title: “Under Fire” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-08” author: “Daniel Kilgore”
title: “Under Fire” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-25” author: “Shelby Webster”
If it has, it’s because of tragedies like the one last week at Heritage High School in Conyers, Ga., a suburb in the piney woods east of Atlanta. This was no Columbine: far less bloody, but somehow almost as sad. On the morning of the seniors’ last day of class, a 15-year-old identified by fellow students as Thomas J. Solomon Jr.–a church-going Boy Scout apparently despondent over a shattered romance–walked into the school’s commons room before the morning bell. Students say he opened fire with a .22-caliber rifle and a .357 magnum revolver. After wounding six schoolmates (none fatally), he retreated to a lawn near the school’s entrance. He placed the Magnum barrel in his mouth, but didn’t pull the trigger. A few moments later “T.J.” was approached by Cecil T. Brinkley, the grandfatherly assistant principal. “Give me the gun,” the man said. The boy did, and they embraced. “I’m so scared; I’m so scared,” T.J. said.
Little about the boy or the guns he’d used was equivalent to the grisly horror in Colorado last month. Solomon, who was to remain over the weekend in police custody, seemed to be no outcast, but a pleasant-faced member of ROTC who had rebelled only to the point of smoking cigarettes and wearing baggy jeans. Police seized his computer, but there was no evidence of any cult involvement. A classmate told high-school authorities months ago that Solomon had taken a gun to school, but, NEWSWEEK learned, officials could find no proof that he had done so.
And it’s doubtful whether any new law Congress passes now–or could think of passing–would have stopped T.J. from getting the guns he used. The firearms in his home were kept by his stepfather locked in a basement cabinet. Solomon evidently pried it open. The guns weren’t obtained in illicit gun-show purchases, police said, but were legal and registered. The magnum is a deadly piece, but his main weapon at school–the .22-caliber rifle–is hardly a murder machine. It’s the most prosaic and widely used firearm, the kind that even city kids learn to use at summer camp and that even ardent gun controllers would be loath to restrict.
Nevertheless, after Columbine and now after Conyers, it’s clear where the politics of guns is headed: toward new federal laws restricting the sale and possession of firearms. “Outside the Beltway the public is on our side,” said Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the NRA. “But back in Washington, there’s a full feeding frenzy going on.”
It began in earnest last week. In a dramatic vote in the Senate, Vice President Al Gore broke a 50-50 tie to pass legislation requiring background checks on sales at gun shows and the sale of safety locks or secure containers with new handguns. This week Democrats in the House will agitate for more, including a ban on the possession of all handguns by minors. GOP leaders concede that some new measures probably will pass, perhaps next month. They wanted to forestall consideration of them until after the Memorial Day recess, but Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt, working closely with the White House, refused to go along. So expect a blizzard of gun-control amendments to be discussed this week. Votes will come later. Gephardt will attempt to pass them–or (just as good from the Democrats’ political point of view) blame the Republicans for failing to.
Emboldened, Democrats think they have found a new “wedge” issue with which to divide and enfeeble their GOP foes. Republicans rose to power in the Reagan years by the shrewd use of such issues, which force the other side to defend (or quash) the most loyal but also most extremist parts of their alliance. The GOP compelled the Democrats to answer for the excesses of civil libertarians, death-penalty opponents, defenders of traditional welfare programs and racial-quota advocates.
Now the Democrats think they can do the same thing. Big Tobacco, which has become a mainstay of GOP funding, has long been on their list. Now Democrats have added Big Guns. (Next: Big HMOs.) In all three, the tactics of attack are the same. File lawsuits to establish legal liability. Unearth damning, insider allegations of the industry’s deadly negligence. Follow up with legislative proposals.
There are also deeper cultural changes at work in the shifting politics of guns, as even some firearms advocates concede. There are more than 200 million guns in America and 70 million Americans who own them. But with the end of the military draft and a generation of relative peace, a dwindling number of Americans have any hands-on familiarity with guns and ammo. Suburban sprawl has made it harder for city people to get to the country, let alone do any hunting, says Craig Shirley, a consultant to the NRA. And the recent school shootings touched a deeper chord of disquiet in the American soul, says GOP polltaker Frank Luntz. “Every parent is afraid for their kids and every kid is afraid for themselves,” he said. “Once in a while an issue comes along that makes people look inward at who we are and what we have become. This is one.”
The poll numbers seem to reflect an accumulation of such forces–and the effects of events like Columbine. In the latest Pew Center poll, voters were asked whether they thought it was more important to “protect the right of Americans to own guns,” or “control gun ownership.” By a 35 point margin (65-30 percent), voters chose control. Asked the same question six years ago, voters chose “control” by only a 23 percent margin (57-34). The numbers are even more dramatic among women, who chose gun control over gun rights by a 3-1 margin.
For Democrats, the gun-control frenzy is having its intended effect: Republican pols are beginning to fight each other. Among GOP presidential contenders, Elizabeth Dole struck first, staking out a relatively strong pro-control position a month ago. Last weekend she said she would support the bill the Senate passed, even though the NRA’s LaPierre says it would lead to “a whole telephone book’s worth of new regulations” and an unprecedented federal computer list of “honest citizens” who purchase weapons at gun shows. Dole wasn’t moved. “The Senate did the right thing,” she said. Then she took a dig at Gov. George W. Bush of Texas, the GOP front runner. “Leadership,” Dole told the Georgia State Republican convention, “requires more than sitting on a front porch measuring the direction the gunsmoke is blowing.”
Bush, in fact, supports background checks through federal data banks and mandatory safety locks. But he declined to endorse the Senate bill, his aides arguing that it contained too much regulation and didn’t attack what he regards as the main problem: lax enforcement of existing laws that punish those who commit crimes with guns. Bush this week will sign a new Texas law cracking down on juvenile offenders who use guns.
While the politicians argue, there are other signs of changing times. In one of his monologues last week, conservative radio guru Rush Limbaugh bemoaned the fate of the Second Amendment. Citing a column by John Podhoretz, Limbaugh worried aloud that the school shootings will do for guns what the “passive smoking” issue did for tobacco: create a vast new class of angry potential victims. On TV, talk-show host Rosie O’Donnell attacked Tom Selleck, who is featured in current NRA ads. The former star of “Magnum PI” withered under the assault, slumping in his chair and pleading that he wasn’t a paid advocate of the gun lobby.
There was plenty of hypocrisy along with the righteous indignation. O’Donnell shills for Kmart, one of the nation’s largest gun sellers. Gore, when he was a Tennessee senator, voted against a number of gun-control measures in 1985 and 1990. Now that he is running for president–and facing a challenge from Bill Bradley, a more single-minded advocate of gun control–Gore isn’t about to mention those old votes. Neither is Clinton, who praised Gore for his tie-breaking “turning point” vote last week. It may not have been a “turning point” in terms of public safety. But it clearly was one in the battle for political high ground.
title: “Under Fire” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-11” author: “Margaret Wallin”
Putrajaya will be remembered as the crowning achievement of Mahathir’s 18-year reign or, perhaps, as the bunker where he made his last stand. In an interview with NEWSWEEK, Mahathir seems serene in the belief that he has survived the last test–his one-man battle against the worst financial crisis to strike Asia since World War II. While collapsing currencies “humiliated” rulers and tycoons across the region, Mahathir says, he attacked. He denounced the “colonial” Western powers exploiting the crisis to “take control” of Asia, and shut off his nation to currency trading. If his attackers cast him as a dictator stuck in racial politics of the past, defying the modern global market, so be it. He says he can hold off the money traders with currency controls “indefinitely.” At 74, he has not completed his lifelong mission to lift the Malay sons of the soil, or bumiputras, above their oppressors, whether they be American and European financiers or Chinese businessmen at home. “Sure, it’s been difficult” these past two years, he says. “The most difficult part is trying to manage the economy, when I’m not in control. In my country, I’m in control. In politics, I’m in control.”
Now, the next test. With all of Southeast Asia recovering, lifting the Malaysian economy with it, Mahathir is widely expected to call elections as early as next month. He is already out campaigning, delivering a stump speech that echoes his firebrand nationalism from the 1960s, when he hectored fellow Malays to toss off their colonial reputation as “nature’s gentlemen” and seize Malaysia’s wealth from the British and Chinese. He lectures Malays to be “grateful” for all that he and the ruling United Malay National Organization have done to raise their share of national wealth from 2 to 30 percent, and to save them from “foreign powers.” Everywhere, he invokes the specter of 1969, when the largely Chinese opposition denied UMNO its customary two-thirds majority in Parliament–and Malays vented their rage on celebrating Chinese in a Kuala Lumpur bloodbath. The leader of the Chinese opposition, then and now, Lim Kit Siang, says “Mahathir’s subliminal message is that there will be racial violence again if he isn’t returned by a two-thirds majority.”
For the first time in years, Mahathir could lose. No one had the power to stand up to Mahathir until he sacked his designated successor, Anwar Ibrahim, at the height of the economic crisis last September, then threw him in jail on charges of covering up a homosexual relationship with his chauffeur. Anwar was convicted of the cover-up in Asia’s “trial of the century,” during which police admitted “turning witnesses,” and jailers gave Anwar a nasty black eye. “You couldn’t find characters out of Central Casting to make the judiciary look more ridiculous,” says a Western diplomat. Now facing a second trial for sexual misconduct, Anwar is fighting back from his prison cell, issuing a stream of reports accusing Mahathir of enriching and protecting business cronies, lavishing more than $50 million on the new “palace.” As former Finance minister, his revelations carry a certain weight. Mahathir’s angry rebuttal–that Anwar had his own cronies and stole state secrets–only strengthens the growing sense that the lid is coming off Malaysia Inc.
The campaign is shaping up as a referendum on Mahathir. Even those who see Anwar as a younger, slicker version of his mentor are flocking to opposition parties, which are registering new members at a rate of more than 10,000 per week. Led by the Justice Party of Anwar’s wife, Azizah, the fractured opposition (box) is calling for abolition of colonial-era security laws and Special Branch secret police. They want reform of cronyism, of the judiciary and of an electoral system that, they say, still allows UMNO to marshal soldiers and their wives, even phantoms and the dead, to cast votes for the ruling party. In the countryside, UMNO is a “one-stop shop” offering everything from student loans to funeral arrangements, and civil servants “educate” villagers about the ruling party’s good deeds. Against those odds, the surging opposition probably can’t win. But they might deny Mahathir the two-thirds majority he has used, in the past, to pass constitutional amendments sidelining Malay sultans and other challengers. It would be a crippling blow to Malaysia Inc.
BEFORE THE ANWAR affair, Malaysians had largely assumed that their prospering country was growing more liberal as well. In Kuala Lumpur, or “KL,” a city of 1.5 million people and a tiny Malay elite, everyone knew that Mahathir and Anwar lived side by side in rambling Malay houses in leafy Daman-sara Heights. “We know our politicians intimately here,” says a KL theater director. “It’s like the whole country is Washington.”
It’s hard to overstate the shock last September when Mahathir, seizing on a poison-pen letter, went on TV to denounce his deputy. He used words, “anal intercourse” and “masturbation,” never publicly uttered in this Muslim nation. Malay offices, friends and even families split into Anwar and Mahathir camps, which will define this election. “KL is a small town, where maybe 2,000 people call the shots, and the police keep a book on everyone who matters,” says a Western diplomat. “Suddenly they realize that if this can happen to Anwar it can happen to anyone. That’s a fear they didn’t have before.”
Both sides warn that the campaign will be the dirtiest in Malaysian history, which is saying something. Opposition magazines and Web sites are proliferating, with some hysterically comparing Mahathir to the great tyrants of history. Ruling-party hacks are starting to toy with the Justice Party, says Azizah, pulling speaking permits at the last minute, even taking a potshot at the house of one party member or lighting a bonfire outside the home of another. The Special Branch, which a diplomat describes as “hunter-gatherers” of information for UMNO, hover around opposition rallies. “The police have to watch us, because others are watching them. That’s how Mahathir operates,” says Azizah. “But it’s not working. Even the police are starting to smile back when I wave.”
In this atmosphere of gamesmanship it’s difficult even for Mahathir to gauge true public sentiment. On a recent campaign trip to Anwar’s home territory of Permatang Pauh, he sounded genuinely appreciative of the large turnout, though most were UMNO loyalists bused in by party hacks to provide him a warm reception. That, anyway, is what locals said later. During his speech, Mahathir remarked to the crowd of 10,000 that at times he is beginning to feel “very isolated… very lonely” in his job. “Thank God,” he said, “the people still seem to support the government.”
It is commonplace to hear in KL that Mahathir has grown too large for Malaysia, certainly too powerful to be truly approachable. On a Sunday stroll through the stores of the Petronas Towers–the world’s tallest building and the most famous of his megaprojects–Mahathir stirs startled whispers of “There goes the P.M.!” Most keep a respectful distance. Three nervous teenage girls ask to pose for a picture, giggling, “We adore him!” They don’t care about the Anwar affair, but one 17-year-old boy says students are angry–and he marches up and tells the prime minister so. Mahathir responds with a wan smile, almost a grimace.
His hunter-gatherers appear to be feeding Mahathir information that makes the reform movement easy to dismiss. On the stump, he says he has discovered mounting evidence that Anwar had been secretly building a power base and conspiring with “foreign powers” to topple him. Anwar had embraced IMF-style reform, which Mahathir blames for igniting the riots that brought down Suharto in Indonesia. Aides call Anwar “a CIA agent.” As for the reform movement, Mahathir calls it an un-Malay rabble of ingrates, thugs and paid agents of Anwar’s plot. “You pay them a few cents, they are quite happy to protest,” he says.
Malaysians are less sure than ever what is allowed and what is not. For more than a decade, government censors have been granting the Instant Cafe Theatre in Kuala Lumpur permits for increasingly sardonic political reviews. Officials eager to demonstrate a “liberal” sense of humor have even invited the troop to international conferences in Kuala Lumpur, though they often complain afterward that this or that skit went too far. The troop has parodied Mahathir as the captain of the Titanic, hinted that he might soon go the way of Marcos and Suharto, and never gotten in real trouble. Now, however, locals are staying away, fearful that the cafe will be raided by police. “Even if I start talking politics at the dinner table, my relatives shoosh me,” says director Jo Kukathas. “What we want is a government that doesn’t condescend to us.”
The same fear grips the main-stream press. Since a 1989 crackdown on the largest English dailies, editors have hewed to Mahathir’s notion that reporters should help him develop the nation. Papers that violate the unwritten rules of “developmental journalism” risk losing their operating permits. “We know what he doesn’t like,” says a top national editor, noting that there is “definitely” a ban on publishing photos of the new palace. But is there? “You can’t hide a house that big,” says Mahathir, giving the green light (above photo). “People go around trying to figure out what I like, then trying to do what they think I like. Even simple things. But they’ve got me wrong. They’ve got me wrong.”
Mahathir is from the poor provincial capital of Kedah, where he once worked as a banana seller in the wet market before putting himself through medical school. He made his controversial name in politics with pseudoscientific attacks on Malay sloth and indigence, and with calls on his countrymen to lift themselves up, as he had. He still sees himself as an authority on the Malay soul. On a recent campaign return to Kedah, aides warm up the crowd by boasting how his megaprojects had done Malays proud. Mahathir opens a new motorcycle factory, hands out bicycles to top local students. Then he denounces other youths, “brainwashed” by Anwar, who don’t appreciate UMNO loans and scholarships, who ridicule Putrajaya. “I don’t know what I have done to them,” he complains. “Islam teaches us to be grateful, but they are not grateful.” Off to the side, a group of young women in Islamic head scarves mutter that Kedah is still so poor, it’s time for Mahathir to retire.
Mahathir wants to protect his legacy first. After the fall of Suharto, he became the longest-standing ruler in Asia, and he seems haunted by comparisons to the Indonesian kleptocracy and its billionaire leading family. Leaning forward in his office chair, he insists that Putrajaya is for Malaysia, not for him, and that while people shower him with cars and gifts, all go into a state museum on the resort island of Langkawi. He says his salary is about $4,000 a year. Whenever a deal involving one of his three children comes before the cabinet, says Mahathir, he recuses himself. Besides, he says, his children are not merely collecting rents from national monopolies. “They are not idiots, they are doing real business,” he says.
His family is ready to defend Malaysia Inc., too. Mahathir’s second son, Mokhzani, invites us to high tea at Carcosa, a luxury Kuala Lumpur hotel that is the former residence of the British high commissioner. The setting itself helps explain some of his father’s anticolonial bitterness. Perched amid 40-acre gardens on a high hill overlooking the Parliament, Carcosa was a standing reminder of how the British “lorded it over” the Malays. In 1986, the prime minister offered the British what Mokhzani calls “a deal they couldn’t refuse,” and took it away.
At the same time UMNO’s campaign to take back national wealth from the British and Chinese was getting into high gear, and Mokhzani was one of the Malay businessmen who won a privatization contract–not, he points out, a free national monopoly, like Suharto’s children got. Now 38, Mokhzani makes a quick calculation in his head and figures his net worth at $60 million, mainly from a hospital-supply contract for the southern provinces of Malaysia. “Someone once said my father should get whatever he wants, for all he has done for the country,” says Mokhzani. “He is dragging Malays into the next century.”
At his inner sanctum in Putrajaya, Mahathir has regained control of the economy from the latter-day Western “colonialists,” and is confident he can micromanage Malaysia Inc. Every day, he says, he meets with his National Economic Action Council, studying numbers. Car sales. Motorcycle sales. Bank reserves. “Everything. Every day,” he says. “We sit down at that table in this office, and we do everything.” OK, say housing sales are weak: Mahathir summons the builders, bankers, lawyers. They choose models, sales incentives and, for “one whole month, throughout the country, we sell houses. If we recover, it is not by accident, it is by design. To run a country, you have to know everything that is going on.”
Building Putrajaya despite the financial crisis confirms that one man can triumph over global markets, over the so-called free-market experts. Or so Mahathir sees it. He hopes to rekindle all the Malay-pride projects slowed or stalled by the Asian crisis, including the world’s longest building, the world’s longest bridge and Cyberjaya, a Malaysian Silicon Valley also carved out of the palm plantations. It could all happen, unless, of course, Mahathir is surprised at the polls by the opposition, which wants to cancel megaprojects as too grand. “They say Rome was not built in a day, but Putrajaya was, and at a time when people were going hungry,” says a spokesman for the Muslim opposition party PAS. They promise to sell the palace to the highest bidder, even if it’s one of those Western colonial powers.
