(FORTUNE Magazine) – GREAT MOMENTS IN DRINKING

A program that offered free cab rides to intoxicated Tufts University students was suspended last month...

An organization called Student Lifeline promised to pay cab fares of up to $100 for students...too drunk to drive...The program was intended for emergency use, but students used it routinely for trips home from Boston bars...About 120 students were using the service each night...

According to Richard J. Signarino, Student Lifeline's president, "We don't want it to be used for premeditated drinking bouts."

--From a news report in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

THE MEANING OF MEAN

Your servant put down the Washington Post's Outlook section the other day and swiveled around to the PC in a state of above-average agitation. Dialing into his favorite database, he tensely queried how we got into this God-awful situation wherein liberal polemicists keep scoring points by denouncing conservatives as "mean-spirited."

The answer served up was illuminating. It seems that "mean-spirited" appeared in 358 articles in Nexis during the first three weeks of November. In the same period in 1994--a period featuring the Republican takeover of Congress--the "ms" phrase turned up in 493 articles. But here is the interesting part. In the corresponding 1993 period, it was in only 187 articles, and the score for 1992 was a mere 161. As exclusively analyzed by the Keeping Up social policy desk, these data tell us that babbling about meanness explodes in periods when the commentators of America are terrifiedly focusing on Republicans and/or conservatives behaving as though they might actually do something.

It is very hard to find examples of Democrats being labeled meanies. The wad of Nexis printouts on our desk includes only one instance of a commentator accusing Bill Clinton of being "ms," and possibly this example should be thrown out as the accuser is none other than Newt himself, obviously operating in the tu quoque mode. (For those who took the engineering course, this debating term is Latin for "you, too," the thought being that you, too, are doing what you criticize in others.) Gingrich personally and his Contract are endlessly hammered for "ms"-ness, as in columnist Robert L. Steinbeck's averment in the Tampa Tribune that "the personality of the GOP under Newt Gingrich is mean-spirited...masking scapegoat politics with a veneer of ideological purity." (Masking with a veneer? How duplicitous can you get?) On the same wavelength is Senator Barbara Boxer of California urging the Republicans not to "leave huge tax breaks to the wealthiest to pay for these mean-spirited cuts." (Huh? The tax breaks are paying for the cuts?) A special favorite in one's "ms" collection is former governor Doug Wilder of Virginia commenting on his hard-line successor, George Allen, stated by Doug to have "reached the limits of being somewhat mean-spirited." But honorable mention goes to director-auteur Rob Reiner, explaining to an extremely observant Los Angeles Times reporter while sipping mineral water in his antique-filled Brentwood living room that "the shallow-thinking and mean-spirited" Republican senator played by Richard Dreyfuss in The American President reflected his (Rob's, not Richard's) views of Newt and Bob Dole, in case you thought it was all based on Bella Abzug.

A lot of the "ms" articles, including the Post op-ed piece that got us going in the first place, were bounced off the recent state and congressional elections in which the Republicans did fairly well--but after which a lot of commentators said that "ms" politics had held down their vote. Many other articles rued Powell's decision not to seek the presidency, as Colin would postulatedly have made the Republicans less "ms." Then there are all the articles tracking the fortunes of candidate Dick Lugar of Indiana, a media favorite who has found a niche as the GOPster running on a non-"ms" platform and positing that his "mean-spirited Republican presidential rivals have turned off mainstream voters," a category that presumably does not include the Down East Yankees, who went overwhelmingly for Phil Gramm over Lugar in Maine's presidential straw poll.

Needing to be warily worked into our exposition at about this point is Ralph Waldo Emerson's observation (in an 1841 essay) that conservatives may really be meaner than other folks. Fascinating formulation: "There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact." What the Sage of Concord appeared to have in mind here--as always, he can be read several ways--is that conservatives are folks who have elected to go through life bringing liberals back to reality, in the process seeming more negative and less lovable than the characters they are trying to straighten out.

Note that Emerson assumed one could be mean while also being right on the issues. But a century and a half later, this distinction is a bit of a hard sell, as research yet to be done would demonstrate that millions of today's voters are in thrall to self-absorbed New Age sappiness and therefore rate feelings, intentions, caring, and being "concerned" above mere cost-effectiveness. The question is whether they have yet reached the limits of being somewhat concerned.

STILL NOT GETTING IT

We end the year with three fast questions for the feminists of America, whose positions on certain issues surfacing in 1995 seem to us utterly incomprehensible, or is it totally predictable?

Why are campus feminists, warriors against date rape and sexual harassment, so often supporters of coed bathrooms in dormitories, a phenomenon colorfully elaborated by Williams junior Wendy Shalit in a recent much discussed Commentary article explaining, inter alia, how hard it is on her own campus to get a little sexual privacy when you take a shower?

Coming off the Greene case, is romance in the workplace now officially synonymous with sexual harassment, Captain Everett L. Greene being the Navy officer denied promotion to Admiral after it turned out that two years earlier he had written a few sappy poems and sent a few small gifts to a Naval woman acknowledged by Everett's prosecutor to have been flirting with him?

When will somebody take charge and definitively decide what a chap is allowed to call the femmes (assuming that word is still okay), who in June were said to be endorsing "chicks" (according to the Washington Post) and getting support for this usage from none other than Hillary, but who in November were again registering disdain for the usage while increasingly coming around to "gals" (according to the New York Times)?

THE ENDANGERED ACT

It is unclear as we write just how it will be overhauled, but the Endangered Species Act (ESA) is clearly in trouble. The objections in Congress seem to center on the endless abridgments of property rights among landowners unlucky enough to be found hosting the wrong species, but the property-rights issue is not the act's only problem. A more entertaining difficulty for the Interior Department's Fish and Wildlife Service, which enforces the act, is that it is running out of lovable species to protect.

ESA has been popular for most of its 22 years, during which it has been viewed as protecting grizzlies, wolves, bald eagles, and other "charismatic megafauna," to invoke a phrase suddenly all over the endangerment literature. The term refers to the fact that some species--usually they are large animals--do better than others at capturing the imaginations of American voters, who seem infinitely willing to put up with economic hardships for other people so long as the species being protected has a touch of class.

ESA itself, of course, provides no special privileges for classy plants and animals. It protects any species at all of plant or animal deemed by federal researchers to be in danger of extinction. But wait, there is an exception. When the act was being passed in 1973, cantankerous Senator James Eastland of Mississippi got up and pointed out that not all his constituents were wild about protecting boll weevils. This led to an exception for species of the Class Insecta that are considered to be "pests." Everything else is home free.

The possibility that we are running out of cuddly creatures is powerfully suggested by some data one was recently hovering over in The Endangered Species Act: A Train Wreck Ahead, written by Thomas Lambert, a scholar at the Center for the Study of American Business at Washington University in St. Louis. The study indicates that around 1,000 species are now under the Interior Department's protection and that the figure is expected to grow to maybe 3,000 in the next few years. Lambert gets to that estimate by noting that the department has designated around 4,400 species as "candidates" for protection, and the record shows that something like half the candidates tend to graduate onto the endangered list.

But the big news resides in a table in Lambert's paper showing where this growth is coming from. The table shows that the biggest animal winners are the unlovable insects: 29 are now on the endangered list, but 821 are on the candidate lists. Indeed, 38% of all the animal candidates are insects, and another 18% are snails. The classier mammals, fish, and birds, which over the years have collectively represented well over half of endangered animal species, now account for less than one-quarter of all the candidates. What a comedown.

Hard-line supporters of the ESA often deride the public's preference for the more charismatic animals (and also for animals over plants), but the Fish and Wildlifers have cagily played to these preferences. An article last year in Policy Review, published by the conservative Heritage Foundation, cited an Interior Department manual observing that the popular species can be used as a "spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down." The Policy Review authors add bitterly, "It's a classic case of bait and switch: Financial and political clout are gathered for fuzzy, likable animals like pandas, but the law is applied to anything that crawls."

As it happens, the year's biggest pr disaster for the Interior Department was a flier, not a crawler. The Delhi Sands flower-loving fly, whose existence in California's San Bernardino County had not previously been suspected, turned up just in time to require a $3.5 million expenditure by the county, which ended up moving a hospital whose original site would have affected the fly's habitat. The fly saga divided Californians into a huge majority registering rage and/or derision and a minority of idealists like researcher Greg Ballmer of the University of California at Riverside, who got on record in the Sacramento Bee bemoaning the fact that "it's an insect, and it's so easy to ridicule things that are small and defenseless." And so hard to cuddle up with.

REPORTER ASSOCIATE David C. Kaufman