"Will no one weep for tulips?"

A million tulip bulbs — that could live through the winter and bloom next spring — will be cruelly burned to ashes because they are aliens. They came into the United States duty-free to appear at the World's Fair, but now they must be destroyed. Maintaining the federal government's tariff structure is more important than beauty — more important than life. I saw those flowers. I am crying as I write this.

THE YEAR THAT BLOG FORGOT IS: 1939.

"President Reagan and the lawyers he has put in charge of protecting civil rights should stand ashamed."

"Racial hatred is not tax-exempt, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday by a lopsided vote."

The NYT excoriates the Reagan Administration:

On what basis could the Administration have sided with private academies claiming a religious basis for discriminatory admissions? It's hard to think of any basis other than pandering to the religious right. Courts have repeatedly ruled that such schools are not entitled to pick the taxpayer's pocket for money to finance racial bias. And three previous Administrations, of both parties, obeyed the courts. Ronald Reagan tried to sneak past a change in this policy with a quiet announcement.

When that produced a storm of criticism, the President claimed he was legally bound to grant the tax exemptions. He had the gall to say that if Congress wanted to forbid them, it would have to pass another law. Congress rightly refused to dignify that ploy with an answer. The Court now explains that Congress has already given it - in laws passed over 90 years and reaffirmed twice since 1976.

Here's that "lopsided" decision in Bob Jones University v. United States. The lone dissenter is — as anyone could have guessed — William Rehnquist. How much "gall" are we talking about? Enough to make Congress seem noble for not passing more specific legislation? Rehnquist wrote:

The Court points out that there is a strong national policy in this country against racial discrimination. To the extent that the Court states that Congress in furtherance of this policy could deny tax-exempt status to educational institutions that promote racial discrimination, I readily agree. But, unlike the Court, I am convinced that Congress simply has failed to take this action and, as this Court has said over and over again, regardless of our view on the propriety of Congress' failure to legislate we are not constitutionally empowered to act for it.

Why let Congress off the hook? It's a shame that all this litigation was necessary.

THE YEAR THAT BLOG FORGOT IS: 1983.

"Racial minorities cannot be racist in the U.S.A." and "all whites are racist in the U.S.A."

2 statements in a NYC teachers' training manual. The "Lora Training Handbook: A Leader's Guide" — now withdrawn — was a response to an order by U.S. District Judge Jack B. Weinstein in a class action case about the disproportionate number of minority school kids who were getting assigned to special ed classes for the emotionally disturbed. The city was supposed to sensitize teachers to the problems of racism.

Here's the earlier NYT report on the manual:

One excerpt declares, ''In the United States at present only whites can be racists, since whites dominate and control the institutions that create and enforce American cultural norms and values.''

Another passage says: ''Even if an individual white American is free from all conscious racial prejudices, he/she remains a racist, for he/she receives benefits distributed by a white racist society through its institutions. . . . They do not have to consciously decide to oppress racial minorities in order to be racist.''

At another point, the handbook advises instructors that ''challenges are to be expected'' on the book's contentions that ''racial minorities cannot be racist in the U.S.A.'' and that ''all whites are racist in the U.S.A.'' The manual, Mr. Hikind noted, then provides instructors with ways to respond to such challenges.

Elsewhere... the manual declares, ''In order to change a racist society, all persons, particularly white persons in the U.S., must actively choose in some instance to question and go against authority, rules and values, in order to behave in an anti-racist way and fight a racist system"...

What is the conventional wisdom in academia is highly inflammatory when quoted to the general public. People don't want to hear that they are racist. I understand that the idea is to loosen up set ideas and to get people to rethink their perceptions and assumptions, but a different approach is going to be needed.

THE YEAR THAT BLOG FORGOT IS: 1987.

The White House announcer calls him "Justice Breyer."

It's our new Supreme Court nominee, Stephen G. Breyer, but he's not Justice Breyer until the Senate confirms him.

Some Democratic senators have grumbled that the President allowed Republicans to dictate his choice....

Mr. Clinton said: "The Constitution requires the President to seek not only the consent, but the advice, of the United States Senate. And I did that."

I like to see a solid, sensible, moderate justice, but I can see why some Democrats are grumbling. When they get finally their shot at a nominee — who knows how long it will be before they get another? — they want somebody strong, representing their point of view. It's been decades since we've had a truly passionate liberal on the Court. I'm thinking of William O. Douglas. But it's been a while since we've seen the likes of Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan. Harry Blackmun was the closest thing we had to a liberal, and now he's to be replaced by this Stephen Breyer character who, everyone knows, Bill Clinton rejected the first time around because he was too coolly dispassionate.

Elaine Jones, the director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, expressed some reservations about Judge Breyer. "He's a brilliant legal mind, no doubt about it," she said in an interview. "I know he's got the capacity, but he's got to have the fervor, too."

Yes, "fervor"... it sounds wrong for a judge. But don't we need at least some judges with fervor? Our conservative Justices seem rather fervent at times. Can Stephen Breyer offset them properly? You have to look at the whole array of Justices and think about the balance — try to predict how they will interact.

But the dissent today was mostly around the edges of the debate. Senator Alan K. Simpson, Republican of Wyoming, dismissed the suggestion that Mr. Clinton had nominated Judge Breyer to avoid a messy confirmation fight over his first choice, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt.

"Well, I had the biggest laugh of the day on that," he told reporters after the Rose Garden ceremony. "I mean, how the hell do a couple of ragged Western senators control what the President does in selecting a Supreme Court nominee? I can't imagine."

Wait. Was Simpson laughing deviously? Look at that quote. He laughed and he wondered how it could be that a little old Senator like him could manipulate a President. That doesn't mean he didn't think he did it. Maybe he's just amazed that the Prez caved. Ha ha ha — biggest laugh of the day.

Mr. Clinton agreed. "I think that when you do consult broadly, and you think about it and you're personally involved in it, as I've tried to be, you tend to make the right decision," he said.

Well, of course, he's going to assert that he made the right decision. But didn't Clinton cave?

It was last Saturday, May 7, when President Clinton first began to appreciate that his effort to choose a Supreme Court nominee was going to be far more difficult than he had hoped. Although Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt's name had been under consideration for some weeks, Mr. Clinton realized that his choice of the moment would not sail through the Senate and could create a wider set of political problems.

Further, one of the President's other two top candidates, Judge Richard S. Arnold, a friend from Arkansas, has cancer. That left only Judge Stephen G. Breyer of Boston. Mr. Clinton had regarded him as aloof and unappealing when they met last year, but in the end, Judge Breyer presented the fewest problems, and his friends convinced the President that he had misjudged him.

Although they had been engaged in a search for the past six weeks, Mr. Clinton and his top advisers, including, at important moments, his wife, Hillary, found themselves plunged into a tumultuous deliberation over the last week. The process was more public than they had wanted and hinged far less on jurisprudence than on personal and political considerations, including a possible fight over Mr. Babbitt's successor that could complicate Mr. Clinton's highest priority, health care.

The President found himself lobbied heavily by supporters of Judge Breyer, the man he named on Friday. Judge Breyer's backers lauded him as one of the nation's top jurists. One even sent a videotape meant to humanize the man Mr. Clinton had rejected for an earlier Court vacancy....

Judge Breyer was a finalist last year when President Clinton chose Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg as his first nominee to the Court. White House officials said they had turned away from Judge Breyer then because he had not fully paid Social Security taxes for a nanny, a hot issue at the time in Washington.

But in truth, officials acknowledged, the principal reason for the rejection was that Mr. Clinton found Judge Breyer didactic and distant when they met to discuss the nomination. The President, one White House official said, thought him distinctly uncharming.

Read that whole article. Clinton was excessively attentive to Senators, it seems. Do you think that if the next President is a conservative Republican, he's going to worry about Democratic Senators or that he will simply pick the very best conservative jurist he can find and fight for him or her? If the latter, those who want a passionate liberal now will be saying, but Bill Clinton consulted with Senators from the opposite party and nominated someone that everyone felt comfortable with. And those who are having a big laugh this week will be having another big laugh. Nice going, Bill. And good luck with that health care plan.

THE YEAR THAT BLOG FORGOT IS: 1994.

If women are competent to be jurors, is it because they are LESS emotional than men?

Justice Charles L. Guy of the New York Supreme Court thinks so. His point is that women's emotions — while perhaps more numerous than men's — are less deep. He admits that it would be hard to prove this, but — as the NYT paraphrases:

The doctors say that women are less sensitive to pain than men, but that, if true, may be because the women, having more pain to bear than men, have learned through the ages to endure it better, to accept it as the course of nature.

The emotionality of women appears to be aroused within narrower limits than those of men — personalities interest them more than generalities, and when the persons do not interest them some of them can be what to men seems strangely, even brutally, callous.

Hey, I like "Guy" as a name for a guy who has so much to say about the difference between guys and ladies, and I'm feeling strangely, even brutally, callous toward him. Still, I can see this is helpful toward the rights of women. He's saying, don't worry that women are too soft and sympathetic. If they aren't interested in you, they'll be just as happy as men to send you to the electric chair.

The Times notes that Guy had nothing to say about the conventional worry that the courtroom will wreck women's "delicacy and refinement." Neither the Times nor Guy says anything about how it might be a good thing to try to get some delicacy and refinement onto the jury. It's all about women and men being equal these days, and only unenlightened folk get twisted up thinking about how we are different.... except that part about us women being shallow. Somehow that was okay.

THE YEAR THAT BLOG FORGOT IS: 1925.

20 years after Brown v. Board of Education and what is it like...

... here in "the spring of Nixon's discontent"?

Roger Wilkins wonders where we are. One third of black Americans are still "mired in poverty," and Vernon Jordan says, "If we don't find a way out for that hard core one-third, I believe that we have the seedbed for the most rebellious revolution we can imagine."

THE YEAR THAT BLOG FORGOT IS: 1974.