United States and Iraq then Bush ought to ask Congress to declare it. And if Bush refuses, Congress ought to declare war on its own — or else wave the white flag, surrender, and admit that in the post-World War II era, the constitutional pro- vision has become a joke, outdat- ed by modern technology, nucle- ar weapons, mass media, presi- dents willing and able to grasp the power to make war, and legisla- tors relieved to see the decisions of life and death out of their hands.

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AUGUST 24, 1990

Murphy

Continued from page 3

in each of her past three statewide races for lieutenant governor has been made up mostly of young, educated, left-leaning, and ardently pro-choice women — a profile that’s quite different from that of most women in the state.

Those supporters have encour- aged Murphy to concentrate on a pro-female, pro-choice agenda, reasoning that polls show that women’s ranks in the Democratic party are growing and that most women voters are pro-choice.

Murphy, unfortunately, listened to her inner circle in the earlier months of her campaign. And that hurt her. Most voters, after all, don’t choose their candidates based on gender and the abortion issue alone. (Early polls, in fact, showed older women favoring Bellotti, younger women leaning toward

Mr. ° Ticket

ON SA SALE B NOW Murphy, and women between the Joe Jackson at Citi Cub, Billy Bragg, ages of 35 and 55 mostly undecid- ( ed, according to Gerry Chervinsky

of KRC Research.)

What’s more, most women are grappling with a plethora of “women’s issues” — balancing work and family, caring and paying for the care of children and aging parents, facing old age, and a Medicare and Medicaid system that’s rapidly falling apart — with which Murphy, despite her feminist rhetoric, simply isn’t identified.

To be fair, no other candidate in this campaign has grappled at all with many of the issues Evelyn Murphy has recently begun to address.

But what is most distressing about Evelyn Murphy the liberal/feminist candidate is that in her 12 years of public service, she’s never shown the kind of passion and the ability to deliver that are going to be essential in a governor who wants to get anything accom- plished for women, for the disen- franchised — or for anyone — in the next term.

John Silber possesses a passion and the will to have his way that is more common to dictators than to United States governors.

Bellotti, who’s run a lackluster campaign for this office, as ‘Massachusetts attorney general vig- orously took on the publishing industry on behalf of secretaries, the owners of Seabrook on behalf of people who live near the plant, .|; private corporations that didn’t want to provide health and mater- ee nity benefits on behalf of their employees, and the life-insurance ~| industry, in a protracted fight over unisex insurance. In each of those

cases, Bellotti delivered. He won.

T patent: over the years, has developed a large, loyal, and

8:09 pm somewhat eclectic following. Most ee people who’ve worked for him adore him. Murphy, on the other hand, has a terrible record as a boss. Among her staff of 12, she’s seen 35 employees come and go in her latest term — including three chiefs of staff. She’s had a testy

\ugust 3 relationship with most members of INNER CIRCLI the Dukakis administration during THE SHAKERS the past eight years she’s worked

pm with the governor.

Some worry that Bellotti, a volatile personality who’s served as a paid political lobbyist and played plenty of partisan politics on Beacon Hill while employed in the private sector in recent years, might have difficulty getting along with the Legislature if he’s elected.

At a time when the governor and the lawmaking body may be grap- pling with the devastating effects of a tax rollback, that could spell trou- ble. But Bellotti, unlike Murphy, has at least shown he can go along, get along, and get something done.

Murphy hasn’t. And because she hasn’t, there’s little reason to expect she’ll be able to deliver on promises she makes to anyone or

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Talks are underway in Washington that threaten to result in a much higher federal excise tax on beer. These taxes place an unfair burden on the working Americans who enjoy beer. Here are a few key facts:

@ Current proposals include a 400% increase in the current tax.

e The price of beer would increase by more than $4.00 a case.

@ 60% of all beer is purchased by Americans with annual household incomes of $35,000 or less.

e Beer taxes have continued to rise: On average, state beer tax collections have — increased by more than 650% since 195].

@ The beer industry is a major purchaser of agricultural produce and many other goods and services. It employs hundreds of thousands of Americans. A major tax increase will raise prices to a level which will cost thousands of jobs in the brewing, wholesale and retail industries. :

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As one of America's 80 million beer drinkers, tell Congress you're willing topay — your fair share of taxes, but enough is enough. .

Tell them to can the beer tax. : Anheusev-Siusch, Jue.

“~7" ° AUGUST A. BUSCH & CO. OF MASS.

LIFESTYLE BOSTON

THE BOSTON PHOENIX, SECTION TWO, AUGUST 24, 1990

RBAN

IRREVERENT 4 ‘A ~~ FALL FASHION BEHAVIOR ’ = “ ————

Caryl Rivers’s newest = oe (page 6) book is a tart, sexy | ee, ge > f one . thriller that casts

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Gail Ross Don Rubin Eric Zicklin

$ K Y =

WRITING

Heavenly ideas

Don’t say it with flowers. Say it with words in the sky. Banner-toting and skywriting planes can be hired for all sorts of occasions: birthdays, anniversaries, marriage pro- posals — one agency even flew over a funeral.

(But be forewarned: these flying sentiments can be haz- ardous to your health. One wooing suitor arranged for a “Will you marry me?” banner to be flown overhead during a romantic picnic atop Blue Hill, in Milton. The low-flying pilot, after watching the ecstatic pro- posee knock over her boyfriend three times in her joyful jumpings, feared for the groom-to-be’s safety and took off into the distance — mission accomplished.)

If you decide to take the risk and can spare the cash, here are a few places to call. ¢ Aerial Skyvertising in Brockton charges $225 an hour plus $1 per letter for up to 40 letters. Call 265-2445 a week in advance. ¢ Cape Cod Flying Service will fly your message for $200 an hour. Call Rick at (508) 428- 8732. ¢ Aero Ads in Taunton charges $180 an hour for the South Shore area and more for Boston-area assignments. Call (508) 822-2457, 24 hours in advance. ¢ Nitetime Skywriter can give you an extra-romantic evening affair: they'll pull a 44- foot aluminum-and-wire frame with hundreds of bulbs illumi- nating your sentiments. The cost is $70 for 10 minutes plus $1 per round-trip mile from Manchester, New Hampshire (1.e., for Boston, add $100 extra). Call Malcolm Shute at (603) 432-6600.

— Cindy Powell

A work in progress: Harris (left) and Guarnotta in their salon-to-be KATHY CHAPMAN

HOT THING IN THE MAKING

Ego ¢ centrix

Write down this name and address: Egoecentrix, 30 Newbury Street, Boston.

When it opens for business next month, Egoecentrix will undoubtedly become one of the hottest salons on our city’s street of chic. It’s the brainchild of Mark Harris and Vincent Guarnotta, two longtime veterans of another very hot shop, the John Dellaria Salon, 33 Newbury (right across the street from the new digs). Guarnotta is an 18-year veteran of Dellaria; Harris worked there for 12 years and managed the place for nine. And they’re two of Dellaria’s best stylists. One bit of evidence to suggest that’s true (aside from many of the very impressive, Harris-inspired haircuts sported by waitresses at 29 Newbury) is Harris’s interim location: until Egoecentrix opens (in late September), he’s moved his scissors up the street to Born 2 B Wild, 116 Newbury Street, which has been mamed best salon in Boston by Vogue magazine for the past two years.

And don't be surprised if the Newbury Street salon wars heat up too. Although Newbury Street has housed the best (and most competi- tive) salons in town for years, its list of red-hot salons is growing. Along with Dellaria and Born 2 B Wild, other major players include Diego at the Loft, 143 Newbury, and newcomer Mario Russo, at 9 Newbury, and Vidal Sassoon, at 14 Newbury. Harris and Guarnotta plan to compete with a complete line-up of services: hair care, skin care, manicures and pedicures, their own line of custom-made and organic hair and skin-care products — and, of course, their combined talents. ox

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RESPONSIBLE SHOPPING

The Green Planet

Tired of mail-ordering your recycled toilet paper, plant-fiber freezer bags, and cotton diaper covers? If you’re an environ- mentally hip consumer who wants to do the right thing but is looking for a more convenient way to do it, your time has come, and Newton Highlands is the place.

The Green Planet is a store full of fantastic, environmentally safe products. Most of them were available only by mail order, says owner Annabelle Ship, before she opened her doors. Ship, a cello teacher, opened the store about five weeks ago and says a steady stream of customers has come in to buy items like cotton shower curtains and super-energy-saving light bulbs. And Ship expects that environmental conscious- ness, and her business, will continue to blossom.

“I don’t think it’s just a trend,” she says, noting that her store may be the only one of its kind in the Northeast, something she’d like to change with a nationwide chain if business keeps up.

The Green Planet, at 57 Lincoln Street, in Newton Highlands, is open Monday through Wednesday-and on Friday and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and on Thursday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Ship also delivers bulk orders. Call 332-7841 (that’s 3-EARTH-1).

Batteries included JEFF THIEBAUTH

Fo Y §$

Funny Farm Doug Vesely and Caroline Crescenzi had planned to close their new store at 7 p.m. on Friday and Saturday nights. But

° since opening Funny Farm in late July, they’ve shut down } N A PE R FF y T V6) R [ ») closer to midnight on weekends. “It’s been like a little party,” says Crescenzi of the late-night customers who've filled their THE “HUSBAND U7/LiTY BELT” = shop. A noisy party at that. The store’s inventory consists WOULD KEEP HER - exclusively of wind-up and battery-operated toys; the whole . va place screeches, buzzes, and whirrs. And when the Farm PURSE - FREE © FOR crowds up, it’s a contagious cacophony. EVENINGS OF The Funny Farm is a hands-on store, where play is encour- UNENCUMIBELE D y) aged. Crescenzi, for example, will gladly turn on Bash-Me, a Ww squat beast that comes with its own rubber hammer, and invite you to thump the little critter until it squeals. (“It’s the perfect therapy,” she says.) Another of the owners’ favorites is a soft- ball-size “monster egg,” which cracks open and releases a tiny Godzilla — an ideal plaything for the office desk. And speaking of eggs, one of the handsomest — and wittiest — toys for sale is a brilliantly painted hen that pumps them out of its tail end. A varied inventory isn’t the only thing that sets Funny Farm apart from the big chain stores. Toys R Us wouldn't set up a bathtub, fill it with water and wind-up toys, and supply hand towels for anyone wishing to splash around. And it certainly doesn’t give away free batteries — one of the nicest surprises of all at the Farm. Funny Farm, at 14D Eliot Street, Cambridge, is open Monday through Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., Thursday through Saturday from 10 a.m. until the owners’ batteries run out, and on Sunday from noon to 6 p.m. Call 661-3999. == TG

SSSSHSSSSSSSHSSSESSSSSHSSSSSSSSHSSSSSSSHSSSSSSHSSHSSSSSSSSESESSEEEEEES

SSCSSSSSSSSSHSSSSHSSSSHSSSSSHSSHSHHSHSSHSSSSSSSHSHSSSSSOHSSSHESESSESES

‘RUGUST 24, 1990

N EW S

Bulbous beauty

There are two groups of people: those who love garlic and those who don’t.

For those who swear by the small bulb — whether for its aphrodisiacal, medicinal, or culinary purposes — there’s an entire newsletter, called Garlic News, dedicated to the subject. Published by the Fresh Garlic Association, in California — which is the source of most American-grown garlic — the quarterly is devoted to teaching about fresh garlic for cooking and health. The year-and-a-half-old four-pager, which is full of news, recipes (tuna with 40 cloves of garlic, for example), and history, also provides its 1800 subscribers with information about books and other items relating to garlic. Just about the only thing missing — in the current issue, anyway — is advice about how to maintain sweet-smelling breath after eating those 40 cloves.

Affiliate membership in the Fresh Garlic Association ts $5 per year. To join, send your name, address, and check to the Fresh Garlic Association, Box 2410, Sausalito, California 94966.

ART

Nothing to sneeze at

Suffering is no rare subject in the fine arts. With graphic dis-

plays of religious persecution in Renaissance paintings and

* primal, angst-filled screams in 20th-century works, creative minds have tried to express their pain through art. The latest in this tradition — allergy art. “Beyond Symptoms: A Different View of Allergy” is an exhibit dedicated to the tribulations of the allergy victim.

An allergy is an abnormal reaction to ordinarily harmless substances, like grass, dust, and pollen. According to the American Academy of Allergy and Immunology, some 40 mil- lion people in the US — more than 15 percent of the popula- tion — suffer from such reactions. Yet because allergies are chronic and fell so many victims, those who don’t suffer often brush them aside as a minor ailment. As Richard N. Podell, MD, consultant to the exhibit, explains, “Allergies are more complex than most people realize; they can affect a patient's home and work life.” Most sufferers, however, “don’t get any sympathy for that,” he says.

Podell and the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Corporation, which is sponsoring the show, hope allergy art will help victims get the sympathy they deserve. Works include a photograph of a man whose face has been plugged up with a huge cork and a piece featuring a sumo wrestler whose sumo-size sneeze has just blown his fellow wrestlers down a hill.

“Beyond Symptoms” ts on display on Friday, August 24, from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., and on Saturday, August 25, from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., at the Marriott Long Wharf, 296 State Street, Boston. Call 227-0800.

All Plugged Up, by Timothy R. Wells, San Francisco

* SPOSSSSSSSSSSHSSHSSSHSSSSSSHSSHOSSSHSSOSESSHSSSEHSOSHSSHOSSSOEESES

OUT

by Caroline Knapp

SECTION TWO, THE BOSTON PHOENIX 3

e’ve all heard plenty about what women want in a romantic partner — someone who's loving and kind and handsome and smart and this and that and quack, quack, quack. But what about the other men in a woman’s life? What about the other needs lurking in the average girl’s heart, those that can’t always be met by her significant other? In short, what about the sorts of non-romantic relationships that can make the difference between a happy, well- cared-for girl and a despairing one? In many women’s lives, there are five such men.

The good gynecologist

This one is the most obvious. Suffice it to say that anyone who comes near a girl while wielding rubber gloves and a tube of KY Jelly had better be damn nice: And supportive. And non-threatening. And easy-going and open and avuncular and kind- ly and sweet and not-too-good looking and not too young and not too old and very gentle and completely comfortable with women and capable of making someone who's lying naked on a cold table with her feet up in stirrups and her legs spread out to there feel at ease. (And you won- dered why a good one is so hard to find?)

The intuitive hairdresser

Note the use of the word “intuitive.” Not techni- cally expert, though that’s important as well. Not even equipped with a terrific sense of style, although that, too, is important. No, women need intuitiveness. Understanding. Soul. We need some- one who knows what we rnean when we struggle to articulate our extremely complex hair needs. We need someone who not only empathizes but also takes us seriously when, seated before the mirror, we look up and deliver some variation of the fol- lowing theme: “Well, I want a change, but not too dramatic a change, kind of funky but not out- rageous — you know? — but I also need it to be pretty low-maintenance because I just don’t have time to deal with it in the morning, but I want something really interesting and different, and I'd like to keep it on the long side, but not so it gets all flat on top, and I definitely don’t want layers, but I'd like something with some volume, maybe some wisps or something, but nothing that will flip up at the ends, do you know what I mean? Do you think you can do something like that?”

Not only should the intuitive hairdresser be able to suffer through that sort of dialogue, he should be able to appreciate its profound significance: as most every woman knows, there are few things more debilitating than a bad case of hair trauma. Self-esteem, sense of self, sense of style, confi- dence — all these are intimately linked in the female psyche to the haircut, and they rise and fall in direct proportion to its quality. A good hair- dresser ought to know this. And an intuitive one ought to be able to weed through the jumbled, semi-articulate lists of wishes, separate fantasy from reality (e.g., if she’s a brunette with frizzy hair, it’s up to the hairdresser to acknowledge tact- fully that she will never have hair like Kim Basinger), and come up with a solution. A haircut that makes her glow. A haircut that makes her feel beautiful. A haircut that’s.a change but not too dra- matic, kinda funky but not outrageous, and pretty low-maintenance because she just doesn’t have time to deal with it in the morning, and . . . well, you get the idea.

The empathic auto mechanic

This might sound as obvious as the good gyne- cologist, but in fact it’s much more complex and intimately related to the common female fantasy that someone (some man) will descend from the heavens as if by magic and solve all her problems.

Consider: there are certainly exceptions to this rule (and apologies to any woman out there who

PAUL SANCES

changes her own oil), but many women approach car maintenance the way they approach such ghastly chores as, say, the killing of spiders. The inside of a car is dark and greasy, full of strange objects with intimidating names, daunting. A woman’s tendency, in turn, is to approach car maintenance with equal parts reckless abandon and denial. She just drives the thing, does her best to ignore odd noises, keeps even the simplest con- cepts (tune-up, wiper fluid) in the far recesses of her mind, and prays the machine doesn’t fall apart. Then, seemingly out of the clear blue, some horri- fying, out-of-her-control event occurs (e.g., the car dies), and, against her will, she is forced to visit the auto mechanic.

If her mechanic does not sympathize with the vehicular side of the female psyche, this can be a nightmare. She takes the car in. The mechanic looks and probes. Then he begins to spout bizarre words and phrases, as if suddenly possessed by a demon from vocational school: “Well, it looks like ya got a problem with the starter, but it could be the alternator, and while we're at it, we should have a look at the compression-distribution-igni- tion-coil system because a bad valve may be blocking your generator, and . . . ” Before she knows it, the woman’s eyes glaze over, she’s out $500, and she never even figured out what went wrong.

An empathic auto mechanic, on the other hand, will handle her with great care. He will use lan- guage and concepts she can grasp: “The car died because you didn’t give it enough water — like a plant.” He will offer concrete solutions: “Ask some- one to check the oil once a month.” He will be extremely clear and honest about what he’s going to do and how much it will cost. And he will accomplish all of this without making her feel like a complete idiot.

The truly platonic male friend

This can be tough to find, as sexual tension can exist between even the most platonically intended women and men. That’s not necessarily bad — if it’s handled well, it can be a nice element of the male-female bond — but it’s different from rela- tionships that are totally non-sexual.

In those — preferably one with a man who has a good sense of style so he can help you through periodic wardrobe crises — a woman can find a veritable gold mine of information. She can gain access to the most complex aspects of the male psyche. She can ask graphic sexual questions with- out offending. She can dig for answers about what’ men really think (“Do guys really care about breast size?”). And she can take advantage of a real, live male sounding board, someone who can deliver the male perspective about her love life without secretly simmering with jealousy or resentment.

Happily married men work well for this type of friendship. Former boyfriends can do in a pinch if the relationship ended long enough ago to eradi- cate lingering ties and feelings of anger or jeal-

ousy.

The kindly bank executive

Ah, the kindly bank executive. The man who will lean across his desk and look at you with earnest, soulful, sympathetic eyes. The man who will deliver such calming phrases as “Well, of course you're overdrawn! You needed those seven pairs of new shoes! Don’t give it a second thought!” and “I know how hard it is to make ends meet — just pay us when you feel like it.” And, of course, the man who understands what it’s like to be'a woman. As he might put it, “An extremely low-interest loan to finance your gynecology appointment, your rebuilt carburetor, your newly

’ coifed and tinted hair, and dinner with your best

male pal? Well, why not!” Need we say more? , OQ

4 THE BOSTON PHOENIX, SECTION TWO

AUGUST 24, 1990

Aphrodite at mid life

into bed together, they’re wading deeper and deeper into a mystery that links behavior-control technology to govern- mental megalomania in the early 1990s. It’s like Lou Grant meets Spenser, with special

eg Morrison, the teenage heroine

of Caryl Rivers’s 1984 novel

Virgins, envisions a movie of her

life called, natch, The Peg

Morrison Story. In it, she either

wins a Pulitzer Prize or dies in the arms of her high-school boyfriend turned “Hero Priest of the Amazon.” Now, the Pulitzer may still be a dull gleam in the eye of the Boston University journalism profes- sor turned novelist at mid life. But the odds that she will die in the embrace of husband and Globe columnist Alan Lupo, his burly frame encased in priestly vest- ments, are slim. To paraphrase lime-clad, dog-track-loving Uncle Morty, a character in Rivers’s new book, Indecent Behavior: Jews don’t have cassocks; Cossacks have cassocks.

Uncle Morty may be the most opinionat- ed ethnic commentator in Indecent Behavior. He thinks that if Yahweh had | intended Jews to ski, Jerusalem would be | in Norway. But the novel, a thriller set in

by Carolyn Clay

Boston, is full of cultural jousting — with most of the low blows being aimed at the North Shore Brahmin set, living their patri- cian lives amid the woof-woof of the Myopia Hunt Club hounds. And if the book’s Cabots talk only to the Lodges and the Lodges talk only to God, they manage to get the word out to the rest of us plebes by publishing the newspaper of record, here called the World Herald. Why, one wonders, in a roman studded with Boston landmarks from Locke-Ober to Howard Zinn, is the Globe called the World Herald? “Well,” says Rivers, “my husband works there.”

So do the novel’s reporter-detective pro- tagonists, John Forbes Aiken, of Pride’s Crossing and Wellfleet, and Sally Ellenberg, of Brookline and Filene’s Basement. Compared on the book jacket

to Nick and Nora Charles, these ink- stained daredevils are more like Nick and Nora Ephron — except that only Sally is Jewish. She’s also tough, bright, and lovelorn, incapable of matching outfits, given to pushing her talent and her cleav- age, and blessed with the tart, earthy wit that leaks out of Rivers into her heroinés. Jack, for his part, has an aquiline nose, a perfect fiancée, and a reined-in “sensuality that itches to get loose and gallop all the way from Myopia to Suffolk Downs.

Ah, you say, another odd-couple love tussle, like Rivers’s last book, Intimate Enemies, wherein a onetime war protester gets her chimes rung by a ROTC head in local groves of academe. But at the same time that the feisty Ellenberg, a criminal- justice reporter, and the wealthy white- bread Aiken, a scribe of science, are falling

Photo by Mark Morelli

guest stars Ollie North and Dr. Strangelove.

It's also something of a departure for Rivers, who first garnered attention with her 1973 memoir of “growing up female and Catholic in postwar America,” Apbro- dite at Mid-Century. The funny-poignant Virgins, and its sequel Girls Forever Brave and True, recycled some of the same material — except that the characters actu- ally got in on the sex that, as parochial- school students of the 1950s, Rivers and her chums merely read about in purloined bodice-rippers. In Virgins, for example, aspiring journalist Peg Morrison steams up a lot of car windows with boy-next-door Sean McCaffey, who finally pulls himself up off the upholstery to become a priest.

In real life, says Rivers, that didn’t hap-

AUGUST 24, 1990

pen just once. “Actually, I had four of

them. Luckily, they weren’t great loves.

But practically everybody I dated went off the next day to a seminary.” After driving a quartet of swains to God, Rivers met Lupo at the Columbia School of Journalism — they began to gnaw at each other’s libidos while making a documentary film about rats — and the rest is history.

I say that because, just as Rivers mined her youth in Aphrodite, the two mined their marriage in the 1981 For Better, For Worse. (Rivers has also written two books about female life choices, Beyond Sugar and Spice and Lifeprints, with psycholo- gist/scholars Grace Baruch and Rosalind Barnett. Baruch died last year, but another collaboration between Rivers and Barnett, called The Two-Paycheck Marriage, is in the works.)

If one has read Aphrodite, it seems somehow appropriate that the way to locate Caryl Rivers, who lives in Winthrop, is by going through the Callahan Tunnel and then turning right at the billboard for the “35-foot statue of the Madonna Queen.” In the shadow of what else would a good Catholic girl, however gone to seed, live? And if one has read For Better, For Worse, it comes as no surprise that Caryl Rivers is, well, a slob. She blithely says so herself. And Lupo (described by his wife as “an anal-compulsive, on-time, neat person in a household of slobs”) says so often, if affectionately, in their book.

Sure enough, as a hostess, Rivers is about as pretentious as a barbecue. A big, tanned woman in shorts, with a mop of blond-over-silver curls, she leads you from front door to back room — a glassy aerie overlooking the Harbor — toting a two- liter bottle of Diet Pepsi and two paper cups. Once there, she cozies up amid an explosion of pillows, against the tranquil view of water and boats. Unfortunately, the vista is so close to Logan Airport that our conversation sounds like Raid on Entebbe.

She cheerfully tells you what her house cost — $23,000, 20 years ago, “which seemed like a lot.” And she seems non- plused that in those two decades, the Rivers/Lupo abode has acquired, shall we say, a lived-in look. Unfazed, the lady of the house negotiates a course through crates of her own books (one festooned with a homemade protest placard, her daughter’s, reading “Stop U.S. Government intervention in women’s wombs”) with ease. The library, after all, is nothing to the crammed front porch, the eclectic contents of which include a visiting cat and the cab of a camper (her son’s). What it suggests is that everything that ever got old or broken in the house made it no farther out than the porch. Someday, presumably, Rivers and‘Lupo will go there too.

But if Rivers spends little time buffing her crockery (“I don’t want to see my face in anything except mirrors, and then only dimly,” she cracks in For Better, For Worse), she stays busy. The 20-odd years since she left the grind of daily journalism have produced lots more than the detritus on the porch — including Steven Lupo, 23, a management consultant; Alyssa Lupo, 21, an NYU theater student; eight books; a portfolio of magazine work, for such pub- lications as the New York Times Magazine, Ms., and Redbook; two television scripts; and the screenplay for Virgins. In her spare time, Rivers is a full-time, and by most accounts popular, professor of jour- nalism at Boston University. And if that doesn’t impress you, the once-ranked high-school tennis player, who boasts of having “the strongest immune system in the world,” swims off the back of her house — in Boston Harbor.

The authorial career began almost by accident. Rivers was fond of regaling friends with amazing tales of her parochial-school girlhood in Silver Springs, Maryland, and reaction was so boffo she decided to write them down. “I wrote an article called ‘Growing Up Catholic,’ and I sent it everywhere. And everyone rejected it, saying either @) ‘It’s very funny, but you made it up’ or b) ‘Our Catholic readers will lynch us if we run this.’ So finally I sent it to the least likely place, the New York Times Magazine. To my absolute surprise, they bought it. And the day after it ran, I had five telegrams to write a book.

“Then the editor I signed with hated it [the book], and it was really awful. They expected it to be terribly dramatic; they told me they wanted it to be like a book called I Jumped Over the Wall, by an Episcopal nun who had escaped the con- vent. But I couldn't imagine why they had bought my book from my article, which was nothing like that. And the more I wrote, the more they hated it.” Eventually

rejected by the wall jumpers, Aphrodite at Mid-Century was published by Double- day. “And it got good reviews and a lot of attention. It was one of the first of the new breed of Catholic books to come out, talk- ing about the pre-Vatican II Church.” (interestingly, the book didn’t make it into paperback until 15 years later, under the “sexier” title Occasional Sins. Rivers was told by one editor: “Catholics don’t read; too bad you’re not Jewish.”)

The move to fiction, in the mid ’80s, was less abrupt than it might seem. Indeed, Rivers’s wry Borscht Belt-papist persona (the result, perhaps, of her Bridget Meets Bernie life with Lupo) makes Apbrodite and Virgins sort of a matched set. Says the author, “Journalism was my first love, but I also wanted to write fiction. And since I was in my 20s, I've played around with it. The interesting thing was, I started to write short stories. I’d read a lot of short stories, so I started to write them — in the genre that was popular: the world’s most depressing short story. Everybody died, or got cancer, or was left by their lover. And, well, they were all right, but they weren’t my voice. And an editor told me, ‘You real- ly should write novels, because you’re a storyteller. You don’t write in the genre that short stories are now — they don’t have plots; they’re very impressionistic. You like stories. You like endings. You like characters.’ ”

He or she might have added sex — straightforward, to be sure, but with the women at least into it rather than swoon- ing romantically as their stays are unlaced — and savvy humor. Rivers may not be Jane Austen, or even Ann Beattie or Anne

just smart-mouth (though there’s a lot of that, especially as pertains to Jack’s North Shore ice-maiden fiancée, who, sniffs Sally, “probably thought fellatio was a minor work by Vivaldi”). And the writer admits the Brahmins get the worst of it in Indecent Bebavior, wherein the two-bit crooks| have names like Big Doc Jabotinsky and Mayo Shannahan but the

real villains are Harvard Clubbing

Machiavellians with Mayflower monikers. “I wanted to combine both the good part of the George Bush thing, the public ser- vant, and the bad part, that being the abso- lute assumption you have the right to tule.”

Mini-seriesed-out Midwesterners and Californians may assume it’s the Irish Catholics who run this part of the world: the Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, that lot. But Rivers says, and it’s reflected in the political scheme of her book, “They only own a portion; they own politics, local politics. They don’t own the banks; they don’t own the money; they don’t own the State Department. I think Irish Catholics always feel very embattled, and very much put upon.

“In Boston, there’s such a long tradition of ‘No Irish need apply,’ of being put down by the Yankees and having to claw for political power and a place in the sun, that I think there’s still a sense that the Irish Catholics aren’t there yet. I remember, when I first came to town, going to a party, and Kevin White was there. He kept talking about ‘the Yankees’ this and ‘the Yankees’ that; I thought he was talking about the baseball team. I said, ‘Alan, why -is he so mad about the Yankees?’ Having

“T always wanted to look like those models in Vogue. You know ... thin. Rich. Arrogant. It never worked. I always looked like the same thing, whatever I put on my back.”

“What’s that?”

“Remember the Italian starlets

they used to import? With the - boobs and the broken English? They stood around in rice paddies with their boobs hanging out. ‘I am Earth Mother. We make love.’ ”

— from Indecent Behavior

Tyler. But she is a very funny writer who bristles, not unjustifiably, at the occasional dismissal of her books as “trashy.” “I don’t have any pretensions to being ‘high liter- ary,’ in the sense of being the one that every creative-writing class has to study. But I think I’m a very good realistic novel- ist.” She also has a strong sense of both the political and the absurd, and a knack for mixing social commentary with stand-up. Cataloguing the virtues of Barbie (“Her boobs were so hard you could drive nails in them. Sometimes we did”) over GI Joe, Indecent Bebavior’s Sally wonders if WASPy Jack “ever played with GI Joe? Or is that too declassé for Yankee families? Maybe they have little plastic bankers and lawyers and corporate CEOs. Their war game is called zoning, and they put up barricades to keep out the little plastic Jews, Italians, and Irish.”

Rivers defends the congenial WASP- bashing in her latest book as more than

lived in Washington, where there is no power structure in the sense that it utterly changes every four or eight years, it was really new to me, coming to Boston and finding this sense of class so strong.”

Not that Indecent Bebavior's just a trea- tise on the class struggle in Our Town. There’s also romance — the reporters’ with each other and with journalism. And, as Sally and Jack penetrate the web of leads that suggest murderous doings deep and high in the body politic, there’s more adventure than you can shake a rolled-up newspaper at. Crooks with electrodes pro- truding from their heads drop dead in mid stick-up. Black radicals die suspicious deaths, as do honorable government bureaucrats who know too much. Prostitutes keep mysteriously disappear- ing, and a crazed brain surgeon cruises the Combat Zone in a limo.

As the reporters, between clinches, close in on the links in all this, they’re bashed, bruised, and caught in more cross-

SECTION TWO, THE BOSTON PHOENIX 5

fire than Crockett and Tubbs. Finally, in the book’s galloping, gory climax (based on a real behavior-control experiment from the 1970s), our voluptuous little latke of a Lois Lane and coupon-clipping Jimmy Olson must do battle with a raging bull! Given their luck, if you sent this team into a dark parking garage, they’d encounter not Deep Throat but Freddy Krueger.

Buttressing the far-fetched tale, howev- er, is a serious liberal-American paranoia that most of us can plug into. “The whole book came out of a piece I was assigned to do for Ms. magazine on new behavior- control technology,” says Rivers. “In fact there really was, during the Nixon admin- istration, a proposal to set up something called the California Violence Center. And, get this, they were going to take mental patients, prisoners, and menopausal women do experiments on them as to why they were violent.

“It was actually funded by the Justice Department. They were going to take an old missile base and turn it into this center, and there were reports they were going to do psycho-surgery. You know, it was pret- ty scary stuff. But the California legislature found out about it and canceled it. So my thought was, okay, now that you've got all these regulations against research on human subjects, what if you were the gov- ernment and you were worried that some other government was getting real far ahead of you on behavior-control technol- ogy?” You'd take an Ollie North approach? “Exactly. The funny thing was, as I was writing the book, if I thought I'd gone too far, I'd just turn on the Iran-contra hear- ings.”

Rivers is candid about her hope that the forces of Hollywood will roll in this materi- al like pigs in a wallow. The book, she says, “is perceived as a thriller, and I think that often thrillers are sort of written off as ‘beneath us.’ It hasn’t been reviewed as much as Virgins was.” It is, however, doing understandably well in Boston. And it’s been optioned for a film “by Herb Jaffe, a veteran producer. And he’s working with a very good young director named Jenny Bowen. She directed The Wizard of Loneliness for American Playhouse. Herb and Jenny are right now going around to the studios, and I think there are five or six that are interested. So, hopefully, it will happen.” (And if you're talking “pie in the sky,” Rivers would like to see it cast with Debra Winger and Harrison Ford, or, as a B-team, Geena Davis and Jeff Bridges.)

But then, the writer’s been west before. Currently, all four of her novels are under Hollywood option, though nobody’s start- ed a camera rolling, and For Better, For

Worse almost became a CBS sit-com. After making it all the way to the top brass, it was scrapped as a vehicle for Susan Saint James (possibly because Jane Curtin would have been so unconvincing as Lupo).

Anyway, Rivers knows the drill and has not, as she says, “put the check on the Mercedes.” She and Lupo both took a lot of meetings in connection with For Better, For Worse that went nowhere. “We. went out there, and Alan expected to see old, fat

Jewish guys with pinkie rings. And they’re not; they’re all yuppies. So it was sort of a bizarre experience. At one point one of them said, ‘Why don’t we make Caryl Jewish and Alan Catholic?’ No reason. Somebody just had to put an oar in, I guess.”

More recently, Indecent Behavior has been making the rounds, to sometimes equally perspicacious response. “There was a studio executive who had looked at the book before it was published and said, ‘Gee, the idea of grabbing prostitutes isn’t very high concept; why don’t we have them grab beautiful wives of CEOs? And I said, ‘Oh, right. That’s just what a govern- ment covert operation would do. They'd grab Ivana Trump.’ That’s sometimes what you deal with out there; there’s a sense of disconnection with the real world. They have contempt for content. The only thing that matters is the deal.”

Rivers, of course, is not above making one; in fact, she intends to write the screenplay. Meanwhile, there are a num- ber of other projects between the madon- na queen of Winthrop and having to clean house — including The Two-Paycheck Marriage with Barnett, a novel set in the civil-rights era, another that tracks three women over 20 years, and even a one- woman theater piece, a series of “mono- logues about contemporary young women,” for actress-daughter Alyssa. So until the call from the yup in the pinkie ring comes, you'll find