Dateline — Washington, D.C.

Garment makers join opposition to anti-desecration amendment

AS the Senate prepares to pass the first constitutional amendment altering the Bill of Rights, lobbyists for the clothing and manufacturing industries are putting their political muscle behind efforts to scuttle the measure. The proposed amendment would exempt flag burning from the First Amendment free speech protections.

Last week the House of Representatives approved the bill that would overturn a 1989 Supreme Court ruling that laws prohibiting desecrating the American flag are unconstitutional infringements on free speech.

Two-thirds of the Senate must approve the measure for it to pass. The body voted down a similar law in 1995. With 67 senators already declaring support for the monumental amendment, a preliminary head count suggests that the bill will narrowly pass.

As the final vote nears, free speech advocates are concentrating their efforts on a handful of possible swing voters. Only one senator need withdraw support from the amendment for it to be defeated.

Contrary to early indications, the opposition may be able to derail the passage. In a remarkable last-minute bid, the American Apparel Manufacturers Association has joined the ACLU and other free speech lobbies opposing the amendment.

The AAMA, whose members produce 85 percent of the clothing sold in the United States, objects to the wording of the proposed amendment, which it claims would effectively outlaw clothing that incorporates the flag. The trade association contends that the amendment would force retailers to remove thousands of products, from flag-themed ties to Tommy Hilfiger shirts, from department-store shelves.

The complete text of the proposed amendment reads, “The Congress shall have power to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States.” It is the emphasis on “physical desecration” that alarms retail groups like the AAMA. Whereas immaterial representations of the flag, such as print ads, are not proscribed by the amendment, objects imprinted with a flag design could technically be subject to government regulation.

“One man’s patriotic bow tie is another man’s desecration of the flag,” AAMA government relations liaison Stephen Lamar says. “When you look past the catchy rhetoric, it’s like telling the ice cream industry not to make the Neapolitan flavor.”

But Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-Calif), says the AAMA’s fears are unfounded.

“A flag is not a flag if it’s on a towel,” Cunningham says. “This bill will not hamstring America’s commercial interests.”

AAMA spokesperson Lamar disagrees: “And if a flag is used as a towel, that’s desecration? We’re in pretty murky legal waters here.”

Many legal analysts echo the AAMA’s concerns about ambiguities in the anti-flag desecration amendment. Margaret Casillas, a lawyer and Harvard Business School professor, stresses that the risk of rights infringement is magnified because the legislation in question is not a single law but rather a permanent alteration of the U.S. Constitution.

That alteration could be a harbinger of greater limits upon the freedom of speech. In legal terms, a product can be the equivalent of an idea and thus enjoys First Amendment protection. Asserts Casillas, “Most people experience the marketplace of ideas very literally. Now the flag is one such idea. And if the flag is meaningful, it invites a multiplicity of interpretations and, in this case, uses – even as a handkerchief.”

Dateline — Berkeley

Popular new book on homelessness blurs the line between fact and fiction

The lines in Stephen Mecklin’s face are carved deep. When he smiles, which is often, they outline his piercing blue eyes with impressive arcs. Judging from his gray hair, clipped speech, and stooped posture, one would guess that Mecklin is fast approaching retirement age. But appearances can be deceiving.

At 32, Mecklin is relatively young for a best-selling author, but close to the average age for Americans who are homeless. A self-described “veteran of the streets,” Mecklin says he ran away from his home in Missouri when he was 16 and spent the next decade traveling through northern California, camping under freeway overpasses, bathing inside fast-food restaurant bathrooms and foraging through Dumpsters for something to eat.

Throughout these years of extreme poverty, Mecklin continued to write in his journal, a habit he says he began at the age of nine. He made detailed notes of his day-to-day life and even managed to write lengthy reflections on his psychological state. Eventually, Mecklin’s entries filled more than 27 notebooks, which he turned over to a volunteer in a homeless shelter in the spring of 1998.

This counselor was Alex Keith, a recent graduate of Brown University and at the time an acquisitions editor at the Berkeley-based publishing house Ten Speed Press. Keith took the notebooks home and was astonished to discover a highly coherent and sophisticated narrative unfolding on the meticulously handwritten pages. After reading the complete series of 27 spiral-bound volumes, the young editor was convinced that Mecklin’s writings, while fragmentary, constituted a brilliant and quite possibly important literary work.

“It was Norman O. Brown meets James Agee, Henry Miller meets Hannah Arendt,” recalls Keith. The editor subsequently took Mecklin into his own home where together they fashioned the manuscript that would eventually become a best-selling book about the homeless condition.

Within six months, the editor had quit his job at the small Ten Speed and secured from Random House a position for himself and a sizable advance for his no-longer-homeless friend. Mecklin’s autobiographical account of his experiences as a homeless person was released just in time for the 1998 Christmas buying season. Being Nowhere quickly shot to the top of the nonfiction best-seller lists as a result of glowing reviews and powerful word-of-mouth endorsements.

“Being Nowhere, a watershed book, is to the homeless of the 1990s what Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man was to Blacks in the 1950s,” a critic for the Atlantic Monthly went so far as to assert. “Surely destined to become an American classic,” wrote Mitchell Cockatan in the New York Times Book Review.

“Never, not once did I think it would happen” says Mecklin, who today lives in a modest apartment a few miles south of the UC Berkeley campus. “I pinch myself to prove that I’m still me and that this isn’t some dream someone else is having about me.”

That remark, made in an interview last February with the Chicago Sun-Times, has proved to be far more prescient than Mecklin perhaps intended. For as the best-selling author’s personal fame has grown, so have concerns about the authenticity of his first-person account. As it turns out, Mecklin is not the only one looking to prove that he is who he says he is.

A woman identifying herself as the author’s former landlord came forward in March and suggested that for a three-year period in the early 1990s Mecklin lived in a government-subsidized efficiency apartment near Lodi. At least two witnesses have surfaced claiming to have lived in a state-run residential psychiatric facility with Mecklin in 1988. And many of the critics who once offered his book unqualified praise are now urging Random House to reclassify the work as fiction.

“Stephen may have found himself between homes from time to time, but he had a knack for getting into government-funded programs,” intimates Blue Heiland, a social worker at Valencia House, the shelter where Keith discovered Mecklin in 1998. “I’m not saying that everything in the book is a lie, but I’d say Stephen was as delusional as he was brilliant. Still, he’s done a lot to bring attention to the problems of homelessness irregardless of his own status.”

Mecklin, for his part, has refused to comment publicly on the controversy surrounding Being Nowhere saying that the book is “true to itself.” Indeed the public may agree with Mecklin if this month’s brisk sales figures are any indication. “There is no one way to define homelessness,” Mecklin declared last week in a lecture at Stanford University. “Many people must feel as homeless as I have felt or the book wouldn’t be such an unqualified success.”

Dateline–World News Update

California ballot initiative to convert prisons into colleges

Sacramento, Calif. – A ballot initiative that would convert nearly 10 percent of California’s state prisons into state university campuses by 2005 has been admitted into official circulation after gaining the requisite number of signatures. Nicknamed the “Seventh Inning Stretch” in reference to the state’s “Three Strikes” sentencing laws, the bill’s chief proponent, multimillionaire Frank Jacqua, argues that California’s future in the high-tech industry is being threatened by its growing dependence on prisons.

According to Jacqua, “The pastoral setting of some of our smaller sites like Chuckawalia and Mule Creek are better suited for education rather than incarceration … [and] when the taxpayers of California see what their kids are missing, it won’t take much convincing.” The initiative would also allot hundreds of millions in state funds annually for the rehabilitation of nonviolent felons. Opponents accuse Jacqua of grandstanding at the expense of California voters and suggest that the only purpose of the initiative is to advance the wealthy entrepreneur’s political career.

Florida-based coffee chain serves more than lattes

Jacksonville, Fla. – A new chain of Bohemian-style coffee shops is winning over patrons in Florida with trademarked rudeness. The cozy stands, called “BrewNose,” promise to serve the very best cappuccinos, lattes, and espressos with a twist: their cashiers are trained to pepper customers with snide comments or cool indifference and even refuse service on “special occasions.” The odd marketing gimmick began as an experiment by the chain’s cofounders, Beale and Jimmie Roberts.

After launching the first BrewNose stand in the parking lot of a Burdines mall, the siblings noticed that they had better luck with customers when they affected a “black on the inside, black on the outside” demeanor. The two began wearing black clothing and playing music tapes sent to them by a friend who lives in San Francisco. Yet it was their faux churlish manner that eventually earned them a reputation as the real thing. “The meaner we acted,” quips Beale Roberts, “the nicer they got. It was amazing.”

The success of their “Java jerk routine” surprised even the brothers, who went on to open up a second BrewNose only nine months later. They are about to open another BrewNose, their seventh in two years, in the state capital of Tallahassee. The Robertses are confident their unconventional formula for success will work in the university town. “We hired a very talented team of young female bikers,” says Jimmie, the elder of the brothers and a former Army paratrooper, “and we convinced them to cut their hair and dye it black. The best thing is they already had the tattoos.”

Public docking stations for mobile phones to provide privacy and enhanced connectivity

Jerusalem, Israel – An Israeli telecommunications firm says it will introduce booths for mobile phone users this summer. The “cell phone booths” will allow users to recharge their batteries, dock their phones into a keyboard and monitor station and, most importantly, create a sphere of privacy for important phone calls. Gertie Raney, spokesperson for RWR Industries, makers of “the Cell Shell,” predicts her company will have difficulty filling orders for the versatile device. “We’ve already received more than a thousand orders from restaurants and movie theaters,” Raney adds. In addition to its wired-in capabilities, the Cell Shell uses an advanced aerospace design to effectively mute all conversations that take place within its sleek confines. Constructed out of transparent fiberglass, the high-tech booth for mobile phone fanatics will be sold in Europe and the United States later this year.