The Sciolist She was old enough to be mother to many of them -- her own daughter turned 20 in 1944 -- but she was sexuality personified, with that low, sultry, German-heavy voice, yet she was sure and at ease in that masculine world of the U.S. Army. She crooned "Lili Marleen" to the boys (and, believe it or not, also performed on the musical saw) as the snow drifted down in Luxemburg. None of them ever forgot it.
Lucky Bomb
03-08-06
Is it possible that something as awful as the nuclear holocausts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was -- in the cold, long view of historical time -- a positive good, a lucky break for the human race?
Why We Fight
01-31-06
All wars ultimately are competitions for power, but knowing that gets you no closer to understanding them.
Molly Ivins
11-13-05
I picked up a Molly Ivins column Saturday. It's not something I usually do. Every time I read one, it seems she's ranting about how she's known George W. Bush since high school and what a jerk he always was, ever since he was 16. I think it must be a set-piece with her. That is, I think she's told that story so often and knows she's done so, so she tries to vary the telling every time just to make the stale old thing seem a bit fresh. How else to explain her awkward chattiness and forced yokelisms?
Necessary War
08-28-05
Critics of the war to overthrow Saddam call it "unnecessary." They don't go into detail about what they thinks makes for a "necessary" war. I'll give you my version of a necessary war: The brief 1936 conflict between Germany, alone, and France, Britain, and Czechoslovakia.
The Enemies We Make
08-12-05
Atop a grieving Statue of Liberty, the demonic-looking U.S. president waves a banner reading "democracy," but in his other fist he clutches the club of "dictatorship." Around him, on the statue's crown points, a young woman hangs in fetters, "anti-war" soldiers carouse, U.S. workers protest, and a clown in a dunce cap emblazoned with the Star of David inflates a stars-and-stripes balloon.
Original Zinn
06-08-05
"The People's History of the United States," by the contrarian historian Howard Zinn, was published in 1980. It started out as an iconoclasm. But by now, in its 25th printing, with more than 1 million copies sold, it has crossed over into the mainstream. Whole college courses are taught based on it. Many more courses use it as a central text.
French Slavery
05-19-05
Recently I read a piece by an American living in Europe, recounting how he had found himself in heated argument with a Frenchman who hammered him with America's rap sheet of historical faults and crimes. Among them, of course, was slavery. The American wrote that he largely conceded the point of slavery to his foe. But the American could have turned the tables nicely on the Frenchman, if he'd known a little more about French history.
Wilsonians
05-03-05
The Statue of Liberty has no wings; she is not an angel. The nation that reveres her often does things unwise or unjust. Like Athens, like Rome, like America. The motives of a great republic on the world stage are never pure; self-interest and idealism always find a balance, and the decision made and pursued usually is a matrix point that satisfies both.
Simple Gifts
04-20-05
I can't remember the last time I saw a California hippiechick anti-war activist and human-rights crusader praised by the Wall Street Journal editorial pages. I'll start counting again from today.
Washington's Crossing
12-20-04
There were no Geneva Conventions in the mid-18th century, but every soldier and officer understood the customs of war, which were binding on their sense of honor as warriors. A wounded or cornered enemy could ask "quarter" from the other side, and there were standards for accepting it, or rejecting it. Plundering was universal, but if a house was occupied, and the owners did not resist, the proper plunderer always left the family enough to live on, and he did not take personal items.
Bush in History
07-07-04
The German media enthusiastically draws parallels between the American abuses at Abu Ghraib and the Nazi concentration camps. The Bushitler thing is so old it's hardly shocking anymore. But now "modern America = Nazi Germany." Even the conservative, mainstream "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" writes about "a pile of naked men that reminds us of pictures from the concentration camps."
Chomsky is Right
06-18-04
Many people I read and respect in the Blogosphere have an attack-dog reaction to the name "Chomsky." But people who mock and dismiss him should read him first. They may find much that will have them nodding in agreement.
Ernie Pyle
05-28-04
During the Iraq invasion, war critics blamed the American media for declining to focus their coverage on al-Jazeera-style footage of American dead and civilian casualties. Some of them evoked the ghost of World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle, who wrote unflinchingly about the brutality and death of battle, about "friendly fire" casualties and blundering bureaucracies. They reminded us that Pyle won his Pulitzer for a column that described the glamorless death of a U.S. Army captain.
The Media and Abu Ghraib
05-03-04
I'm getting that helpless feeling again, like on Sept. 11, when events spin out of control so fast my brain can't process how bad it's become before things get even worse. It makes you want to retch. It makes me want to hand each of those prisoner-abusing a**holes a loaded Magnum and shut him or her in an empty room. They'd know what to do. Trying to keep some semblance of journalistic detachment amid all this is nearly impossible.
Remember 'No Nukes'?
05-02-04
The "Guardian," the left-wing British newspaper, laments the fading of the popular movement to halt the growth of nuclear weapons arsenals. This once was a defining cause for American liberals, too, and in my days of association with them, in the late 1970s, it was still very much alive, both in America and in Europe. It seems things have changed.
Thinking Allowed
04-29-04
The "Star of David = Swastika" flag got to be so tiresome at Palestinian demonstrations that they seem to have retired it, or maybe they lost it. (Now they just hold up their children, dolled up with fake guns and cardboard dynamite.) But you can still get an eye-full of it over here in the U.S., in the hands of "non-conformists" who seem to regard this symbolic connection as an inspiration of wisdom, rather than what it is: a lie so absurd as to be puke-making.
World War IV
04-22-04
World War IV began on Feb. 26, 1993, but almost nobody in America realized this. Islamic fundamentalists tried to topple one of the Twin Towers onto the other amid a cloud of cyanide gas. The plan failed, the details didn't emerge until much later, and at the time it seemed like another wacky day in the Big Apple, not a dress rehearsal for Hell.
Worth Fighting For
04-21-04
Some thing are worth fighting for. The rule of law. An independent judiciary. A military that is answerable to civilian authority. Whether the fight for them is against foreign enemies or domestic corruptions, these are values we cannot surrender.
Dogs of War
04-20-04
America wove two tragic mistakes into its victory in the Gulf War of 1991. The first was fighting a half-war. War is terrible; to pretend it can be anything else is naive. To leave a battlefield with the enemy half-beaten, as Colin Powell did in 1991, may seem merciful in the moment, but it costs far more lives and woe in the long run.
Incident at Samarra
02-06-04
We have to watch carefully, on many levels, the daily unfolding in Iraq. Roadside bombings and terrorist massacres make headlines, but incidents that miss the headlines can cut deeper. Like what might have happened outside the city of Samarra on the night of January 3.
Loose Buchanan
02-05-04
Smithsonian magazine -- a glossy travelogue for retirees with too much money -- took up Lancaster County history in its recent edition under the headline, "Was James Buchanan our worst president?" The article compares him to his Lancaster contemporary, Thaddeus Stevens, in an attempt to ramrod the grim Stevens' "moral clarity" into America's hearts. Buchanan emerges 800 words later slathered in insults to everything from his politics to his masculinity.
Doctor, My Eye
01-24-04
"Dr. Suzy" dispenses sex advice on the Net. She also publishes her political opinions, as "Dr. Susan M. Block." It sounds very formal, especially if you don't know that her "doctorate" is one in philosophy from Pacific Western University. She's my current favorite example of how ignorant it is for non-medical people to claim the title "doctor" in a world where that is understood as implying "expertise in matters of health and medicine."
Judge Moore's Rock
01-24-04
Roy Moore is coming to my town. He's the former Alabama Chief Justice who snuck into the Alabama Judicial Building in the middle of the night three years ago and plunked down a 5,280-pound rock chiseled with the Ten Commandments.
Healing Iraq
01-21-04
American media pundits nowadays tend to see every vote, every opinion poll, as a "referrendum" on the Iraq war. Forget about it; history doesn't answer to deadlines. From the beginning I've said we won't know for 30 years whether this was a good idea or not.
Chomsky, Coulter, and Moore
01-06-04
Paul is an old hippie, who went to Canada during Vietnam and came back when the fighting was over. He never saw an American president or foreign policy he didn't like. He never protested a war or a dictatorship unless there was a U.S. interest behind it. Paul is the kind of pacifist you just know it's unwise to tick off.
Marathon Man
08-12-03
It's part of being a "liberal," in the old, good sense of that word -- the only sense of it I can still claim -- to believe in the consistency of the human experience
Europe & America
05-10-03
A friend in Germany writes of his frustration with America's course through the world, and I write back, and over time I begin to see we don't live in the same world after all
New Lost Cause
04-23-03
Native-born Southern white woman working with native-born Southerners, black and white, reasoning together with a shared sense of decency to accomplishing the work of desegregation. Not a Freedom Rider in sight. Not a bullhorn or a German shepherd or a firehose water cannon in the chapter. Where is it told in the museums or the PBS specials?
Somebody to Love
04-10-03
Right now, even before all the bronze Saddams are blown off their pedestals, we must begin to put Iraq back together. First, find those hospitals that lack water and electricity, and hook them up again. Get the food and the water moving into the neighborhoods
See the War
04-07-03
The wisdom and justice of this war will be proven by the thirty-year rule. It will take that long to know if the follow-up America puts into its new client is worth the blood spilled. We need to be big enough to know how big we are, and approach the problem with a calm enthusiasm and an open heart
With You So Far
02-25-03
Every morning I get out of bed (afternoon, actually) and check the news to see if this is my stop. Maybe this is the day I get off the bus. So far it isn't. I'm still riding with the President on the matter of Iraq
Columbia Tragedy
02-03-03
She was a double-wide trailer fitted with angel wings. She could heft 4 million pounds into space and fly 17,000 mph and pass unscathed through a blast furnace that would pulverize a solid block of concrete and melt battlefield armor. One of the four toughest machines on earth died when the Columbia shattered over Texas
My Congressman
11-14-02
My own Congressman, U.S. Rep. Joseph R. Pitts, was all set to talk to a church group this weekend, but some godless liberals shamed him out of it
Confederate Flag
11-11-02
Two years ago, Gov. Roy Barnes redrew Georgia's state flag and stripped off the part of it that Georgia soldiers had carried in the Civil War. Last week, descendants of those soldiers sent Barnes packing. Barnes lost his re-election bid to a Republican, Sonny Perdue. To put the Democrat's loss in perspective, consider that the last GOP governor in Georgia was a worthless carpetbagger who was run out of the state in 1871
Iraq War
11-07-02
The U.N. likely will pass a new Iraq resolution Friday. Inspectors will pack their bags for Baghdad, and Saddam will waste no time in resuming his "cheat and retreat" game with them. It's a countdown to a showdown and the rest of the world will have to get serious about whether to back the Bad Cop against the Murderous Thug
"The Rage & the Pride"
10-30-02
America is not the crowning glory of Western culture, as some flag-waving bigots would have it. Neither is it a cancerous growth, as some Europeans say. Far from driving a wedge between the continents, Oriana Fallaci reminds us how much we share, and revere in common
The First Casualty
10-15-02
Tom Daschle, the U.S. Senate's top Democrat, probably cooks a perfect soft-boiled egg. He knows just how high to turn up the heat, and just when to cut it
Global Warming
06-22-02
The sea level at Atlantic City rose 16 inches during the last century. The rate of increase now stands at 24 inches per 100 years. The latest measurements show the rate is speeding up. Results of 47 years of research in England found the first spring flowering of plant species has advanced by an average of 15 days. Orchids have been sighted on the north coast of the English Channel
Anti-Americans
05-31-02
Since Americans forced the issue of their independence, the intellectuals in the former colonies have tried to cozy up to the Mother Country, who has returned the affection with scorn, disowning her one-time darling as a red-headed stepchild with only a smidgen of true Anglo-Saxon blood
Sherman & Niebuhr
05-08-02
The German theologian Reinhold Niebuhr noted a paradox 50 years ago: America cannot at the same time project its world power and maintain the fiction that it is an innocent, virtuous nation
United We Stand
11-08-01
One of the strange qualities of this time is watching our home-grown, Xtian Taliban wanna-bes grappling with things. Suddenly religious purism stands unveiled as a deadly force; fundamentalist attacks on secular culture are the great enemy. Some of them get it, some clearly don't
Check from a Sheik
10-12-01
It is possible to be an anti-Zionist and not be a Jew-baiter. Yet that happens so rarely. And every time public voices from the Arab world repeat the stupidity about Sept. 11 being a Mossad plot, or the mythical 4,000 Jews who walked out of the WTC moments before the attack, Americans will find it still harder to separate "anti-Israel" politics from the Third Reich
Flags Everywhere
09-27-01
Flags are everywhere. You can't turn in any direction and not see at least six of them. I told Kat, "you're not going to recognize this place when you get back." People are stealing them from one another. Committed liberals are floundering. An absolutist pacifism is almost impossible to maintain. Even Gandhi, if I read him right, would approve violence in certain cases
World With Us
09-14-01
A free people can go to war and keep their freedoms. But they must work at it. As Americans, we are free to say anything. But not everything that can be said, ought to be
Sept. 11
09-13-01
For almost 20 years now I've been a print journalist. Tuesday, for the first time, I didn't want to go to work. The ceiling seemed low, just above my head. Sound came muted. At some time the newsdesk phone rang and I picked up the receiver. A woman's voice: "Is this all they're going to show on TV today? It's so depressing!"
Laurie Show Killing
01-21-01
The revelation of how the prosecution had mishandled the case against Laurie Show's killer was disturbing to some Lancaster County folks. But many more, on the morning she walked free, saw only the smirking face of the woman they considered a callous murderess
Democracy
11-25-00
To understand the founders of American democracy, and the system of government they devised, it is not enough to stand in the present and look back at 1787. You have to stand where the founders stood, and then look back, from there, at the past they knew
History
11-12-00
Most U.S. historians are patriotic; that is, in common with most other people, they are personally committed to the places where they were born and raised. They want to see these places shed their problems and fulfill their potentials. Like Americans in general, though, they can differ wildly over what aspect of America fall into the categories of "problem" and "potential"
SUVs
01-01-00
Imperious as Irish elk, SUVs are avatars of the jungle law: If someone's children get hurt in a wreck, it won't be mine. It's amusing to note how often the inefficient, graceless beasts bear creationism bumper stickers
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