I think it was a TV movie, and it was rebroadcast in about 1975. I was just a preteen at the time and was impressed with the quiet, dignified James Earl Jones. But I couldn't even stay up late enough to see the end. It's kind of hung there in my consciousness. Too bad it's not on DVD. If it can stick in a kid's mind like that, it must be good.

A couple of characters go through the succession list: He's dead, he's dead, . . . and that leaves . . . you-know-who. And then they grin at each other, like, you have to be kidding and wow is this going to be fun. At some point he's getting into a limo, looking dignified and kind of blank.

I watched Fox and must have been channel-surfing when these little backpedaling monents happened. I thought aliens had abducted the Fox regulars and replaced them with the most fair and professional journalists I had yet seen. Everything from the graphics to the split-second timing to the camera shots was spot-on.

Really? Karl Rove said "better angels of our nature"?

Just one question: What is card check?

I voted for Obama because of leadership. His specific proposals will weather a lot of reality, but I saw someone determined to unite this country under a banner of integrity. What amazed me was that that little concept -- integrity -- has been so, well, "alien" to this country for so long that its return came like a Biblical revelation. We've been so bitch-slapped around, degraded into "war" on this and that, and asked to grovel in naked self-interest for so long that it finally feels like fresh air of the kind I haven't breathed since 1979. "Always take the high road," this man says, and it smells of inspiration and possibility. The fact that this came from a black man just happens to partly reconcile our largest national guilt at the same moment, and it feels like catharsis.

One of these days I'm going to try to get ahold of the government's "anthrax test" and test my mother's front porch in Michigan for spores. Because about 3% of the soil in North America "tests positive" for anthrax, it's going to start an international incident: The prevailing winds across Mom's porch blow toward Canada.

I don't intend to attack Canada, but neither were the anthrax attacks real. The story originated with an employee of American Media, publisher of the National Enquirer; the headlines were right up there with Elvis sightings, "Baby Born with Beard" and "500 Space Aliens Found in Jungle Graveyard." They ended with a resident of the Bronx presenting at an emergency room with classic symptoms of asthma -- a leading killer in the Bronx. The FBI couldn't find any evidence that this person ever came into contact with anthrax.

What we have here is a classic case of post-9/11 hysteria, in which people would believe anything that resonated with their fear and paranoia. I live in New York City, lived here then too, and it was just surreal. Mothers were stocking the medicine cabinet with Cipro. The New York Press reported that several people fainted on a subway platform after smelling ammonia-like fumes. New Yorkers usually shrug this smell off as urine. But not after 9/11, by golly. People suffered real symptoms; a mass hysteria works that way.

In the post-hysterical era just begun, the government and everyone connected with the anthrax embarrassment has to find a way out. It's telling, though, that they assert that the threat is more evident, not less. Government coverup of a public health threat! Run for the hills!

This story will die a quiet death as soon as everyone gets done posturing, covering their tracks, and calling for investigations that never happen. It's just shameful that the government drove a marginally sane man to suicide over this. Even that will be forgotten.