Buddy, can you spare a minute? Greasing palms that rock the nation-cradle. Sapphic wisdom. That crazy Foucault. He can't say that! Words, words, words. Sighs of relief.

No. 59 April 23, 1997 Two Cents and worth it.

Buddy, can you spare a minute? . . . Young man asked me to buy him cigarettes. I was walking along on my way to work. It takes a whole village to raise him, so I said no. I was not a complete villager, however, because I did not stop to lecture him on the evils of tobacco.

Well . . . I was in a hurry. Yeah, that's it . . . I didn't have time. Lame, I know, but it's the best I can come up with. At least he didn't ask me to buy him a condom. No need to, of course, unless he's embarrassed to do it himself, and we child-raisers are working on that. Give us time.

Greasing palms that rock the nation-cradle . . . Breaking campaign fund-raising rules matters (a) because it's undemocratic: it says you need $ to be heard, when that's not the idea at all; (b) it costs taxpayers big because it leads to govt. subsidies for things like sugar, for which price supports cost us a Govt. Accounting Office — estimated $1.4 billion a year (Uncle Sugar here); (c) it corrupts donors not even seeking influence -- they are routinely offered favors; (d) it's getting out of hand.

Clinton advisor Dick Morris got him to start TV ads an unprecedented 16 months before the election, calling them Dem party "issues advocacy." The two parties' presidential-election fund-raising was up 73% this time, at $881 million. Next time: the first billion-dollar campaign. Meanwhile, the cost of congressional election is doubling in some places.

That's from a Gerald F. Seib column in the Wall St. Journal, 4/2. The Journal has editorialized against donation-limits as inhibiting freedom of speech, preferring wide publicity of those who give. In this view, hiding it would be the sin.

Sapphic wisdom . . . "Beauty is for the eyes and fades in a while/ But goodness is a beauty that lasts forever." Thus Sappho, translated by Guy Davenport in 7 Greeks (New Directions, 1995). A noble thought. She also told this woe-filled tale (keep in mind the translator uses current idiom): "You have come and done,/ And I was waiting for you/ To Temper the red desire/ That burned my heart." !!

That crazy Foucault . . . The last issue mentioned the French philosopher Michel Foucault as one who leaps to easy generalization. He's very fashionable, having revived Nietsche and Heidegger in the '70s on the English-speaking academic scene. He created a climate, was a sort of rain-maker, setting the agenda for research in the history of ideas and of institutions, with emphasis on asylums, prisons, and hospitals.

He focused on outcasts -- the insane and prisoners -- as key to understanding the world -- an "anti-historical historian," believing with Henry Ford that history is bunk and providing non-Marxist focus for radical feminists and homosexuals who didn't particularly identify with the working class anyhow.

His chief contribution to their causes was his rejection of universal norms, that bugaboo of the free and easy, restless under rules and regs. He favored local struggles over socialist revolution -- a sort of think-globally, act-locally approach.

Anything would do but a bourgeois existence -- limited, boundaried, ruled & regulated. Marxism was on the wane. In walked Foucault as the man of the decade or so, even if he did defend Ayatollah Khomeini's bloody purges of homosexuals and others. ("I don't care, I don't care, he's my kind of guy, funky and rebellious . . .")

He also had a useful motto for people who would rather talk than fight: "Theory is practice." (Boldly announce a contradiction and you win over 10% of any group.) Salons and saloons would do just fine for his kind of revolution.

He can't say that! . . . In 1966 Foucault -- no mean phrase-maker -- declared "the death of man," that is, of humanism or the humanistic philosophy, which put humans at the center of things, recognized them as doers with freedom and responsibility, like the basketball player who "makes things happen" by driving toward the basket to score or pass or be fouled.

Foucault rejected humanism, which seems to me at least as old as the ancient Greeks, and moreover declared it removed to the fringes of philosophical discussion. Bold fella.

Human autonomy (freedom to be you and me) is an illusion, he said. There's no freedom. No consciousness either. We don't know nothin', can't do nothin'. It's naive to think we decide things. People don't do things, the unconscious do. Unconscious rules!

So forget freedom (autonomy). Forget the world too. All we know are words, as structuralists say. Foucault shrugged off the structuralist tag, however. His "primacy of language" idea he got from Nietsche (1844-1900). By it Foucault means it's all arbitrary. Words are patterns imposed on chaos. There's no reflecting reality, no knowing the world, just words.

Words, words, words . . . Power therefore is to definers of words. What a deal for the clever. If you define, you rule. Hence the importance of those salons and saloons where the jabber-jabber happens. Foucault is or was a darling of the new radical intelligentsia of the '70s and '80s.

Sighs of relief on the Michigan bridge . . . Chicago Catholics dodged a bullet, it would seem, in view of its new archbishop being Francis George and not one of those whose names were floated. And the Vatican, or more especially its trusted legates here -- Cardinals O'Connor et al. -- hacked away at [undercut] its reputation for a heavy hand in such matters.

George is a Cub fan from birth, etc., which does help, but more important, he is apparently a protege of Thomas Murphy, the Chicago priest who once headed its priests' senate and now heads Seattle. For George to say he learned all he knows of being an archbishop from Murphy is to announce that Bernardin lives!

That's even to allow for Bernardin's being a country boy and from the semi-deep South at that, while George is deliciously urban. Bernardin surprised with his transparency. Where was the accustomed guard-up, the looking at you funny if you said something dumb? Not much of that from the late Joseph.

From the present Francis, however, we may expect a degree of cosmopolitanism. The world has been his oyster, as head man of a small but far-flung missionary congregation; so he's big enough for us.

As for those mentioned before he was announced, Murphy actually was among them, but only to be scoffed at — as what newspapers have to say — because there have to be funny papers too. To think the present pope would reinstall Bernardin was too much to consider, and Murphy was close enough to him -- had been placed in Seattle through his mediation in a sticky right-left confrontation -- to lead to such a conclusion.

Unlikely mentor . . . When Murphy headed the priests' senate, he joined two others, now-Bishop Tim Lyne and Fr. Jim Roache, Cody's press secretary, in complaining about me to Daryle Feldmeir and other Daily News editors. Feldmeir had me in with city editor Bob Schultz and one other to answer their charges of unfair coverage. Schultz afterwards congratulated me on what I had to say, and the case was more or less closed.

Much more recently I found Murphy much in a hurry at a bishops' meeting I was covering at Notre Dame. He was a bit nervous about me still, which I accept. Some people are nervous about other people, and some make others nervous. No matter. Murphy seems to have been good for Seattle, and I feel confident that George will be good for Chicago.

Gilbert to Wilde to Benny . . . Among "unkillable hymn-tunes" by the composer Sullivan, Gilbert's partner, is "Onward, Christian Soldiers." Sullivan has a following today, but not Gilbert, with all his "colossal verbal skill and prodigious industry," says reviewer X.J. Kennedy in the January, '97 New Criterion.

The two didn't get along, and each longed to do more serious work on his own. But they stayed together, bound by economics, or rather finances: Sullivan was supporting a mistress and Gilbert an expensive wife, yacht, and country estate. Neither could make as much money separately.

Gilbert the writer of comedy invented the straight face, setting the stage [!] for Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest." And Jack Benny, for that matter. As a dominant writer-director, he set the stage also for the dominating writer-director G.B. Shaw. He also sued people a lot, having been a barrister (lawyer) earlier.

The book under review was W.S. Gilbert: A Classic Victorian and His Theatre, by Jane W. Stedman (Oxford, $30), which the reviewer declared more reliable than Hesketh Pearson's 1957 biography but said it doesn't read as well and is long on trivia. For instance, Gilbert's widow doted on fresh fruit and had peaches sent her while on holiday from that sumptuous estate.

Gilbert had died well, trying to save a screaming teen-age girl. But he's the one who drowned; she'd been screaming though not in danger. That's not entertainment.