Chapters 1 & 2 of the New Travelogue, "We'll Always Have Paris" are on the Secret Decoder Ring page.
The Washington-based National Press Corp is all over the visits to Iowa of the Democratic Presidential wannabees. These same guys spoke last night to the NARAL meeting in Washington DC which has been re-designated by our friends in the media as "NARAL, the Pro-Choice group," which, from a marketing standpoints sounds a LOT better than "NARAL, which stands for the National ABORTION RIGHTS Action League."
This business of words is pretty important, especially as most of us scan headlines and maybe read the first paragraph of a newspaper article, or catch snippets of "news" as it scrolls - like the ticker on Times Square reduced to a half inch of real estate - across the bottom of our TV screens on one of the cable networks.
In the Washington Post Metro section yesterday was this headline: "Ehrlich Vows to Diminish Pollution."
There is nothing at all wrong with that headline (which topped a story about Maryland's new Republican
Governor Bob Ehrlich meeting with environmentalists about the Chesapeake Bay) but the verb "vow" on the same line
as "diminish" and "pollution" doesn't give the same sense of optimism as "Ehrlich Vows Cleaner Chesapeake" might have done.
Sometimes just ignoring an important fact - or burying it - can be just as dangerous but more difficult to discern. In coverage of events honoring Dr. Martin Luther King in South Florida, the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel had this in the second-graf:
A minister at a Pompano Beach church crowned Gov. Jeb Bush "the greatest governor ever in the state of Florida'' as he declared equal education for minorities the next battlefront for the civil rights movement.
Wait. WAIT! Governor Jeb Bush is proclaimed to be the "greatest Governor ever in the state of Florida" at a rally of 2,000 people (before whom the Miami Herald in the fourth graf said he gave "a rousing speech") honoring Martin Luther King and it didn't make the front page of every newspaper in the nation?
Wasn't this the SAME Governor Jeb Bush whom the Democrats were going to send packing last November to prove to the world that he had contrived to keep African-American votes from being counted in the election of 2000?
It didn't even rate a headline in the LOCAL papers.
Hmmm.
The Democrats have embarked on a 20-month crusade to "soften-up" the Presidency of George W. Bush in time for the Presidential election of 2004. Read with a critical eye those headlines; listen with a critical ear to the news anchors on the cable shows. The words will be strictly correct, but the nuances - including winks, smirks, eyebrow raises, sighs, and small-but-telling shakes of the head - may tell you more than the story itself.
Some side notes from here in Paris. It is "Fashion Week" a f�te in which I have not been asked to participate and, judging from some of the photos, I'm the better for it.
Also in today's news here, the AP's Barry Schweid is reporting that, the French Foreign Minister, speaking at the United Nations, "hinted that it might veto any resolution authorizing" military action against Iraq.
The French government has, therefore, all but surrendered to Iraq in advance of any fighting, thus doing away with that pesky business of actually pick up rifles only to have to lay them down again and get them dirty.
Finally, I was very interested in watching one or both of the NFL Conference Championship games here even though the early game kick off didn't occur until 9:00 pm Central European Time. My hotel (see the discussion of hotels on the SDR today) gets one sports channel - Euro-Sports - which in the winter is the All-Ski-Jumping-Except-When-They're-Showing-Luge-Racing channel.
I wish there were an All-Fashion-Week channel.
On the Secret Decoder Ring page today:
A link to Chapters 1 & 2 of the New Travelogue: "We'll Always Have Paris," also links to the Jeb Bush article, a listing of the way NARAL is depicted on the Web, and some pretty good photos you'll want to check out.
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