-Caveat Lector- he Age of Mars http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/03/opinion/03DOWD. html January 3, 2001 LIBERTIES By MAUREEN DOWD WASHINGTON Mommy's gone. Daddy's home. The nurturing, sharing, empathizing, self-examining, gossiping, bumping, grinding administration is leaving. The stern disciplinarians are on board. The "Let's figure out how we all feel about this" White House is over. The "We know what's best, follow our rules" White House is beginning. The lip-biting is over. The tight lips are here. We are losing a secretary of state who thinks flirting and dancing and strategic jewelry wearing are all valuable diplomatic skills. Now we will have a trio of presidential counselors including the secretary of state who hail from the macho world of the Pentagon. We will no longer have a president who is dying to know what we think and who is dying to tell us what he thinks, preferably at great length. Now we will have a president who thinks introspection is for sissies and justifying your actions is a nuisance. We are saying goodbye to a president, elected by women, who talked about What Women Want, who handed over large chunks of government to his wife, and who even read Deborah Tannen to see how to better communicate with women. We are saying hello to a president, elected by white men and absentee military ballots, who defended executions and guns and wants to beef up the military, and who reads about hurricanes and sports figures. We are going from Clinton Technicolor to Bush black- and-white. There is nothing about the government President- elect W. is putting together that feels the least bit modern. "The new administration is `Nick at Nite,' " cracked a Clinton White House official. "It feels so old, it's almost a kinescope." W. and Colin Powell were spotted at Morton's steak house digging into juicy porterhouses. Rummy Rumsfeld wants to revive the cold-war dream of a missile shield. Where is W.'s boomerness? Why is such a young president acting so atavistic? Our first boomer president and vice president tried so aggressively to be modern. There were gurus, facilitators, Blackberrys. But the second boomer president is doing everything he can to get the power out of boomers' hands and back into those of the gray generation between World War II and Vietnam. Bill Clinton was the first Age of Aquarius chief executive. But at Yale, W. was largely oblivious to the social upheaval of the 60's. He said he never liked the Beatles after they got into that "kind of a weird psychedelic period." W. is not a Renaissance Weekend guy. He's a Boca Grande guy. If Bill and Al tried too hard to be trendy, W. tries too hard not to be. He has a defiant anti-trendy streak, curling his lip at fads and fashions and the Clinton-Gore style of finger-in-the- wind. Despite the multi-gender, multicultural cast of some of his top appointments, and despite the relentless parade of women and ethnic entertainers at the Philadelphia convention and planned for the inaugural, his big choices the roomful of men he will rely on to tell him what to do reflect a bland, unadventurous adherence to tradition. His inner circle has a very mahogany-corporate- suite, musty-men's- club feel to it, an "I Like Ike" feel. When W. met the press with his choice for attorney general, John Ashcroft, before Christmas, he vividly showed how important it is to him that his White House be as leak- proof as the Skull & Bones "tomb." "When he gives me his legal advice," W. said of Mr. Ashcroft, "you won't know about it unless I tell you." In a little while he added: "Whatever counsel it is, I hope I don't read about it." And a little later he told his designee: "Just don't tell them what your advice is." W. is having the same two-day economic summit that Bill Clinton had before his administration began. But unlike Mr. Clinton who dazzled reporters and those who watched the forum on television Mr. Bush will discuss his prepackaged recession with business and Wall Street big shots in the privacy of the governor's mansion in Austin. The event will be closed to TV and the press. I can already tell that W.'s vexed answer, when he is asked to justify anything, will be identical to his father's: "If you're so smart, why aren't you president?" Just call it the drowning of the Age of Aquarius. The New York Times on the Web http://www.nytimes.com sno0wl <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! 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