Michael Nagle for The New York Times

Bret Easton Ellis

August 11, 2005
Coaxed Down the Rabbit Hole With Bret or ‘Bret’
By JANET MASLIN

“Lunar Park” begins with a coy, teasing fan dance performed by the author. Now you see him, now you don’t: is this the real Bret Easton Ellis, baring his soul and revealing what it was like to be “insanely famous,” to pose for sunglasses ads, to go on a three-day heroin binge in a four-star hotel? Was his college graduation party really attended by “the entire cast of ‘St. Elmo’s Fire’ “? This is also a fan dance in celebrity terms, since it summons an amusing array of luminaries from the days – long gone – when Mr. Ellis was young and hot.

How hot? Hot enough to begin his books with the passages quoted here, beginning with succinct words from the mid-1980′s touchstone “Less than Zero” and then drifting toward oblivion. He says “The Rules of Attraction,” his second book, “was supposed to be an indictment of, well, really nothing, but at that point in my career I could have submitted the notes I had taken in my junior year Virginia Woolf course and would still have received a huge advance and copious amounts of publicity.”

Since then, “Lunar Park” says, he has gone on to write books that would have Alfred and Blanche Knopf rolling in their graves. And he is now ready to seduce his sensation-seeking readers (“Glamorama” supplied “enough pornography and dismemberment to appease my fan base”) with a calculating display of revisionism and self-doubt. It works. The reader is coaxed down the rabbit hole into Mr. Ellis’ supposed middle-aged existence as a suburban husband and father. Rarely has an author brought less sincerity to the claim that every word is true.

So here is Bret, sentenced to hear the hellish sounds of leaf-blowers as he slips into a Talking Heads reverie. Is this his beautiful house? Is this his beautiful wife? He has supposedly married a movie star named Jayne and fathered a son named Robby (not in that order). He has moved to a land of such limited imagination that the kids dress as Shrek and Harry Potter for Halloween. “It was a refuge for the less competitive; it was the minor leagues,” he writes of living in a place where the kitchen features a “countertop specifically designed for the placement of olive oil bottles.” In this style-dead nowhere, “you simply didn’t have to pay as much attention to things. The precise pose was no longer required.”

Bret the character moves through this world in a desperate, druggy stupor, heading for his own personal horror story. (More about that later.) But the guy writing “Lunar Park” is paying as much attention to detail as he ever did. This is what makes his book appropriately addictive, despite its colossal and ludicrous flaws: his powers of observation are undimmed as his needs have become less physical and more urgent. The author of “American Psycho” is not above throwing an ax murderer in an Armani suit into his new novel. But he has also become able to fuse hilarious self-parody with a spiritual neediness that, unlike the book’s particulars, is real.

Marooned, married Bret plods through a teaching job and assorted literary responsibilities (like writing a blurb for “yet another mediocre, polite novel called ‘The Millipede’s Lament’ “) while working on his own halfhearted project: a pornographic novel featuring a “Sexpert” named Mike, a lot of teenage girls and the kind of lurid materialism that Mr. Ellis once made his stock in trade. (“There was a loud pop, then excruciating pain, but Tandra wrapped crushed ice in a Ralph Lauren towel and drove Mike to the ER.”)

Meanwhile, back at the McMansion, strange things start to happen. Claw marks appear. A dead crow winds up in the Jacuzzi. A gravestone bearing the name of Bret’s late father turns up on Halloween night. And it becomes clear that an unresolved father-son dynamic is behind all these developments. Really, Mr. Ellis didn’t have to put the house on a street named Elsinore, throw in an Ophelia Drive and a Fortinbras Mall and begin with a quotation from “Hamlet” to get this across.

But he does – and here lies the book’s big problem. In a house that might as well have a neon sign reading “I’m Haunted,” the hinting and overkill are embarrassingly literal-minded. These effects pile on uncontrollably, too. A nasty little toy called a Terby goes around attacking things, and as for its ultimate meaning – well, TERBY is an anagram for YBRET, as in “Why, Bret?” The reader winds up asking that question just as often as it is asked by the shade of Robert Martin Ellis, the author’s heretofore-maligned father (“Added fact: he also beat our dog.”) who was the apparent inspiration for “American Psycho” and its savagery.

There was a time when Mr. Ellis’s work was routinely grouped with that of his friend Jay McInerney, who puts in a cameo appearance in “Lunar Park.” Now he writes more like Chuck Palahniuk, fusing grisly, whimsical horror gambits with what turns out to be a hidden and fulsomely sentimental side. So Mr. Ellis tries every conceivable gimmick to reanimate his father, his own boyhood and “American Psycho.” (A reader is re-enacting its murders.) And he is over his head in these dark waters. Psychoanalytic navel-gazing is the enemy of the morality struggles in which the most potent, horrific tales are grounded.

What’s more, the Bret who writes so confidingly at first disappears into a haze of both substance abuse and writerly evasion. Eventually he even tries to step out of his own creation and call the novel a kind of fever dream.

All seems lost. But then something sublime happens. “Lunar Park” culminates in an exquisite closing passage that is a phantasmagoria of love and loss, a fusion of hallucination and wisdom, a couple of pages so stirringly executed that they beautifully illuminate all that has come before. If this is the author being carried off on a flight of imagination, he also stirringly transports the reader. But if he has written this with utter clarity and no excuses, he also reinvents himself. The book’s last words do not come from the Bret we used to know.

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Lou Beach

August 14, 2005
‘Lunar Park’: Hero and Heroin
By A. O. SCOTT

I’m not sure I have ever encountered a novel as heavily defended as ”Lunar Park,” which arrives surrounded by the rhetorical equivalent of moats, high walls and velvet ropes — an insecurity apparatus designed not to keep you out so much as to disarm your preconceptions.

And you know you have them. So does the publicity department at Knopf. According to a letter tucked into my review copy, ”everyone, it seems, has an opinion about Bret Easton Ellis — even those who have not read his work.” Further, the author of this letter — Knopf’s executive director of publicity, Paul Bogaards, who also, by the way, turns up briefly as a character in the book — acknowledges that not all of these opinions are favorable: ”Some think he’s a good writer. Some think his best work was long ago. Others dismiss him out of hand.”

And while Bogaards candidly admits to being ”in the first camp,” he is also diplomatically ”sensitive to the criticisms and reservations people have about his work, particularly ‘American Psycho,’ ” which provoked a boycott campaign, was dropped by its first publisher and became a best seller when it was published as a paperback original by Knopf’s Vintage Contemporaries series. Evidently Ellis is aware of these reservations too. He signals as much in the second of three epigraphs, a passage from John O’Hara which notes that ”people who have made up their minds about a man do not like to have their opinions changed.”

AT least at first, Ellis does not seem especially interested in changing anyone’s low opinion of him, preferring to perform a pre-emptive character assassination on himself. In the novel’s astonishing opening chapter, a 30-page excursion into trompe l’oeil autobiography, he introduces his narrator and hero, a novelist named Bret Easton Ellis who became a literary celebrity in the long-ago 1980′s, before he had even graduated from college. His first novel, ”Less Than Zero,” about what an aimless, nihilistic group of rich kids did on their Christmas break, became a ”zeitgeist touchstone.” ”It was an indictment not only of a way of life I was familiar with,” he writes, ”but also — I thought rather grandly — of the Reagan 80′s and, more indirectly, of Western civilization in the present moment.” Of course, there were those who preferred to see it more as symptom than as indictment, a confusion that Ellis has encountered (and encouraged) ever since.

Anyway, the chapter condenses recent literary history into glossy-magazine gossip, as if it had been culled from back issues of Details and Vanity Fair for future serialization in Gawker. Names are dropped casually and in profusion, as they were in Ellis’s previous (and underrated) novel, ”Glamorama” — Madonna, Keith Haring, Bono, Jay McInerney, Sonny Mehta, Michael Stipe, Paul Bogaards and so on — and the pages are littered with nightclub cocktail napkins and couture labels. All of which forms the backdrop for a familiar (and entertaining) tale of wild chemical and sexual excess, an addict’s confession that also, as such things often do, sounds like a series of self-pitying boasts: ”After all that, I lay alone in bed for the next seven days, watching porn DVD’s with the sound off and snorting maybe 40 bags of heroin, a blue plastic bucket that I vomited into continually by my side, and telling myself that the lack of respect from the critical community was what hurt so much and why I had to drug myself away from the pain.”

Who will hear the complaints of the famous? ”My life — my name — had been rendered a repetitive, unfunny punch line and I was sick of eating it.” Having grown up (or refused to grow up) in the public eye, Ellis, like Norman Mailer before him, has developed an acute sensitivity to the public’s volatile, ambivalent relationship to celebrity, and he uses it to solicit both our disgust and our envy. We need to believe that we’re better than he is — and maybe to feel sorry for him as well — because we suspect that he is having a better time than we are, just as we need to moralize away the seductive appeal of his writing by feigning shock not only at its subject matter but at its very existence. Part of what made ”Less Than Zero” work, at the time of its publication in 1985 and ever since (it has not dated much), was its ability to activate alternating currents of pity, prurience and moral superiority. You can shake your head ruefully at the sad, ugly exploits of those privileged kids cruising around in convertibles and snorting cocaine, secure in the knowledge that back in the 80′s you were reading Derrida and protesting apartheid, even if (or precisely because) you secretly wished someone would offer you a line and a rolled-up twenty, or at least a midnight ride in their dad’s Mercedes.

But enough about you. In between writing the books that came between ”Less Than Zero” and this one, Bret Easton Ellis — or at least his identical alter ego — in addition to consuming heroic quantities of crack, booze and heroin and having as much sex as those substances would allow, fathered a child (unless Keanu Reeves did) with a movie star named Jayne Dennis.

You may remember her from such movies as ”The Back Room Deal,” ”Sunstroke” and ”The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.” Or perhaps not, since in spite of the existence of a real fan site devoted to her career (which includes a picture of her with Ellis), Jayne Dennis is fictional. Which means, of course, that the Bret Easton Ellis who appears in ”Lunar Park” is fictional too, in spite of his insistence that ”all of it really happened, every word is true.” That, of course, is how kids at summer camp preface their recitations of ghost stories, which is what this novel, as it drifts from the moorings of faux memoir, turns out to be.

Leaving behind the shallow glitter of Manhattan and the self-destructive glamour of his book tours (temporarily, one suspects), Ellis strikes out for the peace of the suburbs, which is to say for the familiar, safe territory of the suburban literary Gothic. The character, that is, marries Jayne (who also has a second child by another man) and settles into a big house on the evocatively named Elsinore Lane in an unidentified town somewhere outside of New York City. The novelist, meanwhile, descends into a milieu that is ready-made for his contempt, a place of empty, phony social connections, vulgar materialism and social competitiveness, where the children are as heavily medicated as the grown-ups.

You’d think he would feel right at home, but the facades of bourgeois normalcy oppress him, as they have oppressed generations of Wapshots, Jernigans and Revolutionary Roadsters before. There are some ”American Beauty” set pieces — the dinner party at the neighbors’ house, the parents’ night at the fancy private school, the trip to the mall — as well as a few gestures in the direction of the campus novel. Ellis is teaching creative writing at a local college, and carrying on an intense but as yet unconsummated flirtation with a student. Despite repeated vows of sobriety, he falls off enough wagons to fill a parking lot. His son will barely acknowledge him, and his wife is perpetually ready to be disappointed in him. Welcome to the middle class, college boy.

But the self-inflicted punishment does not stop there, with the Brat Pack big shot exiled into what seems to be the first draft of an A. M. Homes novel. It turns out that Ellis is pursued by ghosts. One of them, as the sprinkling of ”Hamlet” references suggests, is his father, an alcoholic California businessman who was, according to Ellis, the model for Patrick Bateman in ”American Psycho.” Patrick himself seems to be lurking behind the hedges somewhere, as Ellis learns of a string of murders in nearby towns that uncannily mimic the crimes he had dreamed up in his most notorious novel. Another apparition from his own writing turns up as well, an undergraduate named Clay who resembles not only the main character in ”Less Than Zero” but, no surprise here, Bret Easton Ellis himself.

Then there is the toy bird that terrorizes Ellis’s stepdaughter and appears to be methodically stripping the paint from his house, and the mysterious e-mail messages that arrive every night from Sherman Oaks, Calif. Later on, an internal double, referred to as ”the writer,” shows up to scramble further our ability to discern what is going on. It’s not a question of whether the story is true, but rather — as in ”American Psycho” — of whether its awful happenings are taking place in the narrator’s head, in the objective reality he inhabits or in some indeterminate zone between the two.

I wish it were a more interesting question. That is, I wish Ellis had found the discipline necessary to pose it more cogently. ”Lunar Park” is a book shot through with longing — with the character Ellis’s sincere, hopelessly self-thwarted desire to find a link to his son and to work through his father’s destructive legacy, and with the writer Ellis’s evident wish to shed the scaly skin of his reputation. But while he has the talent to make these desires credible, Ellis is too cool — or perhaps too lazy — either to fulfill them or to dramatize his failure to do so. He can still write about violence with steely, creepy, funny precision, but the language of feeling causes him palpable embarrassment: ”I felt something ascend and then her face composed itself as she stared back at me and her tears stopped along with mine, and this new expression was in such a contrast to the harshness that had scattered it before that a stillness overtook the room, transporting it to someplace else.”

And where would that be, exactly? The problem with this novel is not that it is a fast, lurching ride to nowhere. Of course it is; it’s a Bret Easton Ellis novel. The problem is that it does not have the honesty to admit that it wants to be more, the faith that readers will accept more or the courage to try to be more. It is the portrait of a narcissist who is, in the end, terminally bored with himself; that it may also be a self-portrait doesn’t make it any more true.

A. O. Scott is a film critic for The Times.

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August 7, 2005

When a Heart Device Short-Circuits

Defibrillators that shock a chaotically beating heart back to normal and pacemakers that regulate a heart’s rhythm have saved or improved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. But every so often one of these implanted devices fails to work when it is desperately needed. The story of how the Guidant Corporation, the nation’s second-biggest maker of cardiac devices, handled a flawed defibrillator provides a troubling glimpse into the murky world of medical device regulation.

The problems came to light after a college student with a genetic heart disease died in March while he was mountain biking in Utah. When Guidant analyzed the device, it found that the unit had short-circuited. Worse yet, the same model had short-circuited earlier in more than two dozen other patients. Yet when the dead student’s doctors asked Guidant officials how they planned to get the word out, the officials said they saw no reason to. It was only when The Times was about to publish an article by Barry Meier exposing the problem in late May that the company issued an alert. The article revealed that Guidant had known about the flaw for three years but told neither doctors nor patients.

The company’s justification for its reticence won’t wash. Guidant said it corrected the flaw in 2002 but saw no need to inform doctors because the devices made before then were highly reliable and the surgical risk of taking them out might outweigh the very low risk of failure. Incredibly, the company kept selling the potentially flawed devices from inventory for months after it began making improved versions. To this day it maintains that all the devices are highly reliable, but surely there are few doctors who would want to implant a device with a flaw that had been corrected in more recent units. By failing to disclose the flaw publicly, the company pre-empted a decision – whether to remove the flawed devices surgically – that should be made by doctors and patients.

With the company facing heightened scrutiny from regulators and a steady drumbeat of articles by Mr. Meier, Guidant has issued alerts or recalls on 20 models of defibrillators and pacemakers, comprising tens of thousands of devices in all. For the future, the company, the Food and Drug Administration, a heart rhythm medical society and the chairman of a Senate committee are all pondering ways to increase the flow of information on flaws in medical devices. It will be equally important to improve the monitoring of these devices after implantation. Their generally reliable performance must not obscure the fact that when they fail, the results can be catastrophic.

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August 8, 2005
‘The Thin Man’ Is Escapism, From an Unlikely Source
By ADAM COHEN

Two of the media stars of the summer are a charming husband-and-wife team who made their last film appearance in 1947. Nick and Nora Charles, Dashiell Hammett’s wealthy Depression-era detectives, are the hero and heroine of six “Thin Man” movies, which were released this month in a boxed set that quickly jumped to No. 1 on Amazon.com’s list of best-selling DVD’s.

If it’s surprising that 21st-century Americans find Nick and Nora so appealing, it’s no more so than that Hammett, a dedicated socialist with a very dark worldview, created them in the first place.

Hammett was an ex-Pinkerton detective who became a writer of pulp crime stories with unsentimental, sometimes unsympathetic, heroes. His Continental Op, an operative for the fictional Continental Detective Agency, was a sullen loner who was just a few moral notches above the criminals he was tracking down. “It is a long step from Holmes pondering the significance of a flake of cigar ash,” one critic has said, “to Hammett’s Op, who, on one occasion, stuffs a length of copper wire into his pocket because it’s just the right length to go around somebody’s neck.”

Hammett’s first full-length novel, “Red Harvest,” is a searing story set in a corrupt mining town called Personville and pronounced “Poisonville” by the locals. “Poisonville is right,” the Continental Op, who ends up engaging in a few bad acts himself, says bitterly. “It’s poisoned me.” Dorothy Parker once called another Hammett detective, Sam Spade in “The Maltese Falcon,” “so hard-boiled, you could roll him on the White House lawn.”

But then the stock market crashed, and Hammett created Nick Charles, a happily married, semi-retired private eye who lives off his wife’s money and cheerfully drinks his way through Manhattan high society.

“The Thin Man” announces itself right away as a very different kind of novel. It begins with Nick waiting for Nora to finish her Christmas shopping. When she does, she reports that Asta, the couple’s spirited terrier, has “had a swell afternoon – knocked over a table of toys at Lord & Taylor’s, [and] scared a fat woman silly by licking her leg in Saks’s.” Nick and Nora’s lives revolve around their elegant apartment, swank parties and posh supper clubs.

“The Thin Man” was made into a classic movie, starring William Powell and Myrna Loy, which in turn produced five sequels. Despite their often uninspired, even convoluted, plots, the movies’ witty dialogue, engaging acting and sophisticated ambience made them immensely popular. Their great charm lies in Nick and Nora’s strikingly modern marriage of equals, and the genteel, carefree world they inhabit.

Even if it is first-rate escapist entertainment, Hammett purists consider “The Thin Man” his weakest novel. It was certainly a moral compromise for a man who identified strongly with the downtrodden and would eventually be jailed during the McCarthy era.

He had exposed the rough working of capitalism in “Red Harvest” in early 1929, when the economy was still giddy. He could not have helped but be troubled by how much worse things were in 1934, when the unemployment rate was more than 20 percent. Yet that was the time when he was creating his most upbeat, upscale characters.

There are at least two competing explanations for the new direction Hammett took in “The Thin Man.” One is that he was inspired by Lillian Hellman, the playwright with whom he was to have a lifelong, often tortured relationship.

Hellman said that Hammett told her she was the model for Nora – although he also told her, she said, that she was “the silly girl in the book and the villainess.”

Perhaps a better explanation is that Hammett knew that in hard times, when people opened a popular magazine or a novel, they wanted to read about penthouses, not breadlines. If they would pay to do so, Hammett was more than willing to oblige.

That may be the reason Nick and Nora are popular again. Leaving the world’s grittiness behind to wallow in a life of luxury is a fantasy that is particularly prevalent right now. On a new television show on VH1, “Kept,” young men are competing to be the kept man of a wealthy woman. On another, NBC’s “I Want to Be a Hilton,” young people are vying to be part of a family of rich celebrities.

We are not in a Great Depression. But with the economy feeling precarious, the war in Iraq going badly and the headlines filled with London subway bombers and North Korean nuclear weapons, it is comforting for many people to imagine that a rich person might want to take care of them – or that they are rich themselves, with little more to worry about than how to get over a martini-induced hangover.

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Able Dangerous
By Laurel Wamsley
Posted Thursday, Aug. 11, 2005, at 3:38 PM PT

Bloggers discuss allegations that a secret military data-mining operation had named Mohammed Atta as a terrorist threat during the summer of 2000. NARAL’s ad attacking John Roberts stirs up controversy, as does the New York City health department’s request that local restaurants avoid trans fats.

Able Dangerous: Bloggers eagerly point fingers after reports that a Defense Department operation called “Able Danger” turned up the name of Sept. 11 ringleader Mohammed Atta as a potential threat in 2000. Able Danger was never mentioned in the report issued by the 9/11 commission.

Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Curt Weldon has been trying to draw attention to the Able Danger findings. But “Weldon is not exactly a reliable source,” suggests Kevin Drum, the Washington Monthly‘s Political Animal. “[H]e has a huge axe to grind here (data mining is a longtime hobby horse of his), and [9/11 commission executive director Philip] Zelikow seems to be pretty well regarded in DC circles as a straight shooter.”

Wondering just what documents Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger stuffed down his pants, Brian at the conservative Iowa Voice proposes that the Clinton administration is to blame for 9/11: “Sure, after Bush took office, the Administration could have acted upon the intelligence provided by Able Danger, but if the information was buried, then they probably weren’t even aware of it.”

Conservative Ed Morrisey has been following the 9/11 commission’s changing story (and the Sandy Berger speculation) at Captain’s Quarters: “First they never heard of Able Danger. Then, maybe a low-level staffer told them about the program but not the Atta identification. Next, the military met with the Commissioners but didn’t specify the Atta identification. Now, we finally have confirmation that the Commission itself—not just its low-level staff—knew that military intelligence had identified Mohammed Atta as an al-Qaeda operative a year before 9/11.”

“The 9/11 Commission’s purpose was to find and detail the failures and deficiencies that may have contributed to the attacks,” notes right-of-center Baldilocks. “It appears that one of those deficiencies is the tendency to discount real, valid information … and that tendency seems to not be a partisan one, nor confined to military and intelligence agencies.”

Read Government Security News on the matter here. Read more about Able Danger here.

Checking the facts: Political-watchers of all stripes are up in arms about NARAL Pro-Choice America’s television ad criticizing Supreme Court nominee John Roberts. FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan political watchdog, called the ads, which claim Roberts sided with an abortion-clinic bomber and excused violence, “false” and “misleading.”

“NARAL misrepresents the Bray case in every particular,” argues John Hinderaker at conservative group blog Power Line. “Roberts didn’t ‘support violent fringe groups’ or a ‘convicted clinic bomber.’ He supported the federal government’s position on a specific question of law—correctly, as the Court found.” Perry Townsend at youthful Gleepster-ville reluctantly agrees: “[A]s much as John Roberts’ record and views scare the sh*t out of me … I don’t think he can be faulted on this one.”

Joy-Ann Reid at Reid Report believes the ads are a waste of money. “What on earth was NARAL thinking blowing half a mil on a ridiculous ad that tries to turn the straight laced Roberts into Randall Terry?” asks the left-leaning Florida journalist. “Give it a rest ladies, you’re speeding into irrelevancy.”

But LiberalOasis thinks the commentators are missing the mark. “[M]aybe if labor, environmental and consumer groups adopted NARAL’s attitude, the discussion would broaden and Roberts would be further on the defensive,” the lefty aggregator rebukes. “While everyone else seems to pondering how not to upset Fox News and FactCheck.org, NARAL appears to going to the mat to save our Supreme Court from the right-wing.”

Read NARAL’s response to FactCheck.org. Read more about NARAL’s ad here.

Notorious F.A.T.: Libertarians—among others—defend their vats of partially hydrogenated vegetable oils as the New York City health department urged the city’s restaurants to stop serving food containing trans fats.

“It never ceases to amaze me at how controlling bureaucrats can become—even to the point of telling people what to eat and when,” moans Oklahoma blogger Tory Fodder at Pax Plena. “I’m sure it’s for the public well-being, but if people what a greasy cheeseburger or a super-sized order of fries (yum) then I say, let them have it!”

“[I]t’s another example of government intrusion on business decisions,” declares no-nonsense Illini fan Champaign Common Sense. “If I want to go to a smoky bar I should be able to. If I want to eat margarine I should be able to do so. … The business owner should make the decision. if it’s the right decision, the business will go on. if it’s the wrong decision, the business will fold.”

Dave Morris at Dave’s Window worries that a few fat-lovers are ruining the grease for everyone else. “Will there never be a time when people can, on their own volition, practice restraint?” he wonders in St. Louis. ” … I can see it coming now, the DOH will be outlawing margarine next. Then chocolate. Then dairy products. Where does it end?”

Find your state’s health ranking here. Read more about trans fats here.

A long way down

Now, that’s big air

Attack of the MegaRamp
The nine-story behemoth that scares the bejeezus out of the world’s best skateboarders.
By Bret Anthony Johnston
Posted Thursday, Aug. 11, 2005, at 4:22 AM PT

In 20 years of skateboarding, I’ve never had to ride an elevator to the top of a ramp. I’ve also never seen a weather vane spinning on the deck to help skaters make adjustments depending on the wind. Birds land on the uppermost railing, then fly off. When a blimp floats by, I can make out that the pilot is wearing a Lakers cap. Skaters drop in from the ramp’s precipice and then disappear like they’ve fallen down an elevator shaft. Medics on the ground stand by with gurneys and defibrillators.

Across the street, on the side of a hotel in downtown Los Angeles, looms a mural of Danny Way, the legendary skater who brought this behemoth ramp to the X Games. The standard ramp that’s been used in skating contests for years is the 12-foot, U-shaped halfpipe. Way’s invention, the “MegaRamp,” is nearly nine stories tall and longer than a football field; it looks less like a halfpipe than a sculptor’s rendering of a tsunami. Last month, Way took a similar structure to China and jumped the Great Wall.

The MegaRamp combines a bunch of skateboarding’s previous paradigms: the launch ramps, gaps, and banked landing pads of street skating and the quarterpipe and roll-ins of vert skating. On the MegaRamp used at the X Games, skaters choose between two starting points: an intermediate drop-in that’s 65 feet off the ground and a suicidal-looking, 80-foot drop-in. The first route delivers you over a 60-foot horizontal gap; the second sends you over a 70-foot breach. Once across the gap, you land on a banked ramp and speed toward a 27-foot tall quarterpipe that pitches you as high as 25 feet over the deck.

In the three years since Way conjured the MegaRamp, it has already raised skateboarding’s skill and cojones bar to ridiculous heights. (To watch a series of tricks that defy belief, check out these videos from Way’s Web site.) The fear factor is so severe that of the 11 skaters invited to compete in the X Games Big Air Competition, only three started from the higher roll-in. (Tony Hawk, who wasn’t competing, stopped by to try the MegaRamp for the first time and would attempt only the 60-foot gap. Danny Way, who did take off from the highest point, won the competition.) When someone simply climbs to the upper deck and peers down, the crowd here goes wild as if a skater even contemplating the bigger jump is more spectacular than anything they’ve ever seen at the X Games.

And there’s the rub: Compared to the Big Air competition, the usual 360s and rail grinds look, well, a lot less extreme. The video-gamelike hang-time the skaters get when launching off the MegaRamp allows them to perform 720s over huge gaps and McTwists almost 50 feet off the ground. Sean Penn showed up to watch last Saturday’s Big Air practice session. The only celebrity I saw at the skateboard vert finals, unless my eyes were deceiving me, was Pauly Shore.

Many skateboard purists distrust the X Games and the MegaRamp, deeming both bourgeois photo-ops that sanitize and gentrify the sport. But despite the extraordinary marketability of Big Air, there’s very little danger of it rendering the rest of skateboarding obsolete. For one, there aren’t any MegaRamps in municipal skateparks. Aside from the one built for the X Games, Danny Way’s personal MegaRamp is the only one in existence. To practice on the big ramp, skaters travel to California from as far away as Australia, Brazil, and Germany. This logistical constraint, along with the fact that only a handful of pros have the requisite skill and courage to ride the damned thing, could eventually work against skateboarding’s Big Air phase, turn it into an evolutionary cul-de-sac.

But even if the MegaRamp does grow to overshadow the rest of the sport, kids won’t stop doing ollies in their driveways. The various forms of skateboarding have always fed one another: Street skaters borrowed the grinds and slides from pool riders, and vert skaters adopted the technical kick flips and shove-its from street skating. Big Air doesn’t exist in a vacuum either. Perhaps this weekend’s most impressive accomplishment—Bob Burnquist‘s “switch” (essentially backward) tricks on the MegaRamp—was the byproduct of a lifetime training on vert ramps and street courses.

It would be great if the crowds here gasped at the obscure technical tricks that most skaters pride themselves on perfecting. I don’t think, though, that skateboarding has to be inscrutable. As someone who has been arrested, beaten, and fined for skateboarding, I take not a little sanctimonious satisfaction in the sport’s current mainstream success. Skateboarding will naturally fall out of commercial and broadcast favor—the sport dies and resurrects itself every 10 years or so—but every time the MegaRamp shows up on television, a new skater gets his wings. Some of the next generation will stick to the painted curbs, some will swear off everything except drained backyard pools, and some will stand atop the largest skateboarding structure ever built and wave to the blimp pilots. And, eventually, a few of them will soar over the blimp.

Bret Anthony Johnston is a writer and skateboarder in Southern California. He is the author of Corpus Christi: Stories

August 7, 2005
Catholics and the Court
By ROBIN TONER

IT is, in many ways, a triumph of assimilation, a marker in the political ascendancy of American Catholics: After more than a century when there was typically only one “Catholic seat” on the Supreme Court, Judge John G. Roberts, if he is confirmed next month, will become the fourth Catholic on the court.

So why is there so much simmering tension about Judge Roberts’s religion and the role it should – or should not – play in his coming confirmation process?

Religious conservatives contend that liberal Senate Democrats are trying to keep “people of faith” off the federal bench. Some Catholic conservatives quickly declared that any questions about Judge Roberts’s beliefs were utterly out of line. Democratic leaders, for their part, angrily deny that they are the ones injecting religion into the debate, and take particular offense at being accused of anti-Catholicism, since many of them are Catholics themselves.

All this fury is largely pre-emptive; Democratic leaders say they have no intention of grilling Judge Roberts on his religious beliefs (which several of them share) in next month’s confirmation hearing. But the role of religion in the public square – for voters and public officials – is one of the most contentious debates around these days. And the influence of a judge’s faith and personal beliefs may be growing just as contentious, as abortion, gay rights and other social issues come increasingly under the purview of the courts.

Which leads to the question: how relevant are a nominee’s religious views? Friends and political allies have described Judge Roberts’s active and conservative brand of Catholicism, which he shares with his wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, as an important part of their lives. Many social conservatives clearly took his religious background as a positive sign about his judicial and political philosophy. But any deeper probing of his religious views and their implications for his rulings strikes some Catholics as reminiscent of a more prejudiced time.

“I think it’s unfortunate that we’re still at a point in our nation where we have to ask these questions,” said Douglas W. Kmiec, a professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine University.

Lisa Cahill, a professor of theology at Boston College, argued: “Just as with any candidate, his track record is the key thing. People have a lot of communal identities and roles that go into their public stance – maybe a political party, maybe a religious tradition, maybe the Elks Club – and I don’t think it’s fair to pick out the religious tradition and suggest that will determine his views.”

Paradoxically, scholars like David Yalof, a political scientist at the University of Connecticut, note that Catholicism, like other religions, has not been a very good predictor of judicial conduct. “We have a small sample of Catholic justices now, and there’s no pattern on whether their Catholicism determined anything,” said Mr. Yalof, author of “Pursuit of Justices: Presidential Politics and the Selection of Supreme Court Nominees.” “Are you a Scalia Catholic, a Brennan Catholic or a Kennedy Catholic?”

Barbara Perry, an expert on the Supreme Court at Sweet Briar College, said that President Dwight Eisenhower very carefully picked Justice William J. Brennan Jr. to reinstate the “Catholic seat” in 1956, which happened to be an election year, and noted that Justice Brennan eventually became one of the key supporters of the constitutional right to abortion.

There is, moreover, a tradition in American Catholicism of public officials’ drawing a clear line between private beliefs and public duties. That line was most famously defined by John F. Kennedy, who told the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in September 1960, “I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me.”

Gov. Mario M. Cuomo of New York reiterated that line in 1984, declaring that while he accepted the church’s teachings on abortion, he could not impose those views on a pluralistic society.

The Senate Judiciary Committee that will review the Roberts nomination next month is in many ways a case study in Catholic political independence and diversity: 4 of the 8 Democrats are Catholics, and 2 of the 10 Republicans..

Still, in recent years, the American church has grown increasingly divided over the responsibilities of Catholic elected officials to promote church teachings – particularly on abortion – in their public lives. Last year, some conservative bishops threatened to deny communion to Catholic elected officials who disagreed with church abortion policy, including the Democratic presidential nominee, Senator John Kerry. Some analysts say the blurring of that line has inevitably heightened the interest in Judge Roberts’s religious background.

R. Scott Appleby, a historian at Notre Dame, said the bishops’ stance “eroded” the broad area of discretion that Catholic laity have historically had in their professional lives, “and I think that’s unfortunate.” He added, “That in itself planted the seeds for the kind of controversy that is now going on” around Judge Roberts, “someone who those bishops would very much approve of.”

Still, even as some church leaders try to exert more influence over Catholics in political life, several scholars noted that judges are not elected officials. Mr. Kmiec, the former dean of Catholic University’s law school and a former Reagan adviser, said that the church has “never argued that someone serving in the role of a judicial officer has the duty or even the encouragement to impose, in the scope of that judicial office, their faith.” In short, a judge is not supposed to be making the law, but merely applying it.

In the ideologically polarized climate of the current judicial battles, there is little room for scholarly parsing. Senator Richard J. Durbin, the Illinois Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, tried to have a private discussion with Judge Roberts about their shared Catholic religion and found himself embroiled in controversy and denounced by religious conservatives. Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the committee, said he was once denounced on a Sunday morning talk show as “anti-Christian or anti-Catholic” – while he was at Mass.

“It’s a world upside down,” said Mr. Leahy, who spoke nostalgically of the bright lines drawn by Kennedy in 1960.

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Target is the only advertiser in next week’s New Yorker. This ad is by Andre Dubois.

August 12, 2005

In a New Yorker First, Target to Be Sole Advertiser
By STUART ELLIOTT
FOR the first time in the 80-year history of The New Yorker magazine, a single advertiser will sponsor an entire issue.

The Aug. 22 issue of The New Yorker, due out Monday, will carry 17 or 18 advertising pages, all brought to you by the Target discount store chain owned by the Target Corporation. The Target ads will even supplant the mini-ads from mail-order marketers that typically fill small spaces in the back of the magazine.

The Target ads, in the form of illustrations by more than two dozen artists like Milton Glaser, Robert Risko and Ruben Toledo, are to run only the one time in the issue. They are intended to salute New York City and the people who live – and shop – there.

Many mainstream magazines like Time and Life have published what are known as single-sponsor issues, carrying ads only from marketers like Kraft Foods and Progressive insurance. Target has been a sole sponsor before of issues of magazines, among them People.

The goal of a single-sponsor issue is the same as it is when an advertiser buys all the commercial time in an episode of a television series: attract attention by uncluttering the ad environment.

“We try to do breakthrough things in many different places,” Minda Gralnek, vice president and creative director at Target in Minneapolis, said in a telephone interview.

” ‘Expect more. Pay less’ is our mantra,” Ms. Gralnek said, quoting the Target slogan, “and this is part of ‘Expect more.’ It’s not ordinary.”

The drawings in the Target ads will feature subway motifs, street and park scenes, a dog walker, a cocktail party, even a bridge rendered as a shoe. All the ads, not surprisingly, feature the Target bull’s-eye logo in one way or another, like a giant game of ring toss with the Target targets circling a skyscraper.

“We had a list of New York icons” that might appear in the ads, Ms. Gralnek said, but in the end “these were the rules we gave the artists: the ads had to use the Target bull’s-eye and had to have New York themes.”

The artists were also asked to draw using only three colors to help the ads stand out: red and white, for the Target logo, and black.

Neither Target nor The New Yorker, part of the Condé Nast Publications division of Advance Publications, would discuss what the sponsorship cost. A look at the magazine’s rate card suggests that a retailer like Target, which has advertised steadily in The New Yorker since 2003, would pay a bit under $1.1 million for the ads. But it is unclear whether a discount retailer whose slogan is “Expect more. Pay less” would pay, uh, retail.

For those worried that The New Yorker may be blurring the line between editorial content and commercialism, executives of the magazine and Target offered reassurances that there would be no equivalent of The New Yorker mascot, Eustace Tilley, staring at a butterfly through a monocle covered with a Target bull’s-eye.

“The editorial integrity of our product is a big thing,” David Carey, vice president and publisher of The New Yorker, said in an interview at his office in Times Square.

“People often say, ‘We’d like to do something in The New Yorker that’s never been done before,’ but we have high standards,” Mr. Carey said. “There are some ads we don’t accept if they break the format of the magazine.”

So while The New Yorker will run “a few scent strips a year” and gatefold cover ads, he added, the magazine has rejected ads in formats like the Dutch door, when a front cover, split in two, unfolds to reveal an ad inside.

Target was not told in advance what the editorial contents or the cover of the issue would be, Mr. Carey said, and there is to be no editorial acknowledgement of the sponsorship. (An ad identifying the illustrators is to run in the back pages of the issue.)

The ads were designed to look different from the cartoons that decorate the pages of The New Yorker, Mr. Carey said. For example, none of the ads are to have captions.

Mr. Carey said that he informed the editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, that the issue would have Target as its sole sponsor and that the arrangement would not affect the editorial department in any way.

Mr. Remnick, asked for a response, replied in an e-mail message, “Ads are ads, and I have no problem at all with Target’s advertising a lot, all at once, or a page at a time.”

Target and The New Yorker have been planning the issue for several months, working to find a week when the magazine could clear out all its other advertisers. The mid-August date “was an easier time to do it,” Mr. Carey said, because “if you want to own an entire issue” there are typically fewer advertisers during the dog days of summer than, say, during the holiday shopping season.

The few advertisers that had initially booked ad space in the Aug. 22 issue are being shifted to the Aug. 29 issue, Mr. Carey said.

In addition to the ads that will run on the pages of the Aug. 22 issue, there will also be a Target ad under the flaps that wrap the covers of the issues to be sold on newsstands.

The New Yorker issue joins a lengthy list of catchy marketing and promotional ploys from Target. They include opening so-called pop-up stores, which remain in business only a few weeks; decorating the outsides of office buildings with oversize Target billboards; and hiring acrobats and dancers last month to walk down the side of 30 Rockefeller Center in a “vertical fashion show.”

Many of Target’s special ads are aimed at New York City for reasons that include a desire to burnish the image of its stores among fashionistas in the garment district and burnish the image of its corporate parent on Wall Street. There are five Target stores in three New York City boroughs: the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens; so far, to contradict a famous Lorenz Hart lyric, Target does not have Manhattan (or Staten Island).

Ms. Gralnek said she was aware that some Manhattan shoppers, seeing all the Target ads in a borough that has no Target stores, have expressed frustration.

“If it does make some people want a Target more, that’s not a bad thing,” Ms. Gralnek said, adding that they could “get to the other stores” in the outer boroughs or visit the 53 Target stores in the metropolitan New York area, including Long Island and New Jersey.

True, but is there a magazine called The Long Islander, or The New Jerseyan?

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Carl Gossett/The New York Times

In 1961, these men robbed and killed a U.P.S. driver in New York; a police detective shows the murder weapon.

August 7, 2005
Where Killers Are Out of Style
By SAM ROBERTS

THE lions aren’t lying down with the lambs yet at the Bronx Zoo, but New York is becoming an increasingly peaceable kingdom.

With the year more than half over, it appears the number of homicides in the city may fall below 500 for the first time since 1961, when the subway fare was 15 cents and Roger Maris hit 61 home runs. If that happens, this could be the first year in nearly half a century when more New Yorkers kill themselves than are murdered, as well as the first time since then that New York’s murder rate, the number of murders per 100,000 people, is lower than that of the nation as a whole. At the peak in 1990, 2,245 murders were committed in New York. Whatever has driven down the murder rate since then – and no one is sure what that is – the drop raises two intriguing questions: Given the dwindling number of victims, who typically is killed? And, considering that even the first family in biblical Eden had a one in four chance of being slain, just how low will human nature let the murder rate go?

Today, random murders are way down: strangers commit just 16 percent of murders, down from 33 percent in 1991 (about 45 random murders were committed through July of this year, compared with 710 in all of 1991). Murders committed during robberies and burglaries have declined, too, to 11 percent today from 16 percent in 1991 (or about 31 deaths so far this year compared with 344 then). Both declines appear to be largely attributable to a greater police presence, fewer guns and the decrease in random violence in the city that came with the waning of the crack epidemic (fewer bystanders are being shot in drug wars; fewer store clerks are being killed in robberies committed by crack addicts).

In general, murder discriminates; you’re much more likely to be a victim in New York if you’re black and male. The most likely murder candidate is a black man with a criminal record, from the age of 25 to 40, outdoors on a weekend in Brooklyn and confronted by an angry 18- to 24-year-old friend, acquaintance or relative who is a former convict and is wielding a gun.

“If you’re not in that group, your chances of being murdered are minimal,” Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said.

Joshua Cohen, a senior researcher at Harvard’s Center for Risk Analysis, said that a black man is about 36 times more likely to be murdered than a white woman. Last year, New York’s 570 murder victims included 327 blacks (277 men and 50 women), 157 Hispanics and 66 whites (14 women). This year, about 11 percent of murder victims have been white.

Homicides are not declining because of some certainty that the police would find the killers. About 40 percent of murders go unsolved, a proportion that has remained pretty much the same for decades. And murder remains the leading cause of death among New Yorkers 15 to 34 years old.

“Can you get away with murder?” Commissioner Kelly said. “Yes, the clearance rate shows it.”

Analyses by Eric Monkkonen of the University of California, Los Angeles, found that at least 100 people have been killed in New York City annually since 1898. The toll passed 200 in 1906, 300 in 1920, 400 in 1929, 500 in 1931. The peak in 1990 came at the height of the crack epidemic, when scores of bystanders were killed by stray bullets, and drugs figured in about 40 percent of murders, compared with about 24 percent today.

But if, in 1990, the question was how high the number could go, today the question is how far it can fall.

James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, analyzed the range of murder rates in the nation’s 40 biggest cities and adjusted for demographic factors – primarily for race, which correlates with poverty and fragile family structure, both good predictors for crime. His model, based on how murder rates have fluctuated in all the major cities, suggests that the number of murders in New York could range from 2,407 in a very bad year to 385 in a very good one.

Those numbers are statisical abstractions, of course, not irrational flesh-and-blood human beings. In fact, it is possible that murders could fall even below 385. But in a city of eight million souls, in which more than 55,000 violent crimes took place last year, statistics and history, logic and experience, argue that some number murders will inevitably take place, whether committed by calculating criminals, impassioned lovers or a men having an argument in a bar.

“Could it go lower?” said Mr. Fox. ” Yes. Is 385 doable? That’s pretty low. It would put you at a rate where the only one that would be lower is Honolulu. I don’t think it’s going to happen. I call it the criminal justice limbo stick. The closer you get to the minimum the harder it is to reach it.”

One reason to hope the number of murders will continue to fall is that, armed with an increasingly sophisticated computerized crime database called Compstat, the police are learning more about who gets killed and why, and can try to pre-empt murder.

They have learned, for example, that if they stop enough people for minor offenses, frisk them and impose mandatory sentences for gun possession, word spreads pretty quickly (which may also explain why a growing proportion of murders these days are being committed with knives).

Take complaints of domestic abuse more seriously, and fewer spouses and partners will become homicide victims (a Health Department study found that more than half of murdered women are killed in their homes, a third by their intimate partners). Stake out social clubs on Saturday nights, and you can intervene before a fight becomes fatal.

“It is still possible to reduce the number of murders,” said Thomas A. Reppetto, president of the Citizens Crime Commission.

He pointed out that the annual number of murders in Manhattan recently dipped below 100 for the first time since the 19th century. Hardly anybody noticed.

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Jeff Topping for The New York Times

A fingerprint ID scanner is used by the Border Patrol in Nogales, Ariz.

August 10, 2005
Hurdles for High-Tech Efforts to Track Who Crosses Borders
By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON, Aug. 7 – The federal government has been pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the once-obscure science called biometrics, producing some successes but also fumbles in a campaign intended to track foreigners visiting the country and the activities of some Americans.

Hoping to block the entry of criminals and terrorists into the United States and to improve the enforcement of immigration laws, government officials have in the past several years created enormous new repositories of digitally recorded biometric data – including fingerprints and facial characteristics – that can be used to identify more than 45 million foreigners. Federal agencies have also assembled data on more than 70 million Americans in an effort to speed law-abiding travelers through checkpoints and to search for domestic terrorists.

The immigration control and antiterrorism campaign was spurred by the Sept. 11 attacks and subsequent Congressional mandates to improve the nation’s security. But the effort has fallen far short of its goals, provoking criticism that the government is committed to a technological solution so ambitious that it will either never work or be achieved only at an unacceptably high price.

“I am not satisfied,” said Representative Dan Lungren, Republican of California, who is chairman of a House panel that helps oversee the effort. “We are stumbling toward progress. I would hope we would be sprinting.”

In defending its record, the Department of Homeland Security points to arrests along the nation’s borders. In the past year, thanks to a new system that allows Border Patrol agents to check quickly and comprehensively the fingerprints of every illegal immigrant detained near the border, officers have identified 437 people wanted, previously charged or convicted of homicide; 579 who had sexual assault records and more than 18,000 others with records involving robberies, drugs, kidnappings or assaults.

The State Department said new facial recognition software had also uncovered visa fraud. The software identified 5,731 applicants to the annual visa lottery program who had doctored their names or otherwise cheated. They included people who each submitted at least a dozen applications and tried to disguise themselves with different hairstyles, glasses or expressions.

But the biometric effort still has a long way to go. The State Department, for example, recently started to test so-called electronic passports that contain a small computer chip that holds a digital photograph of the owner. [The department announced on Tuesday that it would begin issuing the electronic passports in December.] But even with the chip, officials at entry points will only have a bigger photograph to compare with the person seeking entry instead of a computer-based biometric analysis that could determine with certainty whether the passport holder was the legal passport owner.

“When it’s all in place, there’s still no real additional security or at least it’s of marginal value,” Representative Christopher Cox, Republican of California, said before he stepped down as chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security to become the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In all but a few locations, another new program, US-Visit – which has cost $1 billion and could exceed $10 billion – can only record foreigners’ arrivals, not their departures, meaning it is far from delivering on its promise of creating an immigration tracking system.

The high cost comes from the extensive computer networks that must be built to tie together the data and make it accessible to United States officials around the world.

“We are still just in the formative stages of this,” said Rey Koslowski, a political science professor at the University at Albany and the author of a recent report that questioned whether the program’s goals could ever be met. “Now may be the time to scale back the mission.”

The science of biometrics relies on unique human characteristics – including fingerprints, facial dimensions or the rings and furrows in the colored tissue of the eye – that can verify a person’s identity. The government programs that rely on biometrics – at least eight are under way at the Homeland Security and State Departments alone – want to remove the uncertainty involved in using a traditional passport, visa or other identification document.

The enhanced screening starts at the 207 State Department visa processing locations around the world. Since late last year, almost all applicants must be fingerprinted and submit a photograph. The prints are transmitted to Washington, where the Department of Homeland Security compares them to a database of about five million people, mostly criminals, who may be ineligible to receive a visa.

In rural Kentucky, the State Department has put another biometric tool to work. At its visa processing center there, staff members use facial recognition software to compare applicants against a database of digital images of 45 million foreigners – collected from a decade’s worth of applications – to see if any had previously applied under a different identity. The screening is being tested on small numbers of applications but will be expanded to all applications starting next year.

Facial recognition systems, which look at skin texture and the facial geography like the distances between the eye sockets or the point of a nose and an eyebrow, are much less accurate than fingerprint-based systems, requiring members of the State Department to examine every reported match.

But the system has been effective, particularly as a fraud-prevention tool in the competition for 50,000 special immigration visas that the State Department offers each year.

The software also spotted the same photograph of a Cambodian child in nine applications with different names, dates of birth and sets of parents.

The screening continues when foreigners come into the country. At domestic security checkpoints, visitors with visas are again fingerprinted and photographed to verify that they are the same people who were given the travel documents. If they are from 27 so-called visa waiver nations – mostly in Europe – they are fingerprinted and photographed for the first time. The federal government uses the data to check against watch lists and to share with law enforcement officials.

Perhaps the most effective effort so far is along the Mexican border, in places like Nogales, Ariz. More than 490,000 people were caught near Nogales last year trying to enter the United States illegally.

Five years ago, the only way to conduct a comprehensive criminal check of fingerprints was to fax the prints to a central processing center, which could take hours.

By last year, all 136 Border Patrol stations were linked to the F.B.I. fingerprint system, which produces results in two minutes.

The checks turned up 113,747 criminal record hits in the last 11 months, or about 7 out of every 50 detainees, compared with 1 in 50 before the new system was installed, a Customs and Border Patrol official said.

“Before, you might have a hunch that some guy was not right, but there was nothing you could do to check further – you just did not have the time,” Luke Bilow, a senior patrol agent at Nogales, said.

Among those identified were fugitives that included Francisco Martínez, a Mexican wanted for questioning last year in connection with the killing of his cousin in Florida. Mr. Martínez had fled while the investigation was under way, but turned up at a Border Patrol roadside stop in New Mexico.

The federal government also intends to use biometrics to screen Americans. The State Department has assembled a database of high-resolution digital images of passport applications – including photographs – submitted in the past decade by 70 million Americans.

In conjunction with facial recognition technology, the photos may eventually be used to detect fraudulent passport applications, one State Department official said. Law enforcement officials at the National Counterterrorism Center now have access to the photos for investigations into possible terrorist activity.

At six American airports, A.T.M.-like machines automatically read fingerprints and do eye scans of the irises of passengers enrolled in Registered Traveler, a Homeland Security Department program intended to speed the movement of “trusted travelers,” who also had to undergo background checks.

The cost of the program has been modest, $20 million in the last two years. But many critics question its value. Relatively few passengers take part because they must still wait in line to pass through metal detectors and have their bags X-rayed.

At Reagan National Airport outside Washington last Monday morning, one of the busiest times of the week, not a single passenger used the Registered Traveler ID machines for an hour, while hundreds of others passed through the regular checkpoints.

“It offers no benefit to our passengers,” Robert Isom, a Northwest Airlines senior vice president, told a House panel in June.

Mr. Isom suggested that officials consider abandoning the program.

Starting this week, the Homeland Security Department is testing a system that automatically tracks people as they cross land borders by issuing visas that transmit radio signals. But critics have pointed out that a person intent on circumventing the system could simply give his visa to someone else to carry across the border, because there is no biometric check.

“If we ever catch a terrorist, we will only catch an extremely dumb terrorist,” said a federal official who asked not to be named because he was criticizing the program he was involved in.

Representative Lungren said it was even more disturbing that the State Department accepted as proof of identity for passport applications documents like birth certificates that could easily be forged. In such cases, biometric-based technologies could actually help a smart terrorist.

“What we may have done, in some ways, is give terrorists or criminals tamperproof, fake ID’s,” he said.But federal officials say patience is required as the biometrics push gets under way.

“These things are tough,” said James A. Williams, director of US-Visit. “They take time.”

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