Spinning a Global Yarn : New-Age consultants put high-tech, psychologically slick twists on public relations.

Think the spin doctors are having fun with California’s gubernatorial primary? Wait until you see what they’re doing to the rest of the world--make that the Brave New World.

As one spin doc puts it, “Something is happening in the world, and it ain’t politics in any form known before, and it’s gonna change everything.”

What’s happening--high falutin’ terminology aside--is good old public relations. But it’s public relations with a high-tech, psychologically sophisticated twist.

In a darn-near brilliant piece of reportage in the April Manhattan Inc., staffer Maura Sheehy examines the Sawyer Miller Group, a New York-based consulting firm, which, in its own arrogant view, is revolutionizing the emerging democracies of the world and helping to “restructure” America.

Speaking a stilted, largely inarticulate New Age-esque newspeak, the PR guys at Sawyer Miller talk of “electronic democracies” and “global linkages.”

But when Corazon Aquino’s people call in the middle of the Philippine night to ask how to treat the major earthquake that just hit, they offer very specific spins. When they talk to the leaders or aspiring leaders of Poland or Colombia, they explain to them how to use television to make their people think “the government can become a part of the family,” Sheehy writes.

Through careful research into the country it is advising, the firm, Sheehy writes, “can discover what expectations are, so a government can be careful to meet those expectations, or more cynically, to appear to meet them.”

Or sidetrack them. Before the new Solidarity government in Poland forces its austerity program on the Polish people, for instance, it may just take the firm’s advice and put “some sexy French TV” on the national television station, as an “opiate and distraction,” Sheehy reports.

Sawyer Miller’s “manifesto” is purportedly to promote “fluid democracy and fluid dialogue.” As the article’s author points out, though, “What sometimes seems absent . . . is the quality and content of the dialogue.”

Too often, the PR-generated dialogues, such as those that dominated the last U.S. presidential campaign, “hit voters deeply, viscerally, emotionally. They weren’t geared to rational, informed debate.”

Still, these spin docs have technical skills that give them power “independent of any constituency, save that of the CEOs and politicians who pay their fees.”

And with that power they are shaping the way people in South and Central America, Eastern Europe, the Philippines and United States, among other places, will live.

Fluid democracy aside, what they really hope to create, Sheehy charges, “is a kind of shadow government just behind the ears of power, just out of the camera shot.”

MUST READ

* In Peru, where cocaine is the economy, where Maoist guerrillas calling themselves “the shining path” hack to death 39 Indians at a shot, where the inflation rate was 3,000% last year, it makes a magical realist sort of sense for a novelist to run for president. In the April Esquire, Guy Martin follows Mario Vargas Llosa on the campaign trail as this former Marxist-turned-Thatcherite, decked out in his $1,500 suits, glad-hands his way through villages of his “rock-sucking poor” countrymen. By the way: Guess which PR firm is handling his campaign?

* Are Robert Redford, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and other Hollywood movers dupes of Fidel Castro? That’s the assertion of an incendiary article in the April 16 New Republic. In question is Cuba’s internationally known film foundation, headed by novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez. As portrayed in the piece, Marquez is something of politically motivated money grubber, and he and Fidel “are using a cultural project to legitimize one of the last bastions of Stalinist rule--then roping in Hollywood to do the PR.”

* When a Japanese company bought an American Mexican food chain recently, the jokes about sushi burritos reflected the nation’s growing anxiety about foreign takeovers. In the March Business Tokyo, “The people who work at three illustrious concerns describe what it is like to be Bought By the Japanese.” Actually, it’s the people who run those companies who do most of the describing. As a consequence, the piece is pretty upbeat. It’s also informative.

* “We particularly want to thank the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for its generous assistance. . . .” Who’s talking here? Jessica Tandy? Akira Kurosawa? Nope. It’s Architectural Digest in its introduction to its April “Academy Awards Collector’s Edition!” More interesting than any of the after-awards party coverage, the issue offers glimpses into the homes of film stars past and present, including Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Mary Pickford, Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Lillian Gish, Liza Minnelli, Gene Hackman, Humphrey Bogart and Marlon Brando.

* To most people, it will look like a strange stamp collection. Trivia junkies and nostalgia freaks, however, will probably spend hours poring over Sports Illustrated’s special 35th anniversary issue with 35 years of SI covers.

* Horror stories about communist and Nazi kids who snitched on their parents to the KGB or Gestapo once were the basic stuff of American propaganda. Now, here in America, we salute the youngsters who fink on mom or dad for drug use. The April Life magazine presents an complex and intriguing profile of Bradley O’Hara, a 9-year-old who turned in his mom.

SHREDDER FODDER

* As usual, this week’s Entertainment Weekly is in too big a hurry to spend more than a few paragraphs on any film, TV show, book or musical creation. But it does devote six full pages of homage to the making of one of those “hip, glamorous,” Nike ads by Spike Lee. Yawn.

NEW ON NEWS RACKS

* Countryside, a new magazine “devoted to the interests of the increasing number of weekend or full-time countrysiders--contemporary young professionals and their families who yearn for a simpler, unspoiled life style closer to nature” is just about as good and bad as you’d expect.

At its best, it offers pieces such as author Alston Chase’s thoughtful essay on the reality awaiting urban exiles: “Ecological decline is not something we can run away from.”

At its worst, the Hearst Corp. bimonthly carries newspaper reprints such as: “The Greening of a Wall Streeter--An ex-banker milks her sheep for gourmet cheese and yogurt.”

In either case, the magazine deserves applause for contributing the charter advertising revenues from the slick first issue to organizations that buy ecologically sensitive land to protect it.