Snide celebrations.

The last weekend in August marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of the ratification of women's suffrage, and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Women's Strike for Equality, a huge nationwide demonstration by feminists that announced the arrival of the women's liberation movement. Television news made fleeting reference to the suffrage anniversary, and our newspaper of record, The New York Times, ignored it entirely. No one even mentioned the strike, which back in 1970 was the largest feminist demonstration in history, and thus was a front-page story and dominated the nightly news. (Well, hell, who wants to look at old footage of all those angry, karate-chopping, humorless, castrating Amazons anyway? It might suggest that anniversaries involving women are just as important as those involving men.

The pundits chose a variety of touching tributes to commemorate these feminist milestones. Evans and Novak, on CNN (with Fred Barnes sitting in for Rowland Evans), gave a half-hour of deeply respectful air time to Bob Packwood--a.k.a. "The Tongue"--and didn't treat him like the pathetic, obnoxious, justice-obstructing boor he clearly is. Packwood pooh-poohed those trivial charges of sexual harassment as twenty-year-old news and then jovially recounted a story about how another Senator came up to him during the Senate Ethics Committee hearings and said, "Boy, I'm glad that's not me. If that was me, we'd have to hold hearings in RFK Stadium." Har, har, har: big, goofy, boys-will-be-boys chuckles from Barnes and Novak, whose laughter endorsed the notion that forcibly french-kissing your seventeen-year-old intern, not to mention twenty-some-odd other women, is simply a Senatorial perk, nothing the skirts should get so riled up about. Novak, in his closing encomium to Packwood, hailed him as "a fighter."

The commemorations didn't stop here. Over on This Week With David Brinkley, the lead question was, "Is Hillary Clinton's decision to go to China the right one?" Oh boy, more Hillary bashing. Guest pundit William Kristol announced that "there's no national interest in Hillary Clinton going to China" for the international women's conference because "it's not an important conference." Yeah, well, anything that might draw attention to the millions of women around the world who live in abject poverty, suffer genital mutilation, the unnecessarily in childbirth, or are battered by male relatives is probably inconsequential. And the estimated 50,000 women in Beijing are probably just there to gossip and shop anyway. Except for Hillary. According to Republican pundits, she'll be endorsing slave labor and the forced abortion of female fetuses. As George Will put it, her attendance "completes the de-moralization of Hillary Clinton."

Cokie Roberts noted regretfully at the end of the discussion that "I wanted to celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of women's suffrage, but we're out of time." But not so out of time that Will couldn't add sarcastically, "And it made the United States a paradise." The week before, when Roberts told Brinkley that Shannon Faulkner's withdrawal from the Citadel did a great disservice to women and hurts the cause of women's equality, Brinkley responded with mock concern, "We feel for you, Cokie." More chuckles all around.

I know you're waiting to hear about the festivities over on The McLaughlin Group. Unfortunately, at the end of August the regulars are on vacation, and McLaughlin does theme shows with guests who don't usually serve as pundits. This one--entitled "Is it time to shut the gates?"--was about immigration and featured Peter Brimelow, author of an anti-immigration diatribe called Alien Nation. His comportment was that of a Rottweiler who had never known the benefits of a rabies vaccination. His accent was vaguely South African, and he spoke of immigrants as if they were body lice. His position, if I am summarizing it correctly, is that we should halt all immigration tomorrow, possibly by walling in the entire country. We learned that Pat Buchanan wants a wall at least along the entire Mexican border. It's important to give such erudite policy analysts national air time. At least they aren't out of the mainstream the way those crazed feminists are.

McLaughlin kept getting hysterical over the invasion of the immigrants and the "browning of America," warning that "native Americans [he doesn't mean Indians] and their offspring will become a minority in their own nation before the end of the next century." It would be helpful if viewers were reminded that by 1920, in cities like New York, Chicago, and Detroit, "native Americans and their offspring" were already greatly outnumbered--by as much as three-to-one--by the foreign-born and by children born here of foreign-born parents. Their descendants now boast of such roots when running for President. But at least this nativist ranting distracts attention away from the soaring emigration of jobs out of the country, sponsored by corporations especially fond of underpaid and overworked child and female labor.

The previous week, McLaughlin hosted a debate that asked, "Is the entertainment industry poisoning our values?" The panelists were all white males. One of them, John Podhoretz of the new conservative rag The Standard, actually said on national television that the drop in weekly movie attendance from 1946 (90 million) to 1995 (25 million) "can only be explained by a decline in standards, a decline in quality, and a decline in taste." How does McLaughlin do it-find a guy who somehow missed the invention of TV, suburbia, and the VCR?

I guess it was really silly of me to think that this summer, when anniversary celebrations both jubilant and somber have been incessant, anyone would take note of feminist achievements. Oh well, that's OK. I know that during the coverage of Beijing, the media and pundits alike will explore the substantive issues raised there, that they won't simply dog Hillary, and they certainly won't seek out conflict so they can make the conference seem like a giant, international cat fight among unreasonable, strident harridans who just can't get along. None of that will happen. Because seventy-five years after getting the right to vote, we've come a long way, baby.

Susan Douglas teaches at Hampshire College. Her column appears in this space every month.