Bonfire of the Verities
Cosmopolis By Don DeLillo, Scribner, 224 pages, $25.00 Either Don DeLillo has written his worst book or he’s done something so sneaky I can’t see it yet. Cosmopolis’ tale of a new-economy billionaire who reduces the world’s currency markets to rubble while crossing Manhattan to get a haircut relies on a premise no weaker than…
The Co-Presidency
Boy Genius: Karl Rove, the Brain Behind the Remarkable Political Triumph of George W. Bush By Lou Dubose, Jan Reid and Carl M. Cannon, Public Affairs, 256 pages, $15.00 Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential By James C. Moore and Wayne Slater, John Wiley & Sons, 400 pages, $27.95 The Right…
Free Market Furies
World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability By Amy Chua, Doubleday, 340 pages, $26.00 Amy Chua’s new book is not likely to receive a warm reception at the Department of State, the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund. For more than a decade, the received wisdom in…
Why We Need Europe
Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order By Robert Kagan, Knopf, 112 pages, $18.00 France and Germany’s refusal to accept the Bush administration’s definition of the Iraqi threat has made shockingly visible the decade-long weakening of the Atlantic alliance. Robert Kagan looks behind such wars of words to discover why,…
Paved With Good Intentions
What would Graham Greene do? Or more to the point, what would he write about our current time, its terrorist horrors, its shadows of war on the horizon? Perhaps our situation would sound familiar to the author, who set a similarly foreboding scene in his 1955 novel The Quiet American, the subject of Phillip Noyce’s…
Dissent in America
The shooting may or may not have started by the time you read this. But one thing that has certainly begun is the campaign to force dissenters to keep it zipped when the shooting commences. “Once the war against Saddam [Hussein] begins, we expect every American to support our military, and if they can’t do…
Asylum Interrupted
The United States has never opened its arms to immigrants seeking asylum. Before September 11, aliens would arrive only to be shackled and handcuffed to an airport bench, suffer through multiple interviews, wind up in a county jail or private correctional facility, and finally file their cases before an immigration judge. Sometimes an asylum seeker…
Freedom to Fail
As any advocate for the poor will tell you, measuring the success of welfare reform depends on how one defines success. If it’s simply a matter of cutting the welfare rolls, the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program has been the social policy equivalent of winning the space race. Between 1995 and 2001, the…
The Republican Railroad
In July of 1994, just four months before Republicans swept the elections and won control of Congress, then-Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) blasted the Democratic leadership for trying to ram health-care reform legislation through Congress without giving the minority party a chance to be heard. “It is fundamentally wrong for America,” he said, “for people who…
The Fakeout
President George W. Bush’s global AIDS-relief proposal seemed like a historic announcement. “[T]o meet a severe and urgent crisis abroad, tonight I propose the Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief — a work of mercy beyond all current international efforts to help the people of Africa,” Bush said during January’s State of the Union address. “I…
Real Marriage, Real Life
Laughing at marriage, that age-old comedy staple, is trendy once again. The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, Joe Millionaire and the “reality” genre’s latest entry, Married by America: Watching what fools these mortals be is setting Nielsen records. And why not? Unlike the terrifyingly high-stakes disputes over Iraq, smallpox vaccinations, airport security and secret detentions, marriage has…
Breaking the Frame
When communications consultant Susan Nall Bales talks to environmental groups, she tells them that they can’t fix government policies until they first fix themselves. For Bales, that means these groups must become acutely conscious of the stories that they’re telling and the hidden chains of reasoning their narratives can set off in the public mind.…
A Tale of Two Fables
Fable 1: The world is blessed with an advanced civilization renowned for its dynamism and freedom. Most of the world’s peoples admire and emulate it. But this civilization fails to notice a primitive, evil force that emerges worldwide, intent on destroying it. Motivated by envy and hate, the evil force exploits the openness of the…
The Pro-War Post
What’s the role of an op-ed page? Echo chamber for a newspaper’s editorials? Ping-Pong table for both sides of the story? Or supplier of third, fourth, and nth sides and angles of the polyhedral truth? The reader might guess that this writer prefers a lively page that improves the debate, makes new arguments and surveys…
Beyond Left and Right
I recently attended a forum, sponsored by one centrist and two liberal groups, on opportunities to bridge ideological extremes. The panelists were discussing a new report titled “Crossing Divides.” The report addressed recent policy innovations that promise to break through stale polarities and yield real benefits for the poor, such as the Earned Income Tax…
Clash of Civilizations
I. Bush v. World George W. Bush may believe he has the mandate of heaven for what, as I write, is still the looming war in Iraq, but he’s not doing very well on earth. Indeed, he’s all but unified the planet in opposition to the notion of a U.S.-led preemptive war. Governments that support…
Just the Beginning
For months Americans have been told that the United States is going to war against Iraq in order to disarm Saddam Hussein, remove him from power, eliminate Iraq’s alleged stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, and prevent Baghdad from blackmailing its neighbors or aiding terrorist groups. But the Bush administration’s hawks, especially the neoconservatives who…
A War for Democracy?
Like Woodrow Wilson during World War I, George W. Bush has held out the promise that by going to war, America can make the world safe for democracy. Once Saddam Hussein is ousted, we can turn Iraq into a political and economic model for the Arab world, addressing the causes of terrorism at their roots.…
A Case for Hell
Much of the furious debate at the United Nations has been over whether inspectors are capable of disarming Iraq, but what really divides the United States from its chief critics on the Security Council are two diametrically opposed scenarios of a post-war Iraq. The American scenario, dubbed “new dawn,” sees a transformed Iraq leading a…
