>If Conniff and Hitchens and Doug are good at
>that sort of thing, I wish them all the best.
The Salon piece also exaggerated my CNN-ability. I've been on the main CNN once - on Moneyline, when Lou Dobbs was away on vacation and a sympathetic producer thought she could slip me on for their Labor Day 1997 special. I talked up the militance of the new AFL-CIO (more than I really believed, actually) in the hopes of scaring the rentiers in the audience. And I've been on CNNfn twice, once to talk about Asia's collapse and once to talk about Russia's collapse. The problem with these appearances is that you usually get 2-3 minutes, the first 90 seconds of which are devoted to explaining why you're not a freak. I got 5 minutes on Moneyline, and by the end of it, the idiot anchor's jaw was hanging open. All Myron Kandel could manage was an "interesting" when it was all over. Their universes are so constricted you could be speaking Urdu. At least on Canadian TV you get more time and interviewers with some brains and political sophistication.
Doug