Attend our Council Meetings,

If you wish to learn a lot —

About our fearless leaders,

And what’s cooking in the pot.

Particularly, if you live on slopes,

Or plan to paint your house,

Or maybe to install a fence,

Or even trap a mouse.

You can observe, a new Bell Curve,

By how they think things out.

Agendas that affect you.

Believe me, there’s no doubt.

The bottom line, you may find,

Is to justify the fact —

They love the Power of Control,

And how we breath and act.

There may never be a reason,

Nor a season, for their plans —

But even so, the ego’s show,

As they ignore the facts at hand.

You have to see in person,

What Cityhood has wrought —

The quality of thinking,

And what our votes have bought.

P. F. Fogbottom

I hardly believe that the Malibu city attorney’s investigation into the 1996 City Council election campaign irregularities was a “Kenneth Starr-style investigation.” Hogin was amazingly discreet, no leaks from these lips, and most notably, O’Neill’s sex life was not held up to scrutiny and I never saw a photo of her in a beret.

I cannot believe that the Malibu Courts will find that Ms. O’Neill committed a serious offense against public law, nor will the consequences amount to much. Acknowledging that O’Neill must be under a lot of pressure, stress, and fear, I feel the real crime is the alleged $40,000 O’Neill owes her lawyers for dealing with these petty offenses.

Natasha O’Brian

It’s hard to be nostalgic when you can’t remember anything but nostalgia.

I received an e-note from an ex-Malibuite that follows the local Malibu adventures via the Internet edition of The Malibu Times. Or as she stated, “the greatest little tabloid west of Lost Hills.”

She is a mother of four boys, CEO of a successful business and general manager of a Northern California household. Writing a relevant sequence of nostalgic memories about her early days growing up in our community (one of which was me). She reminisced that, as there were no bus lines in Malibu, and gasoline was sold on odd and even days, so she and her siblings would find ways of convincing me that her posse needed an automobile ride to a local store. Of course it was always to retrieve an important item for a school project, only to come home with a pencil and bag of candy.

She was always the deputy in charge of the confection posse and thus the handle of Silver Tongue was bestowed upon her. If the brothers and sisters were short of money you can guess who came up with the difference. Silver Tongue recalled the puzzling time of courtship as a Malibu teen and communicated to me some of the dialogue that her father would have with her youthful suitors. His most memorable comments:

If you want to be on time for the movie, you should not be dating my daughter.

My daughter is putting on her makeup, a process that can take longer than striping Pacific Coast Highway.

If you pull into my driveway and honk you’d better be delivering a package, because you’re sure not picking anything up.

You do not touch my daughter in front of me. You may glance at her, so long as you do not peer at anything below her neck.

I am aware that it is considered fashionable for boys of your age to wear their trousers too big and teeming with holes. I propose this compromise: You may come to the door with your pants full of holes, underwear showing and your pants ten sizes too big, and I will not object. However, in order to ensure that your clothes do not, in fact, come off during the course of your date with my daughter, I will take my electric nail gun and fasten your trousers securely in place to your waist.

I’m sure your parents have told you that in today’s world, sex without utilizing a “barrier method” of some kind can kill you. Let me elaborate, in this family when it comes to sex, I am the barrier, and I will kill you.

It is usually understood that in order for us to get to know each other, we should talk about sports or grades. Please do not do this. The only information I require from you is an indication of when you expect to have my daughter safely back at my house, and the only word I need from you on this subject is “early.”

The following places are not appropriate for a date with my daughter: Places where there are beds, sofas or anything softer than a wooden stool. Places where there are no parents, deputy sheriffs, or Sisters of Saint Louis within eyesight. Places where there is darkness. Places where there is dancing, holding hands or happiness. Places where the ambient temperature is warm enough to induce my daughter to wear shorts, tank tops, midriff T-shirts, or anything other than overalls, a sweater and a goose down parka — zipped up to her throat. Movies with a strong romantic or sexual theme are to be avoided. A movie, which features 101 Dalmatians, is OK. Baseball games are OK. Visiting old folk’s homes are better.

My favorite particle of fatherly advice to one of Silver Tongue’s boyfriends: Do not lie to me. I may appear to be a potbellied, middle-aged, has-been, but on issues relating to my daughter, I am the all-knowing, merciless god of your universe. If I ask you where you are going and with whom, you have one chance to tell me the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

And that’s the total truth.

Tom Fakehany

I have $100.00 to help elect Remy O’Neill to the Malibu City Council.

Where can I send it?

Andrea Sharp

There is controversy on these pages. Yet we all agree, the American flag is a thing of beauty.

Why on honorable days, such as Memorial Day, Flag Day, Fourth of July and Veterans Day, are there so few flags flying in Malibu?

B.W. Kantola, M.D.

The nation’s capitol is brimming with ideas to curtail youth violence. The president said he didn’t want to blame anybody, but a good deal of the finger pointing has landed on those of our neighbors who make their living entertaining us.

There are two ways to respond: as defensive members of a corporation under scrutiny or as talented and creative artists who justifiably pride themselves on their social conscience. Jack Valenti, the head of the Motion Picture Association of America, took the first course. I am writing as a parent and friend to Malibu neighbors in the entertainment field to urge the second. Because I know these producers, directors, actors and writers to be parents first, I am confident they will see the wisdom in this.

Unfortunately, in responding to an inquiring Congress, Jack Valenti played technocrat, not parent. “I’m not saying that movies don’t have an impact,” he evaded. “I just don’t know what it is.” Really? Jack says he wants a new study to determine whether movies like “Scream” and “Natural Born Killers” actually have an adverse effect on young minds. No new study is needed.

Apart from the disturbing similarity between the portrayed murders in recent films and Columbine, a surgeon general’s report that three decades ago found a broad correlation between simulated and actual violence, and a host of other real-world, copy-cat killings, Jack can just ask virtually any parent — or for that matter — his financial colleagues in the industry who aren’t writing expensive, high-resolution, surround-sounded films, because no one is paying attention.

But my point is not to pick on the ever-voluble Jack Valenti, who, when I was working in the White House, once even graciously took me to the movies — a good one (“The Verdict” with Paul Newman, about a lawyer overcoming injustice and a personal addiction). Indeed, I believe Jack is absolutely right when he states that the family is the only genuine hope for addressing violent youth behavior. What is missing, I fear, is the unique role the entertainment family can play at this very moment by beginning a conversation on how to raise the overall level of quality in film and television programming without stifling self-censorship.

We know this is possible. This year’s Academy notables illustrate. “Shakespeare in Love” cleverly re-introduced the extraordinary insight of the bard to thousands who might otherwise have consigned him to a humdrum English class (although, thanks to Patricia Cairns and Jennifer Gonzalez at Malibu High, we know there is no hum drumming indulged locally). So too, “Life is Beautiful” poignantly proposed that the power of a father’s love could strive to defeat even the most brutal Nazi terror. And while one hopes foreign and military policy is not fashioned in theater mezzanines, it is not beyond reason to think that public sentiment is strongly opposed to ground war in Kosovo in part because Stephen Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” graphically reminded us what that entails.

As with Spielberg’s “Ryan,” every parent recognizes that real life isn’t always beautiful. Gangs commit random violence; fraud, discrimination and corruption occur in government and business; spousal abuse, infidelity and divorce sadly can invade even the best of families. This is part of the human condition and therefore a necessary part of well-told stories in film, song, and video. But thankfully, this is neither our aspiration nor the norm. Neither the lives of accountants nor actors, nor professors or producers, nor homemakers or heavy metal rockers are consciously directed toward, or constantly dominated by, such tragic aberration. Why then, must so much of commercial and cable television, CD, video games and movies come in this distorted form?

When television was in its infancy, they used to call that “the $64,000 question.” And it still is. Some conservative voices, who I count as friends from my Reagan days, go on and on about an abstraction called the “culture war,” and write off the entertainment industry as incapable of giving a decent, civically responsible answer. I don’t. I know the producers, directors, actors and writers of this community love their children as much as I love mine, and all of us want a world for them as free of hatred and violence as possible.

In short, an entertainment industry that is giving America the courage to remove the ubiquitous presence of cigarettes can do the same for guns. Both evils are part of a culture of death that deserves no continuing role in an industry that genuinely desires to ensure that life is beautiful.

Pepperdine University Law Professor Douglas W. Kmiec holds the Caruso Family Chair in Constitutional Law, Pepperdine University, and was a former legal constitutional counsel to Ronald Reagan.