From the Ashes, a Jewish Museum
L ike a streak of lightning or an unraveling Star of David, the Jewish Museum Berlin zigzags through the city’s Kreuzberg section, just steps away from graffiti-covered storefronts and boxy, high-rise public housing. Clad in zinc, its facade broken with irregular slashes of glass, it gleams like a spaceship plopped down in an alien landscape.…
The Joy of Sects
N ow that the election has finally ended, politicians may be less preoccupied with declaring their allegiance to God, but efforts to involve Him in public policy show no sign of abating. Most Republicans and many Democrats have enthusiastically advocated federally funded, sectarian social service programs, which were promoted initially by the religious right. George…
Comment: Politics and Beanbag
P olitics, as Finley Peter Dunne’s Mr. Dooley had it, ain’t beanbag. But lately the Republicans have been playing political hardball while too many Democrats play beanbag. Candidate George W. Bush managed to have it both ways, casting himself as a uniter but offering raw partisan rhetoric against the Democrats. During the debates, Bush kept…
Indentured Public Servant
A lan Cranston was always an organizer–one of the best of the post-World War II generation. Soon after the war ended, he founded and built the United World Federalists, an expression of postwar one-worldism that valiantly battled the Cold War zeitgeist. After he left the U.S. Senate eight years ago, he founded and built the…
Round Midnight
A s Bill Clinton prepared to leave office and public attention swiveled toward the incoming administration, the outgoing president spent his last months in the Oval Office making recess appointments and issuing a flurry of new regulations and executive orders. Many of these have been in the works for years but were blocked by the…
Born-Again Bipartisanship
Here’s a dictionary entry straight out of Ambrose Bierce: bipartisan politician–a Democrat who’s afraid of being indicted. Stirrings in the Justice Department have led some observers to predict that indictments are forthcoming against two 18-year Democratic veterans of Congress. In the Senate, New Jersey’s Robert Torricelli has reportedly been under scrutiny for possible fundraising improprieties…
Surprising Nostradamus
One of the synchronicities of the 2000 election was that interest in Nostradamus spiked after George W. Bush was finally acclaimed president-elect. At the turn of the year, the sixteenth-century French seer was listed at number 32 on the Lycos 50, the search engine’s compilation of top online information requests (the list doesn’t include pornography-related…
Stocking Up
T hrough much of the year 2000, stock market analysts at leading brokerage houses were wildly bullish on Priceline.com, the Internet firm that sells discounted airline tickets, groceries, and other goods. True, the company was hemorrhaging money–operating losses for 1999 ran to $63 million–but the analysts boldly predicted that Priceline would soon move into the…
The New Economy As a Decent Society
H ow is the new economy affecting our lives and what should be done about its excesses and injustices? This debate is emerging all over the world, but it surfaces only sporadically and partially, like the tip of a giant iceberg into which other things crash. French workers strike in pursuit of a 35-hour maximum…
Stealth TV
A t Clifton High School, a mostly white, working-class institution in suburban New Jersey, it’s time for second period–and for Channel One, a public-affairs TV broadcast available exclusively for school viewing. Mounted high in a corner of every classroom–as omnipresent an icon as the American flag–is a large-screen television set, provided by Channel One. The…
From New Deal to New Opportunity
A merica’s ambivalent electorate seems to reflect the paradoxes of our times: hunger amidst prosperity, a monumental and growing wealth gap, and record-high employment while millions of workers struggle to make ends meet. Yet no unifying policy framework commands broad support, and no strategy exists to convey a new vision in popular terms. In the…
The Rich Get Richer:
A newcomer to the United States, after reading the newspaper or watching television for a few days, might conclude that every family in America was huddled around their computers, watching their stocks and mutual funds rise and fall. Even the gloomier news reports of recent weeks (“How to Survive the Slump” blared a recent Time…
The Court Packs Itself
I n Justice John Paul Stevens’s despairing words, Bush v. Gore has shaken “the nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.” Coming as it does from a justice known for his sobriety, this judgment should give all of us pause–and I mean Republicans no less than Democrats. We…
All the Maestro’s Men
Nine o’clock on a Saturday morning. Early for the phone. Woodwind snapped awake. It was the city desk. There had been some kind of burglary at Democratic Party headquarters. There was speculation in the newsroom that the White House, even the President himself, might be implicated. Perhaps some kind of botched spy job by an…
The Anti-Auteur
R emember the name: Michael Winterbottom. Not yet 40 and already the director of eight features, Winterbottom is the remarkably versatile, remarkably gifted Englishman one great film away from a place among today’s moviemaking elite. His latest and most ambitious effort, The Claim, won’t be that launching pad. A romantic epic set just after the…
Educational Television
T he Big Moment in the early episodes of the Fox Network’s Boston Public comes at a school board meeting called by the superintendent–an enemy of Winslow High School’s tough-love overseer, Principal Harper–to address the principal’s handling of a teacher who brandished a gun in his classroom, a soccer team that tried to download test…
The Way of RFK
Searching for America’s Heart: RFK and the Renewal of Hope, Peter Edelman. Houghton Mifflin, 272 pages, $26.00. Peter Edelman views the last decades of twentieth-century American social policy through a unique lens. As an aide to New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy, then as policy director for Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign, Edelman watched and participated…
Liberalism’s Lifeguard
Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality, Ronald Dworkin. Harvard University Press, 511 pages, $35.00. About halfway through Sovereign Virtue, I came across an intriguing paragraph. Ronald Dworkin is discussing Lochner v. New York, an infamous 1905 decision in which a conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a statute limiting the…
Specters of Socialism
It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States, Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks. W.W. Norton and Company, 79 pages, $26.95. Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks have written a cold and bloodless book that dissects the failure of socialism in America the way a forensic pathologist would slice into, pick apart,…
