Virtual Offensiveness
More than 15 years have passed since antilibertarianfeminists declared “pornography” a violation of women’s civil rights, allegingthat it demeaned and objectified women. In the 1980s, the antiporn movementenjoyed a lot of publicity and a little local legislative success. But federalcourts quickly struck down antiporn ordinances that classified some sexuallyexplicit speech as discriminatory and offered women…
The War about the War
“If something is defined as real, it is real,” goes a common dictum of thesocial sciences. The passive voice, however, conceals an uncertainty: Defined bywhom? What if, for example, two antagonists define their conflict in opposing ways? As American forces strike in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden and theTaliban say this is a religious war–a view…
Senatorial Crockery
Anthrax and the war in Afghanistan notwithstanding, Senate Republicans have elected to play domestic hardball. Recently, they delayed a foreign-aid bill to protest what The Wall Street Journal editorial page called “unprecedented stonewalling” on the president’s judicial appointments by the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, Democrat Patrick Leahy of Vermont. Yet what may be truly without…
Liberal Crack-Up
New York City has recently seen more casualties than we’d ever imagined possible. There is one casualty, however, that lies buried not under the rubble of lower Manhattan but beneath the acrid smoke that has blanketed this strangest of mayoral elections; and this loss may well have a more enduring effect on the city’s politics…
The $212-Billion Giveaway
Special-interest zeal to use the national-security crisis as an excuse for huge new upper-income tax breaks continues unabated in Washington, D.C. On a party-line vote, the House on October 24 approved a bloated “stimulus” tax-cut bill that makes a mockery of the previous bipartisan agreement between congressional leaders and the administration that additional stimulus measures…
Sidebar: Immigrants on Campus
See Green Light, Red Light by Ronald Brownstein Among the many things destroyed along with the twin towers on September 11 was the opportunity for many children of illegal immigrants to go to college. Before September 11, there were bills pending in state and federal legislatures that would have eased the path to college for…
Green Light, Red Light
See the Sidebar: Immigrants on Campus by Natasha Hunter Maybe the best measure of the deteriorating prospects for fundamental immigration reform after the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon came at a congressional hearing on, of all things, airport security. Amid the debate over arming pilots, deploying sky marshals on commercial flights, or…
Comment: After Triumphalism
What a wonderful world it seemed in the 1990s. TheUnited States had not only won the Cold War; it had demonstrated the economic,political, and moral superiority of its own system, the free market. Those abroadwho had long resented U.S. global policies were finally revealed to beself-defeating nationalists or superannuated Marxists. Even the Latin Americanswere scrambling…
Less Secure, Less Free
For civil libertarians, there was one extra nightmare when we finally got to sleep on that awful day of September 11, 2001. We knew that the Washington bureaucracy’s wish list of additional powers to conduct surveillance of Americans would not be based on a careful analysis of what went wrong. We feared that in the…
The Asian Challenge
On the face of things, the overseas focus of America’s antiterrorist campaign should be on the Middle East. Osama bin Laden is a Saudi. His al-Qaeda network is made up primarily of Saudis, Egyptians, and others from the Middle East. No matter how you define the underlying causes of the problem–whether you blame Islamic fundamentalism,…
Foxed In?
Though no one is likely to mistake Mexico for a Muslim country–even one of the friendly, oil-exporting ones–the United States’ declaration of war on terrorism has forced its southern neighbor into a predicament not altogether different from the one faced by moderate Middle Eastern countries like Oman or Saudi Arabia. If the country’s government does…
Managing the Rage
As the fog lifts from the September 11 attacks, the FBI and CIA are presumably honing in on the identity and aims of the people behind the plot. An organizational explanation focused on conspiratorial networks will be easier for us to accept than a broader sociological one, since anyone who draws attention to the “root…
Why Don’t They Like Us?
It wasn’t its innocence that the United States lost on September 11, 2001. It was its naïveté. Americans have tended to believe that in the eyes of others the United States has lived up to the boastful clichés propagated during the Cold War (especially under Ronald Reagan) and during the Clinton administration. We were seen,…
Flying While Brown
Like everyone else at San Antonio airport on the night of September 17, Ashraf Khan passed through tight security before boarding Delta Airlines flight 1469 to Dallas, the first leg of a two-day journey to Karachi, Pakistan, where he planned to attend his brother’s wedding. Khan, an 11-year U.S. resident with a green card, had…
In Dreams Begin Responsibilities
Many people will love Mulholland Drive, I am sure; and the fact that my admiration is mingled with profound annoyance perhaps says more about me than about the movie. It is David Lynch’s best film since The Elephant Man (which remains, for me, the pinnacle of his achievement). It is better than the goofy Eraserhead…
Of Slime Mold and Software
Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software By Steven Johnson. Scribner, 288 pages, $25.00 It’s easy to see why there aren’t more books like Steven Johnson’s Emergence: Only Johnson knows how to write them. Johnson was a founder and editor of Feed, one of the Web’s first and best “zines” (now moribund,…
Chronicling the Last War
War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals By David Halberstam. Scribners, 543 pages, $28.00 Inside David Halberstam’s mammoth opus is a good little book struggling to escape its author’s fatal ambition. The justly celebrated reporter apparently believes it possible to tell the story of U.S. foreign and military policy over a…
The Enchantress
Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent MillayBy Nancy Milford. Random House, 550 pages, $29.95 What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay By Daniel Mark Epstein. Henry Holt and Company, 300 pages, $25.00 The Selected Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay Edited and with an…
The Blair Project
When Tony Blair went on television within hours of the September 11 terrorist attacks to declare that Britain would stand shoulder to shoulder with the United States, the British prime minister entered a moment of total personal and political clarity–an epiphany. He would give George W. Bush and the war on terrorism unflinching support and…
American Anointed
How the United States sowed the whirlwind
Sports: War Games
After September 11, it wasn’t long before martial terminology returned to the airwaves: There was talk once again of blitzes and bombs, of aerial assaults and ground attacks, of going on the offensive and making moves to shore up the defense at home. There was talk of heroes and warriors, of duty and sacrifice, of…
