February 19, 1995

MY first inkling that Kevin Mitnick might be reading my electronic mail came more than a year ago. I found a document posted on a public electronic bulletin board containing a personal message that could only have been obtained by someone reading my mail. At the time, I suspected it might be Mr. Mitnick, a convicted computer felon who was being sought by the F.B.I. for violation of probation, but I simply shrugged and stopped using that e-mail account for anything important. I'd been around the Internet long enough to believe that true computer security is a fleeting illusion. In cyberspace, many people have become inured to the dangers of living in world of swashbuckling electronic pirates.

WOULD you lend money to a company that had gone broke twice before? What if the man running the company was being sued -- by his son -- for fraud? Last week, Wall Street answered with a resounding "Yes." The Transamerican Refining Corporation raised $300 million by selling junk bonds with promised yields of 16.5 percent to 18.5 percent -- plus a bonus of stock in the company. "These interest rates have not been seen since the leveraged buyout frenzy of the late 1980's," said Max Holmes, Salomon Brothers' director of corporate bond research.

The little shotgun house is peeling and the Oldsmobile in front is missing a rear bumper, but Larry Bannock can glimpse glory through the eye of his needle. For almost a year he has hunkered over his sewing table, joining beads, velvet, rhinestones, sequins, feathers and ostrich plumes into a Mardi Gras costume that is part African, part Native American. "I'm pretty," said Mr. Bannock, who is 6 feet tall and weighs 300 pounds. "And baby, when I walk out that door there ain't nothing cheap on me."

THE President's character, his contemporary critic wrote, was a "non-describable, chameleon-colored thing called prudence," which was "in many cases a substitute for principle" and "so nearly allied to hypocrisy that it easily slides into it." The critic was Thomas Paine, the Revolutionary pamphleteer. The President was George Washington, at the end of his second term in 1796. Today, Washington is celebrated as the father of his country, the pretext for Macy's "Winter Fashion Clearance," and a swell excuse to sleep late tomorrow morning on the Federal holiday that marks his birth.

THE VERY CONCEPT OF "VICTIM ART" IS an appalling one. Only a sensibility unwilling to attribute full humanity to persons who have suffered injury, illness or injustice could have invented such a crude and reductive label. There is a long and honorable tradition of art that "bears witness" to human suffering, but this is not "victim art" as the current term would have it, still less an art that manipulates or intimidates its audience to any perverse degree. (Doesn't all art, especially the conventional and pleasing, have the goal of affecting an audience's emotions?) That a human being has been "victimized" does not reduce his or her humanity but may in fact amplify it.