National myths serve a purpose. They may have little basis in fact, but as the political theorist Benedict Anderson observed, all nation states are “imagined communities” conjured by people, most strangers to one another, who perceive themselves as belonging under the same sovereign umbrella. Such imagination relies on myths to ensure some measure of cohesion, however fragile, of groups of people that otherwise might not see themselves as one.
June 25th, 2009
Images of Iranians at the barricades give hope that the yoke of clerical authoritarianism might be dramatically tossed aside in Tehran. Iran’s influence is enormous, and just as its Islamic revolution reverberated around the region, so too could another Persian upheaval, only this time promising greater pluralism. But change in Iran may well bode far more darkly for its regional neighbors.
June 21st, 2009
We Americans don’t so much pick our leaders as pick personalities. Qualifications matter but only so much. A talented technocrat or an unabashed intellectual would stand little chance of winning high office without charm and guile to match. It wasn’t always so…
June 16th, 2009
Bibi swallowed hard on Sunday and endorsed the principle of a Palestinian state. The Nixon-in-China moment would seem to permanently put to rest the dream of Eretz Israel, the land promised by God to the Israelites encompassing the West Bank, but some sacred cows are not easily gored. Settlement growth in Judea and Samaria, the Israeli Prime Minister assured his audience, would continue. Such are addictions: they’re hard to break.
June 12th, 2009
Why is the US in Afghanistan? President Obama explained why earlier this year when announcing his new policy for the country. “If the Afghanistan government falls to the Taliban or allows al-Qaeda to go unchallenged,” he said, “that country will again be a base for terrorists…”
June 8th, 2009
When it came to purchasing cars my parents were very patriotic. During my youth, the emblems on our car hoods were always American. In 1980, married and with children, I read in the car magazines the rave reviews on a new Chevrolet called “Citation.” It was a five-door hatchback, front-wheel drive, compact, and with good gas mileage from an impressively named engine, “The Iron Duke…”
June 4th, 2009
The “Round Mound of Rebound” pulls no punches. When asked at last year’s Democratic National Convention in Denver if he was contemplating running for governor of his home state of Alabama, former NBA star Charles Barkley bluntly said yes. Uncharacteristically for an aspiring politician, he then disparaged his own state, pointing out that Alabama ranks near the bottom when comparing states’ socio-economic indicators…
May 28th, 2009
Bigotry defies logic. Poor whites should have found common cause with disenfranchised blacks during Jim Crow, but prejudice got in the way. So it is with intolerance towards gays. Why it should rile some that homosexuals enjoy equal protection under the law by having the right to wed makes no sense. But hate never adds up.
June 2nd, 2009
Jeannette Walls knows about forgiveness. It is not the central theme of her memoir, The Glass Castle, which portrays in heartbreaking detail her penurious upbringing. Her story has drawn comparisons to Frank McCourt’s own memoir, Angela’s Ashes, which begins with the observation, “When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all.”
May 26th, 2009
A few months ago I read James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword, a book that describes the long history of European anti-Semitism, from Christianity’s break with Judaism to the present. It is a sad and painful story of the abuse and persecution of Jews at the hands of the Catholic Church as well as its Protestant offspring.
May 18th, 2009
The Baddest Man on the Planet is talking. Mike Tyson, the former heavyweight champ whose scowl could wilt steel and whose animalistic violence intimidated far larger opponents, has turned introspective. Perhaps such reflection comes easily when holed up in a drug treatment facility.
March 30th, 2009
The end of history has arrived for European Jewry and it looks like Disneyland. Not bad given the journey. For centuries, Jews on the Old Continent suffered persecution and expulsion, punctuated, to be sure, by periods of acceptance, before the Thousand-Year Reich, however truncated, nearly finished them off for good…
March 26th, 2009
Gregor Samsa awakens one morning to find that he has become a giant insect. The recurring themes of persecution and alienation in Franz Kafka’s work, including The Metamorphosis, are manifested corporeally. Gregor’s grotesque transformation has rendered him a dung beetle and he’s treated accordingly…
March 23rd, 2009
In the news recently was a painting from the Cobbe family collection. It is a portrait of an aristocratic Elizabethan gentlemen that some have suggested is William Shakespeare. Since there are no definitive images of the great playwright and poet that were done in his lifetime, such a portrait, if truly of the great man, would be very well received among class-conscious Brits…
March 16th, 2009
Gods are found all over the world, from tropical rainforests to dry deserts, in grand cathedrals and on late-night revival television. They speak most of the world’s languages, look like variations of their worshipers, tell us to behave, threaten pain and suffering if we are bad, and perhaps best of all, offer to those who worship them a vision of a wonderful place where we shall live forever after death.
I think I have a stomachache
Perhaps what I ate was a mistake
Shellfish, fries, corn beef and slaw
Wine and beer and even more
We strip them of their clothes
Their arms are tightly bound
Piled one upon the other
We stack them on the ground.
States, like reptiles, social climbers, and casino high rollers, are not by inclination altruistic. Self-interest is their stock in trade. Indeed, international relations predicated on more high-minded principles invariably fails, sometimes spectacularly. Think of the League of Nations, which collapsed, amongst other reasons, because of the erroneous assumption that countries would go to war to defend the sovereignty of other states even if doing so was not in their national interest.
My skin is as black as this night, which rolls over a sleeping world
and calls a moon roaming among the pale clouds to look
down and see her beauty reflected on my resting back.
For when comes dawn the rising sun will glisten on my forearms as
off the wavetops of a giant rolling sea endless to the horizon.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. So goes the punch line. The black humor captures the essential truth that in retrospect the unexpected can seem inevitable. Yet it is hardly so. In the moment, the past is often not prologue, but rather a complex and confused jumble of events that offers up few clues as to how they might play out.
That changes occur suddenly after long periods of quiescence might also explain why predicting the future is so difficult.
Write me those passionate poems
Of a freshly mowed meadow in May
Lovers who sigh with a smile and a glance
For there is killing on TV today
addresses the gap between rhetoric and reality -- between what is and what might be, all analyzed with a keen eye for the absurd.
