Ron Unz, swimming instructor

摘要

This week the Clinton administration, summoning up its righteous zeal, declared war upon a heinous threat to American civilisation. The Education Department denounced it. The Justice Department threatened to file suit against it. The president himself, his officials said, was ready to campaign against it. No effort would be spared, the message went, to frustrate California's Proposition 227, the ballot measure that would get rid of the state's bilingual education programmes. It is hard to see Ron Unz, the ballot measure's mastermind, as particularly heinous. His sweater is baggy, turned up at the cuffs; he looks like a boy in his older brother's cast-offs. His watch strap is plastic, like the chair covers in his favourite Palo Alto restaurant, where lunch for two comes to $11. It is not that he is broke: he has made millions from his software business. But he is an unpretentious sort. When he launched his ballot initiative, he decided not to incur the expense of hiring a political consultant or a public-relations firm. Instead, he spent $80 on blast-fax software, and got an extra 64 megabytes of computer memory. He rises at dawn, reads the California papers on the Web, and blasts off favourable articles to hundreds of sympathetic journalists.