The Cynic Express(ed) 1.16: What Else Happened

     In the media blitz accompanying President Clinton's latest sexual antics and the new-and-improved sordid revelations it entails, it was easy to lose track of what else happened last week. The national media, including the nightly network news, the newsmagazine show Dateline, the covers of local newspapers like the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and even the news magazines Time and Newsweek, focused in on the same photograph of that Monica Lewinsky with the same toothy grin. It would be too easy for a columnist to jump on the hype bandwagon and decry the morals of the president, or even the morals of a nation at large that would elect and then re-elect that same president. I, on the other hand, as a service to readers, will sum up a few things that happened last week that can be played without the soundtrack from Boogie Nights playing in the background.

     Wag the Dog opened in theaters nationwide. The movie portrays a producer, played by Dustin Hoffman, who is called in to produce a fictional war after the fictional president is caught up in a fictional sex scandal involving the fictional equivalent of a Girl Scout. Or so I heard. Every theater I went to was sold out. A case of public escapism from the problems plaguing our government today.

     The real President offered firm words to Iraq about its continued misbehaviour, but somehow these firm words failed to dissuade Saddam Hussein from being repulsive, especially towards UN arms inspection teams. So the Pentagon has begun to draw up attack plans, but action will be delayed for a month so that other official brass can watch Wag the Dog and see how such military actions should be staged, or so that the world will know that our strikes have nothing to do whatsoever with Bill Clinton's problems.

     Somehow, with the threat of trouble in the Middle East, gas prices have dropped. Warm weather in the Northern Hemisphere has allowed refineries to produce more gasoline and less heating oil. New wells in Africa and the North Sea, far away from any hostile dictators and flirty interns, have boosted supply, and the propounded fiscal Armageddon in the Far East has dropped demand. The price decrease affects me more than any action the people in Washington do or get.

     Hey, the Unabomber trial is over. Ted Kaczynski pled guilty and is going to prison for life with no chance of parole. A trial promised to be quite a public spectacle, but it was resolved without a flashy ending. Luckily, the nation had changed channels to the Playboy network.

     The Pope went to Cuba. One of the last bastions of old Bolshevistic communism in the world invited the head of a major theistic organization--the Catholic church-- to the little island nation in hopes of drawing attention and investment to Cuba. Fidel Castro escorted the Pope around and showed the Pope popely sights. The Pope spoke self -righteously (self-righteously because I am assuming he was not doing the "ex cathedra" thing and was on his own) and sometimes appropriately, bashing the Cuban practices of abortion, divorce, premarital sex, and totalitarianism along with the American traditions of not selling the Cubans anything. Of course, at the first whiff of politicians in heat, the American reporters fled from the celibate Pope to better hunting grounds in Washington.

     And remember the big deal about Microsoft forcing computer dealers to bundle Internet Explorer with Windows 95? Microsoft caved in on it. Rather than paying the million-a-day, Microsoft has agreed to allow dealers the option of selling computers without the IE icon on the desktop. Of course, people in the know predict most computer dealers will not remove the icon to avoid angering Microsoft. Netscape announced it would start giving Navigator away free again, along with the source code so that programmers would band together with Netscape to slay the monolithic Microsoft. Stay tuned or, more appropriately, refresh the display often.

     That's what happened last week that matters. The things that slipped into the media between the sidebars about fellatio, the excerpts from clandestine recordings, and the voyeurism that pass for thoughtful, hard-hitting reporting when sex and especially illicit sex scent the fetid air of our nation's capital.