Reason Magazine - Contributors

The People in Nod

info@reason.com (Jodie T. Allen) — Thu, 04 Mar 2004 00:00:00 EST

Our sermon for today will take as its text the Congressional Record, chapter 2-24-04, verse H596:

It came to pass that in those days all branches of government were under the guidance of a single party whose name was Republican. The leader of that party was a prayerful man who had, by his own testament, been sent on a mission by God to spread the gospel of the GOP to all lands. Yet even as he sought to bring the revealed message of the Almighty to foreign infidels, a challenge to those sacred truths arose within his native country from the judiciaries of Massachusetts, California and other regions.

And so it happened that a congressman from the state of Washington, not himself a member of the chosen party but in the spirit of comity that ever guides our legislators, arose and spake thus:

Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, the President's presidential prayer team is urging us to "pray for the President as he seeks wisdom on how to legally codify the definition of marriage. Pray that it will be according to Biblical principles.''

With that in mind, I thought I would remind the body of the biblical principles they are talking about.

Marriage shall consist of a union between one man and one or more women. That is from Genesis 29:17-28.

Secondly, marriage shall not impede a man's right to take concubines in addition to his wife or wives. That is II Samuel 5:13 and II Chronicles 11:21.

A marriage shall be considered valid only if the wife is a virgin. If the wife is not a virgin, she shall be executed. That is Deuteronomy 22:13.

Marriage of a believer and a nonbeliever shall be forbidden. That is Genesis 24:3.

Finally, it says that since there is no law that can change things, divorce is not possible, and finally, if a married man dies, his brother has to marry his sister-in-law.

Now some may question the practicality of the biblical injunctions of which Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) reminds us. True, the escort industry will welcome the long-denied legitimacy—not to mention the potential for job growth—provided by Samuel and Chronicles. And while feminists will complain about the implications of a codification of Genesis, Jack Mormons may find vindication in its sanction of male polygamy. Still, even the well-oiled execution chambers of the president's native state might find it difficult to implement the requirements of Deuteronomy 22:13.

McDermott fails to identify the source of his last listed requirement but it comes, of course, from the much-misinterpreted story of Onan (Genesis 38). As we know, Onan (like the author Dorothy Parker's canary, who was named in his honor), "spilled his seed upon the ground." Whereupon God off'd him. Opponents of contraception have cited these verses as an indication of Divine aversion to unfruitful coitus. Yet let us consult the actual verses:

38:7 And Er, Judah's firstborn, was wicked in the sight of the LORD; and the LORD slew him.
38:8 And Judah said unto Onan, Go in unto thy brother's wife, and marry her, and raise up seed to thy brother.
38:9 And Onan knew that the seed should not be his; and it came to pass, when he went in unto his brother's wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest that he should give seed to his brother.
38:10 And the thing which he did displeased the LORD: wherefore he slew him also.

Could it be any plainer that what got the Almighty's Irish up was not Onan's wasted semen, but his refusal to marry and impregnate his late brother's wife as required by the Mosaic law? Surely the president—who has, after all, only one set of twins to his credit— will want to clear that up in drafting his amendment. And since he is the eldest son of the family he won't have to worry about being pushed into any unwanted nuptials by the death of a brother.

Perhaps it's not surprising, however, that the Catholic Church, the most powerful pusher of the anti-contraception doctrine for the last century or so, should have misinterpreted the Onan message. In my experience through 12 years of Catholic girls' school, few if any Catholics actually read the bible itself, except for those generally anodyne New Testament passages chosen for the Sunday Mass "gospel." Instead we read appropriately bowdlerized "Bible stories," that told us about how Joshua tumbled the walls of Jericho and Moses parted the Red Sea and so on.

The wisdom of this was brought home to me many years later. Rearing a child of our own, my husband and I decided that, the bible being so important a part of our heritage, it would be a good idea if the three of us read it together from start to finish. We were barely into Genesis when the difficulty of presenting this narrative to a literal-minded seven-year-old became apparent. The first thing that drew his attention was that God, having created the fish and fowl on the fifth day and the beasts of the earth and other living creatures at the start of the sixth, only then "male and female created...them." (Gen.1:20-27).

Okay, but how come, asked my son, only a few verses later, having taken a seventh-day break, God comes back and gins up Adam again. And then, apparently retracing his steps still farther back, "out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam..." Finally, as an afterthought, he carves the fateful Eve from Adam's rib. (Gen. 2:7-22)

Look, I explained, time probably wasn't like it is now, and if we get hung up on every little nitpick we'll never get through this. So on we plowed through the birth of Cain and Abel, the murder of the latter by the former, the curse that God lays upon Cain, and Cain's successful plea that God should place a protective—yes protective—mark upon him "lest any finding him should kill him." (Gen. 4:15) "Any who?" asked my son. "I thought that Adam and Eve were the first people and Cain and Abel were their kids."

Well, maybe Cain was looking forward to when his parents would have other kids and they'd have kids, and maybe they wouldn't know that Cain was their uncle or whatever. Okay? Except that right in the very next verse (Gen. 4:16-17) didn't it go and tell us that "Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden." And right off the bat he finds a wife and founds a city that he names after his first born son. "Wait a minute, Mom, where did all those people in Nod come from?"

Still on we slogged through floods and begots and Babel, trying not to dwell upon the seemingly dubious morality of Abraham's handing off Sarah to the Pharoah as his sister in order to save his own skin (Gen.12:10-20). But when we encountered the smooth-skinned Jacob swindling the hairy Esau out of his birthright with Heaven's apparent approval, we decided that for relevant moral guidance, never mind clarity and consistency, other sources might be more fruitful.

Perhaps there is a lesson here for the president.

God Only Knows

info@reason.com (Jodie T. Allen) — Sun, 01 Jun 2003 00:00:00 EDT

Bill's Bogus Journey

info@reason.com (Jodie T. Allen) — Fri, 30 May 2003 00:00:00 EDT

Okay, William Bennett wasn't the paragon of virtue that his books and lectures implied. So what else is new? The interesting question is not how he could have deceived his many admirers and devotees—hypocrisy among the overtly righteous is hardly a new phenomenon. Rather we should wonder, now that he has abjured his gambling addiction, what vice he will substitute in its place.

For it is a fact, well documented over the ages, that each of us is born with an irreducible need for a certain amount of guilt-inducing activity-let us call it an Individual Vice Quotient (IVQ). This theory was first postulated to me by a long-ago colleague, one Robert Pugh. Mathematician Pugh conjectured that while the magnitude of the IVQ varies from person to person—for some the occasional glass of sherry or the filching of a trinket from the local novelty store will suffice; for others nothing less than a regular gallon of gin and a bag full of designer label garb filched from Saks will assuage the longing—it remains constant throughout most of life.

Over the course of years, a given individual may choose to abandon one forbidden activity, but will inevitably replace it with another. Intertemporal substitution is possible—a lag may occur between the abandonment of one vicious habit and the taking up of another—but the new vice will then be pursued with sufficient vigor to compensate for the period of abstinence. Thus, over time, the quotient will be maintained at a constant level (some evidence of a decline in the later years has been adduced).

Many manifestations of this substitution effect are well known. The reformed alcoholic chain smokes. The reformed smoker overeats. But more subtle replacements are frequently overlooked. For example, an abjurer of both alcohol and tobacco for whom I once worked, turned instead to periodic outbursts of spite and malice, inspiring terror in colleagues and underlings and remorse in the perpetrator. A still subtler source of needed self-reproach is to be found in the prideful smugness exuded by those who, having shed their apparent vices, have taken to rigorous physical exercise or still more rigorous religion (to be followed, in secret, by a few pangs of self-recognized hypocrisy).

Of course, what constitutes a vice is neither uniform among persons nor constant over time—all that is required is that the individual in question experience a frisson of guilt when indulging in it. Practitioners of public rectitude, such as Bennett, thus perform an important but little recognized function in society: the creation of new sources of guilt. And to the extent that these newly defined vices are of little harm to the larger society—smoking, say, or the ingestion of artery-clogging saturated fats—they may contribute to the commonweal by distracting would-be sinners from more pernicious pursuits. Better that the aftermath of enjoyed guilt be confined to the vice seeker than that it be dispersed among his family, friends or the larger population.

This suggests that a society must walk a careful line between two opposing hazards: 1) excessive strictness such that all opportunity to indulge in petty vice is eradicated; 2) excessive permissiveness such that few opportunities are offered for would-be sinners to wallow in the satisfying sense of transgression. How then to indulge "that pride of individualism that is half the fascination of sin," as Oscar Wilde has described it? If everyone is wearing a safety pin through the nose, what's the thrill? If the forbidden fruit hangs too low, where's the joy in plucking it?

Which brings us back to Bennett. For all the attention lavished on him, the pressing question of his IVQ remains unresolved. Free munchies at the casino have already given him a heart-threatening paunch, so a resort to gluttony would be ill-advised. Any propensity toward alcoholic overindulgence would surely have long ago manifested itself as he reached for the free drinks plied upon big-time slot players. For him, the thrills of pious intolerance toward the less righteous are obviously insufficient. He might take a lesson from President George W. Bush who has traded away the sins of his alcoholic youth for the scornful pride of the man who can do a mile in seven minutes, while parading his religiosity like the proudest Pharisee.

But there's a warning here: Can exercise or even prayer be a durable replacement for the pleasures of the flesh? Bush, of course, can resort to the occasional unprovoked bombing of some Third World nation to release his pent-up desires. But such opportunities are denied even the most exalted among the citizenry. What's left? Fanny pinching? Arson? A bank heist? A little low-level terrorism? The FBI should be on red alert.

God Only Knows

info@reason.com (Jodie T. Allen) — Thu, 17 Apr 2003 00:00:00 EDT

You gotta feel a little sorry for God these days. The hotline from the White House has been hopping off the heavenly hook; the pope has urged shrines, parishes, communities and families to "persevere in unceasing prayer;" and cries of "Allahu Akbar" echo from the streets of Gaza to those of Baghdad. In Touch Ministries even distributed a pamphlet to U.S. soldiers in Iraq urging them to pray for—George W. Bush. One suggested prayer: "Pray that the president and his advisers will seek God and his wisdom daily and not rely on their own understanding."

Being omnipotent, God of course has no problem fielding all these calls. He can probably even take time out to mediate a dispute in the Louisiana state legislature over whether painting a giant U.S. flag with the words "God Bless America" in 37-foot-tall letters on the roof of the New Orleans Superdome would cut the value of the naming rights to the stadium, which are up for sale. Still, it is hard to imagine that he isn't experiencing a wee bit of cognitive dissonance.

President Bush, of course, has frequently invoked God's blessing on our incursion into Iraq. (The president's close friend, Commerce Secretary Don Evans, according to USA Today, says that "Bush believes he was called by God to lead the nation at this time,"—a belief reinforced, he says, by the knowledge gained while earning his history degree at Yale.) But even as the president's invasion message was being broadcast, there was a televised Saddam Hussein assuring his nation that "God's victory will be ours soon." He also transmitted a message from the Almighty that had apparently sneaked by U.S. signal blockers: "God has ordered you...to cut their throats."

Meanwhile Osama bin Laden, in a taped message noting that he was "following anxiously the preparations of the crusaders to conquer the former capital of Islam and steal their wealth," called upon the Muslim world "to fight for the sake of God, not for nationalism or any infidel regime, including Iraq."

Osama's mention of crusaders inevitably brings to mind the long history of divine invocations in support of battlefield mayhem. "[T]he two kings were causing Te Deums to be sung in their camps," Voltaire dryly wrote of two Christian armies poised for mutual dismemberment, to be followed by the usual round of rape and pillage. Viewing the aftermath, his hero, Candide, "took a resolution to go and reason somewhere else upon causes and effects."

But of course, the ways of God are not the ways of man. And while the divine injunction "Thou shalt not kill," may seem pretty straightforward, religious scholars have long pointed to numerous Old Testament texts to demonstrate, as one Christian pastor wrote recently in The Columbus [Ohio] Dispatch, "The God of the Bible is not a pacifist! God loves and protects the innocent and the weak. He often does so by declaring war on tyrants and oppressors."

That being the case, and Saddam and Osama being joined in perfidy if not in friendship, it seems reasonable to assume that the mandate of heaven has indeed been conferred on the White House in its chosen war. (True, there was that sandstorm shortly after the invasion began, but that was probably just a little reminder about where the ultimate Commander-in-Chief resides.) That does not mean, however, that the president and his most ardent supporters call upon heaven with one voice. For instance, the alliance between evangelical Christians and predominately Jewish neo-conservatives in opposition to Saddam, both within the White House and among the larger population, has drawn attention in the press.

As some have noted, from an historical perspective the coalition might seem odd, given that Jews, along with Catholics and blacks, were once the frequent targets of the more irredentist denizens of the Bible Belt. The route to their latter-day meeting of minds runs through Israel. In the final decades of the last century, with the millennium and its many portents looming near, evangelical thoughts naturally turned to the prospect of the long-awaited Second Coming of Christ. From there it was only a short jump to—Armageddon. On that hill, or at least on the plain it overlooks, say those who parse the New Testament's enigmatic book of Revelation, armies of the East and West will be enticed by Satan to draw together. Thence they will march to Jerusalem where (as is often overlooked) they will do joint battle with the returning Christ.

What happens next is open to many interpretations, not least of which involves different views about who gets "raptured" (i.e. raised bodily into heaven) and when (before or after the time of "tribulations"). Controversies rage among such factions as the Pretribulationists and Posttribulations and the Pseudo-Ephraemists and the Psuedo-Psuedo-Ephraemists—not to mention among believers in the Manifest Sons doctrine or the doctrine of the lost 10 tribes. But it is generally agreed that an important precursor is for the Jewish people to be back in control of the land of Israel before the action begins.

Despite this coalescing of interests in the protection of Israel, a point of contention between the two groups remains: Will anyone but the Christians have a shot at being raptured? Evangelicals have hastened in recent years to assure Jews that they will not be automatically excluded. According to the World of the Bible, "Those Gentiles...who came to faith in the Jewish Messiah during the time of Jacob's trouble...will join with redeemed Israelites in the true worship of God." Says the Pretribulationist Ed Tarkowski, "What lies ahead of them is seven years of tribulation, out of which he will bring a Jewish remnant." [emphases added] Whaddya mean by redeemed? And what's a remnant? God only knows.

Nor are all members of the coalition in tune with the we-don't blame-Islam White House line. While Bush has showcased his visits to mosques and he and his aides have gone out of their way to stress that our fight is not with Islam per se, some of his adherents are less circumspect. "I think Muhammad was a terrorist," the Rev. Jerry Falwell told a 60 Minutes audience in October. "Islam as a whole is evil," said the Rev. Franklin Graham at the National Prayer Service in Washington in November. Graham (son of Billy) spoke at Bush's inauguration. Howard Davis of the United Church of God provides a more nuanced perspective. Even as he reclaimed Jerusalem after the First Crusade, Davis writes, "Saladin was amazingly merciful, in dramatic contrast to the Crusaders of the previous century." More representative of evangelical web opinion is Randall Price, who writes, "[D]espite the U.S. administration's desire to separate the religion of Islam from the tactic of terrorism, the religion of Islam is the common denominator for all the groups with which we are at war."

Add to this those troublesome messages from "old church" prelates. Start with the pope and his tiresome remonstrances about a "religious catastrophe" and stubborn refusal to christen the Iraq incursion a "just war." Small wonder that some bible web sites devote lengthy sections to the apostasies of Rome and its errant vicars. "The Catholic Church has all too often been at the center of the 1,400-year-old struggle between Islam and Christianity," avers one such critic darkly.

If these doctrinal disputes weren't enough to clog the celestial pipelines, across the country Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Hindu religious leaders have gathered to pray for, of all things, peace. Back to you, God.

How FEMA Fought the Future

info@reason.com (Jodie T. Allen) — Tue, 01 Dec 1998 00:00:00 EST

When a Federal Emergency Management Agency spokesman refused last June to release an agency memorandum refuting charges that FEMA was in league with aliens, it came as no surprise to conspiracists. To be sure, the charge had only the plot of a just-released movie (The X-Files: Fight the Future) as its basis, but such involvement would certainly be in character for a federal agency whose fleet of black helicopters is supposedly spotted all the time chasing UFOs in and out of caverns in Arizona.

After all, as Timothy McVeigh's erstwhile buddy, Michael Fortier, used to note in the flyers he handed out at the True Value hardware store in Kingman, FEMA is poised to run the country. At least it is once the United Nations has taken complete control and imposed its "New World Order" (you know, the one that the Trilateral Commission has long been developing in concert with the Council on Foreign Relations).

For a long time, FEMA cleverly hid its plans under a cover of incompetence. In the 1980s, for example, when Ronald Reagan revived the idea of fighting and winning a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, FEMA proposed to evacuate two-thirds of the population to rural areas--a plan that depended only upon the Soviets obligingly assuring us of a full week's notice before attacking. To raise morale among the dubious, the agency put out the good word that food should be no problem in the post-nuclear environment, inasmuch as livestock were far more likely to survive than people.

If called upon to respond to more-mundane threats--floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, and the like--the agency became famous for dealing slowly, incompetently, and even rudely with the disaster-struck communities seeking federal help.

Meanwhile, FEMA provided safe haven for out-of-work pols and other holders of political chits. When Bill Clinton first came to Washington wanting to do something nice for Raymond L. (Buddy) Young, the former head of his Arkansas security detail, he gave him a $92,300-a-year job as director of FEMA's regional office in Texas. And when Young--and later Clinton himself--phoned one of the Arkansas troopers who had been spilling tales of the president's dalliances to the Los Angeles Times, the trooper reportedly said that Clinton offered him a FEMA job too.

Finally, however, when the agency's stumblebum reputation grew so bad as actually to threaten its multibillion-dollar budget, FEMA decided it had better pay more attention to its cover mission. In recent years the agency has responded competently to a record number of natural disasters (a coincidence?). Meanwhile, using the 1993 World Trade Center bombing (and later the Oklahoma City bombing) as justification, the agency has beefed up its capability to deal with chemical weapons, biological agents, and other nonnatural threats. As The Washington Post reported in April 1995, FEMA has held secret planning and training exercises in communities around the country, ostensibly in anticipation of further acts of foreign and domestic terrorism.

But the militia of cyberspace is not fooled. When FEMA announced an evacuation exercise in New Mexico two years ago, one Web site (www.iahushua. com/WOI/FEMA2.html) warned that should a real emergency be declared, "FEMA will...FORCE and escort ALL residents to `safety zones.'...You will be required to leave your front door unlocked as you leave." And why would FEMA do that? "Folks might want to ask themselves one question, What is the only thing in the world that stands in the way of the full implementation of a worldwide socialistic central corporate government (NOW) and eliminating every trace of Sovereignty and Americanism in existence. OUR WEAPONS--OF COURSE....This is what they have been practicing for when all the brain dead sheeple were telling us that we did not know what we were talking about."

Of course, most of us know better than that. Or do we?

In fact, FEMA and its predecessor agencies have been planning to take over the U.S. economy for many decades. I know. I was part of the planning effort.

Not many people remember, but FEMA has an ancestry of Pynchonesque intrigue and complexity. Its roots trace back to the World War II Office of Defense Mobilization, an Executive Office agency charged with galvanizing the resources of the civilian economy to support the crash war effort. Working with a small group of economists and operation researchers in the Defense Department and supportive think tanks, the ODM began to develop models of the U.S. economy that would facilitate its command and control in emergency situations.

After the war ended, the Eisenhower administration sent the Pentagon modelers packing based on the not-incorrect notion that their planning efforts smacked of socialism. But the ODM planners got a new lease on life through a merger with the Federal Civil Defense Administration, a ragtag agency newly charged with the impossible job of protecting the civilian population in the event of a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union.

The resulting Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization suffered from an imperfect melding of its plebeian FCDA and more-aristocratic ODM ancestries. Nonetheless, aided by a physically massive (if, by modern standards, pitifully feeble) computer operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and housed in a "hardened" site under a Virginia mountain, OCDM set to work developing huge files on the country's industrial, agricultural, transportation, and communication resources. With the help of a venerable think tank, the National Planning Association, it also continued development of a huge time-phased input/output model of the U.S. economy that was meant to assist the government in reconstituting the civilian economy in the wake of a devastating nuclear attack.

First as an intern, then as a government employee, and later as a think tank researcher, I conspired on all aspects of this 1960s planning effort. Though it didn't occur to me much at the time, we were indeed planning to "take over" the country, in a manner of speaking. I can't say that we gave any thought to working with the U.N.--we were too busy coping with the simulated mess at home to worry about establishing any new world orders. Our intentions were ultimately benign. But we certainly did intend to make the trains--and much else--run according to our timetables. And our intentions might easily be misconstrued.

One model component that I refined and programmed, for example, sought to maximize the growth rate of livestock herds until they reached a "level-off" magnitude sufficient to support a reasonably varied and nutritious diet for the surviving humans. (This was fairly easy in the event of a "counterforce" attack pattern in which the Soviets primarily targeted our own ICBMs and SAC bases, employing "air bursts" that maximized the radius of destruction but minimized secondary radioactive fallout spread. Far messier were "ground strike" patterns aimed at urban centers. These tended to leave bunches of slowly dying humans as well as livestock with which to contend.)

As it turned out, maximizing long-run herd growth did not consign the human population to short-run vegetarianism. In fact it required a fairly vigorous culling of young males. Only a small number of male animals are needed to service the females, and the rest not only consume a great deal of scarce feed but tend to engage in behavior disruptive to the harmonious functioning of the herd. (This holds true for all types of herds.) And while we never, ever once even considered applying the rule to reconstituting the human population, when you build models like that, who knows to what uses they might be applied by less scrupulous practitioners?

That we never got to try out our dirigiste models is surely no cause for regret by the larger population. In the 1970s, OCDM, having first been transferred to the Defense Department, was ultimately reconstituted as FEMA with a primarily non-nuclear emergency management mission. I do not know if our old models are still refined and maintained in working order by any remnant of FEMA or the Pentagon.

But OCDM's planning efforts were not totally without consequence. The networking weaknesses the planning efforts revealed provided justification for construction of the federal "defense highway" system begun during the Eisenhower administration. They also hastened the rerouting of long-distance telephone lines around major urban areas--and ultimately to the long-line system undergirding today's Internet. And as part of this and other defense planning efforts, contractors developed a host of technologies--video display terminals, electronic printers, remote data links, digitalized photography, innumerable computer design and programming techniques, etc.--that ultimately, if slowly, found their way into the civilian sector.

You may well find it preposterous (as I do) that FEMA aims to operate a secret government that will seize control of the country and its economy. But remember: It's not for lack of planning.

Quota Quote

info@reason.com (Jodie T. Allen) — Sat, 01 Aug 1998 00:00:00 EDT

When Los Angeles Times publisher Mark Willes recently announced that he was going to grade his editors and reporters on the number of quotes from women and minorities that they included in their stories, not everyone reacted in the proper spirit. If any editor told him to add quotes to a story simply to achieve an appropriate gender/race/ethnicity mix, "I would tell that editor to go to hell," one reporter told the publisher.

Some observers have misunderstood this remark to mean that the reporter objected to the spirit of the enterprise, that his fixation on facts and commentary directly relevant to a story had blinded him to the larger social function, the contribution to inclusive diversity, that newspaper articles can serve. Others surmised that some quote suppliers, laboring under the misapprehension that their remarks were sought for their intrinsic value, might be displeased to find they were filling a demographically labeled box.

But these critics are missing the real point. What bothered the reporter--and the many others at the Times who voiced similar concerns--is surely the fear that doing full justice to the demographic multidimensionality of quotees would absorb many scarce column inches. After all, when it comes to identifying people, what's in a name, as Shakespeare so presciently remarked? President Clinton has gotten scant credit for appointing Ambassador Bill Richardson to high office despite his maternal Hispanicity. We can't all be lucky enough to be named Geraldo Rivera.

Consider, for example, a recent front-page article in the L.A. Times describing the rise of Charlotte, N.C., to second-largest banking center in America. Variously cited are a bunch of local businessmen, bankers, and urban experts with names like Carroll Gray, Hugh McCall, and Edward Crutchfield. On the face of it, only one citee, a bank official named Carlos Evans, might score a publisher's point. Yet who knows what mosaic of ethnicities, religious affiliations and migratory impulses might be hidden behind a name such as Winchell Cross (as we shall dub one of the cited experts for purposes of illustration)? Full justice might, one imagines, require a reporter to write: " 'Most banks are run by faceless MBAs,' said Winchell Cross, director of the Urban Research Center, an Anglo-Franco-Irish-Italo-nonevangelical-Protestant-with-Catholic-antecedents-American whose predominantly Chinese wife has some Tatar and Burmese ancestry."

Well, obviously that's not going to work. And it's certainly not going to fit on a business card. What is needed is a compact notation that will allow full and precise display to the unique parameters of each and every giver of good quote.

A new software package QUOTA QUOTE&tm; provides the solution. Easily installed into any newspaper, magazine or personal word processing system, it allows reporters and their editors to describe respondents by assigning appropriate values to the superscripts and subscripts in the following expression (note that the coded categories are meant to be illustrative not definitive, so no offense should be inferred from the failure to specify the appropriate values for every reader):

Name^{A,C,Cs,F,G,O,P,R,Ry,S,Sp}

where the superscripts are specified as follows:

A denotes age (1 = one of the nation's children; 2 = teenager; 3 = Gen-X; 4 = aging boomer/soccer mom; 5 = older worker; 6 = senior citizen; 7 = frail elderly; 8 = death bed)

C denotes color (absent sunning) (1 = black; 2 = tan; 3 = yellow; 4 = white)

Cs denotes color of spouse (defined as for C)

F denotes food preferences (1 = omnivore; 2 = vegetarian; 3 = vegan; 4 = kosher; 5 = lactose intolerant, etc.)

G denotes gender (1 = female; 2 = male; 3 = transgendered)

O denotes sexual orientation (1 = straight; 2 = gay or lesbian; 3 = bi; 4 = other)

P denotes political orientation (1 = Democrat, old; 2 = Democrat, new; 3 = Republican, Rockefeller; 4 = Republican, Reaganite; 5 = Republican, religious right; 6 = Republican, Buchananite; 7 = libertarian; 8 = nonaligned)

R denotes current religion (1 = Muslim; 2 = Catholic; 3 = Protestant evangelical; 4 = Protestant other; 5 = Jewish; 6 = Mormon; 7 = Hindu; 8 = agnostic; 9 = atheist; 9 = animist; 10 = Scientologist; 11 = whatever)

Ry denotes religion of youth (defined as for R)

S denotes socioeconomic status (1 = underclass; 2 = welfare class; 3 = working poor; 4 = lower-middle; 5 = genteel poverty; 6 = middle American; 7 = yuppie; 8 = Range Rover rich; 9 = Learjet rich

Sp denotes socioeconomic class of parents (1 = lower; 2 = higher; 3 = same)

The subscripts (reserved for the important dimensions of ethnicity and geographical distribution) are given as:

Geo denotes geographic residence (in some instances, broad geographic region--Northeast, Midwest, etc.--may suffice. In others cases, recourse may be had to the two-letter state postal codes.)

N denotes current nationality (1 = U.S.; 2 = Central American; 3 = South American; 4 = Canadian; 5 = Northern European; 6 = Southern European; 7 = North African; 8 = Central African; 9 = Asian; 10 = Pacific Islander, etc.)

Nb denotes nationality at birth (defined as for N)

E1 denotes predominant ethnicity--where no ethnicity dominates, specify as the predominant ethnicity of the mother [See Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups for a useful guide from which a three-digit coding system (from 001 = Acadian to 115 = Zoroastrian) may be readily constructed.]

E2...n denote other ethnic antecedents in declining order of importance, where n assumes (for computational efficiency) a maximum value of 5 and unspecified ethnicities are coded as 00Esk (where k = 1,m ) denotes ethnicity of spouse or significant other defined as for E, and m has a maximum value of 3.

Applying QUOTA QUOTE&tm; to the illustration above produces the parsimonious but revealing: "Most banks are run by faceless MBAs," said Winchell Cross^{4,4,3,2,2,1,2,4,2,7,1}

Once a document is specified, QUOTA QUOTE&tm; will automatically score the document using a five-dimensional matrix of weights specified by editors to represent the relative importance of certain types of classifications (typically age, sexual orientation, political affiliation, and primary and secondary ethnicity--though these also may be specified as parameters for a given application) to their publications in general or to a particular story. Thus, in Miami, extra credit may be given for a Cuban citation, whereas in Alaska an Aleut will score higher. Stories with high emotional content will, of course, be scored high for quotes from females (another Willes dictum), while those dealing with nuclear throw weights or numbers in general will get extra points for male commentary, etc.

Scores can be posted at the end of articles for the convenience of both editors and readers, thereby sparing them the need to read the main body of the article in order to assess its importance. After all, it doesn't really matter what people think or say. What matters is who they are.