New York in the 1960s
The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to SaveNew York By Vincent J. Cannato. Basic Books, 702 pages, $35.00 Before the sun had risen on John Lindsay’s first dayas mayor of New York City, the Transport Workers Union went out on strike. It wasthe dead of winter in 1966, and the city’s subways and…
Comment: The Persistence of Politics
The first casualty of war is said to be truth, but more precisely the casualty is complexity. In war, there are Evil and Good, Enemies and Allies, a Them and an Us, conveniently spelled U.S. George Bush declared: “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.” Excoriating an enemy whose suicide bombers…
Life and Liberty
JUST HOW GOOD IS AMERICAN LIBERALISM’S INNER EAR? Defending an open society in the wake of September’s attacks demands that we strike the right balance between security and liberty, between the first of the Declaration of Independence’s inalienable rights and the second; and that we remind our countrymen that in a battle of ideals with a…
Dim Intelligence
What Did We Get for All That Money?
The Liberties We Defend
The tragic and unbearable events of September 11 have united Americans and much of the world as they have not been united for many years. The Bush administration has a unique opportunity to create effective domestic and international structures to deal not only with terrorism but with the other twenty-first-century threats to national and international…
A War Economy…
In a war economy, the public obligation is to do whatis necessary: to support the military effort, to protect and defend the hometerritory, to stabilize the economy itself, and, especially, to maintain thephysical well-being, solidarity, and morale of the people. These may not be easytasks in the months ahead. We are facing an economic war–but…
Terror and Liberalism
The present war, if that is the correct word, may very well be, as President Bush has observed, a war of a new kind—the “first war of the twenty-first century.” But in one important respect, the present war also appears to be—and this, too, the president has hinted at indirectly—a war of an old kind,…
How Not to Fight Terrorism
The calamitous attacks of September 11 have imposed on Americansa sense of vulnerability that we’ve been privileged to avoid for a long time. Butas we respond to the threat of terrorism in our midst, and as the nation takes upwhat President Bush has called a fight for our freedoms, we must maintain ourcommitments to those…
Public Heroes
Even the Right Suddenly Appreciates Government
Cut-Rate Security
How the Airlines Privatized the Nation’s Safety
Safety and Freedom
Of all the lame excuses offered for the failures ofU.S. intelligence and security that facilitated the attacks on the World TradeCenter and the Pentagon, the most disingenuous was the repeated claim thatantiterrorism efforts have been restrained by respect for America’s freedoms.Tell that to the victims of harsh counterterrorism and immigration laws passed inthe aftermath of…
Collective Security
The Bush administration would be wise to work through the UN Security Council abroad and respect civil liberty at home
Another Wolf at the Door
Global oil production will probably reach a peak sometime during this decade. After the peak, the world’s production of crude oil will fall, never to rise again. The world will not run out of energy, but developing alternative energy sources on a large scale will take at least 10 years. In the meantime, there will…
Gen. Greenspan’s Timid March
We’re not in a war economy yet. We’re in an economy that’s just plainsinking. What to do? Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has told Congress to”wait and see” what happens before enacting a stimulus package lest it createinflationary fantasies among traders of long-term bonds. In an extraordinary showof newly bipartisan gutlessness, our representatives in Washington…
Excusing Terror
Even before September 11, hardly anyone was advocating terrorism—not even those who regularly practice and support it. The practice is indefensible now that it has been recognized, like rape or murder, as an attack upon the innocent. The victims of a terrorist attack are ordinary men and women, eternal bystanders. There is no special reason…
The New Twilight Struggle:
It was not about us; it was about them. that is the firstthing to understand about the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and thePentagon. Many motives may have figured in the minds of those who directed thisatrocity. Perhaps they hate us, as some pundits say, because we are rich, orbecause of our liberal…
The Children Are Watching Us
Set among the bleak row houses of Depression-eraLiverpool, Stephen Frears’s new film, Liam, is yet another sepia-tinted tale of a cute, dimpled Catholic boy (played here by Anthony Burrows) whose diet consists mostly of bread, potatoes, and interminable school sermons that promise only hellfire and damnation. “What does sin do?” his teacher asks in a…
Terror TV
The television moments that can even begin tocompareare few: On November 24, 1963, Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald in front of 20million television viewers–more than 20 percent of the United States populationat the time. On January 28, 1986, millions of viewers–many of themchildren–witnessed the loss of American lives in real time as the space…
The North American Way
There is no silver lining to the cloud of horror thatdescended on America September 11. Many are engaged in burying the dead andtending to the survivors or facing the awesome responsibility of satisfying thenational demand for action that serves justice rather than multiplying evil.Those of us who are going back to “business as usual” have…
Strangers in Our Midst
Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America By Stephen G. Bloom. Harcourt, 338 pages, $25.00 The Stranger Next Door: The Story of a Small Community’s Battle over Sex,Faith, and Civil Rights By Arlene Stein. Beacon Press, 267 pages, $27.50 A stranger comes to town. It’s one of the greatthemes of American literature and film,…
The Law from A to The
It’s the little things that count. While some privacy advocates cry foulover the section in Attorney General John Ashcroft’s draft antiterrorism billthat extends certain wiretapping provisions to the Internet, an equally ominouschallenge to civil liberties lurks in an innocent one-word change. In Section 153of the proposed legislation presented to Congress on September 19, the word…
Follow the Money Laundering
Just how good is American liberalism’s inner ear? Defending an open society in the wake of September’s attacks demands that we strike the right balance between security and liberty, between the first of the Declaration of Independence’s inalienable rights and the second; and that we remind our countrymen that in a battle of ideals with…
The War We Should Fight
Let there be no doubt that America is justified in going to war against what President Bush describes as terrorism of “global reach.” After September 11, we have to assume that any group willing to kill thousands of people in the World Trade Center’s twin towers would be willing to use weapons of mass destruction.…
