Trading on Terrorism:
“Sometimes,” U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick said recently, “tragedy also presents opportunities for those who are alert.” Sure enough, in the collapse of the World Trade Center, the alert Mr. Zoellick saw an opportunity to appeal to wartime patriotism in order to put new trade deals on a congressional “fast track.” Fast-track authority allows a…
Political Science:
Most people are demoted for poor performance. Dr. John H. Marburger, President Bush’s newly confirmed science adviser, was kicked down a notch before he even started his job. For over a decade, the national science adviser–who heads the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)–has been a near-cabinet-level position. Officially, the designation is…
You Don’t Have to Be Jewish
A description of sandi Simcha DuBowski’s documentary Trembling Before G-d sounds like the start of a bad ethnic joke: Did you hear the one about the gay Orthodox Jew? The film, however, is no joke at all, as it focuses on the dire plight of religiously devout Jewish homosexuals. Shot in ghoulish yellow shades, the…
Rethinking Pacifism:
When you sit alone, silence seems normal, but the silence of a hundred people feels charged, alive somehow. The Quaker meetinghouse in Washington, D.C., is full this Sunday, as it has been every week since September 11. As we sit facing one another on rows of benches arranged around a central open space, sunlight dapples…
Coming Attractions
Republican strategists have been quick to dismiss the significance of the Democratic victories during this November’s elections. Republican pollster Whit Ayres declared that they “tell us almost nothing about the likely election outcomes a year from now.” But the off-year gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia–held in the first year of a new president’s…
Race Conquers All
New York, like Los Angeles, now has its new mayor; that’s the bad news. Seldom has a city elected a leader about whom it knew less or who seemed to know less about his city. Their mutual ignorance–New York’s of Michael Bloomberg, Michael Bloomberg’s of New York–seems almost total. In the course of his campaign,…
Comment: The Business of America
Liberals confront the charge that we are anti-business. Modern liberals liketo strike a “third-way” pose of being pro-entrepreneur and pro-market whilesocially liberal on such issues as tolerance and the environment. Old-timeanti-corporate liberals, such as trade unionists and Naderites, are said to bestuck in a 1930s time warp. But every so often, politics offers a graphic…
Radical in the Center
The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics By Ted Halstead andMichael Lind. Doubleday, 272 pages, $24.95 The Next Agenda: Blueprint for a New Progressive Movement Edited byRobert L.Borosage and Roger Hickey. Westview, 386 pages, $18.00 How the Left Can Win Arguments and Influence People: A Tactical Manual forPragmatic Progressives By John K. Wilson. New…
Trouncing the Taliban
As I write this, the Taliban are on the run. By the time you read it, theymay be back in their caves. What’s the lesson here? Already some in Washingtonare pronouncing the Bush strategy for dealing with terrorism a resoundingsuccess. A few are even suggesting that what we’ve accomplished in Afghanistanshould encourage us to topple…
Ridge’s Troubled Waters:
Every new administration begets its share of policy buzzwords. At the moment, “homeland security” is very much in vogue. An important concept saddled with an ill-chosen moniker (it’s hard not to detect a whiff of the worst kind of retro-nationalism), the fundamental notion is finally incarnate in the form of the newly created Office of…
HERE’s Hard Times:
Late last year, Nicole Howard was laid off when Montgomery Ward went bankrupt. In the spring, she happily found a new job cleaning rooms at Chicago’s venerable Palmer House Hilton Hotel. But on September 14, she says, her boss “just told me that because of what happened on September 11, they had to lay people…
The Invisible Victims
Undocumented Workers at the World Trade Center
Home-Court Advantage:
“This is a different kind of conflict,” said General Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a Pentagon briefing in October. He was speaking of the war on terrorism. “The closest analogy would be the drug war.” Since September 11, comparisons between the two wars have been rife: Both are said…
A History of Corporate Looting
If you want to understand what corporate lobbyists in Washington, D.C., are trying to foist on us with the pending “stimulus” bill, look back to the first half of the 1980s. In 1981, Ronald Reagan pushed a huge tax-cut bill through Congress. Forcorporations, it offered an array of new loopholes, centered on super-accelerated”depreciation” write-offs for…
The Burden of Execution
The Last Face You’ll Ever See: The Private Life of the American Death Penalty By Ivan Solotaroff. HarperCollins, 232 pages, $25.00 Legal Lynching: The Death Penalty and America’s Future By Jesse L. Jackson, Sr.; Jesse L. Jackson, Jr.; and Bruce Shapiro. New Press, 174 pages, $22.95 Ivan Solotaroff states early on in The Last Face…
Economic Casualties
For the first time in a decade, our economy is in recession. It’s not official yet–the group that dates recessions doesn’t act until after the fact–but there’s little doubt that we’re in the midst of a downturn. The tragedy of September 11 didn’t sink the economy; it was already listing badly. But the terrorist attacks…
The Return of Smallpox
On Tuesday evening, October 22, the phone rang. It was a federal official I have known for years. “The U.S. government can’t sit on this much longer,” he told me. His normally calm voice was cracking. “Three people down in Florida have a rash; 30 are in quarantine. The CDC is all over it.” He…
Living with Death
Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for aFaith By Studs Terkel. New Press, 407 pages, $25.95 Studs Terkel, that national treasure, has providedus another gift in Willthe Circle Be Unbroken? As Studs says (to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever called him “Mr. Terkel”), when you’re going…
Double Agents
In 1996 the Central Intelligence Agency, having taken many well-deserved public-relations hits over the years, hired a full-time “entertainment liaison officer”–a veteran paramilitary operative with the movie-hero name of Chase Brandon. Until September 11, the strategy seemed to be paying off. The CIA was set to star in three new network series: ABC’s Alias would…
Literati: The Oprah Wars
No sooner had American culture bid its sober official farewell to irony than the literary world veered headlong yet again into the gruesome (yet ever comforting) ironies of cultural warfare. The occasion was novelist Jonathan Franzen’s widely publicized affront to Oprah Winfrey, who had made his novel TheCorrections the choice of her book club for…
Serotonin: From Prozac to Politics
Peter D. Kramer will always be known as the author of Listening toProzac, his 1993 work that both described a new, psychopharmacologically based “climate of opinion” in our culture and helped bring it about. But if he doesn’t become known, too, for Spectacular Happiness, that will not be the fault of this daring first novel.…
Paging Tom Cruise
Is Washington Post reporter Steve Vogel covering the war in Afghanistan or pounding out a script for Top Gun II? “Kabul had flashed by, and Cmdr Morris ‘Moby’ Leland rolled over the target area north of the city, looking for a Taliban bunker to destroy with his F/A-18 Hornet, a trusted fighter he had nicknamed…
