Columnist.
The most revealing comment made during the not very revealing "debate" among Republican presidential candidates came from the moderator, CNN's John King, who asked the line-up of GOP hopefuls to explain what their plan for the economy was. The question was revealing, however unintentionally, because of its underlying assumption: that the economy needs a presidentially provided plan if it's ever going to fully revive.
Crime and punishment went out with Dostoevsky; ours is an age of neurosis and treatment. Rather than just resign from Congress and go away, please, the Hon. Anthony Weiner, M.C., is "entering professional treatment at an undisclosed location...." That's the latest word from the wire services. Why is no one surprised? Because in this therapeutic society, quaint concepts like guilt, shame, repentance, atonement and the rest of those medieval superstitions gave way long ago to the talking cure. Especially for politicians and other upwardly mobile types who suddenly find themselves not so much famous as notorious. And much in need of some well-publicized rehab.
It comes as no surprise to learn that Barack Obama's top economic adviser is resigning. That's good news, because whatever it says about the current state of the American economy, it indicates that results still matter in what has been and should remain a results-oriented society. If a policy isn't working, it needs to go. So does the policymaker. And last week he went. The bad news is that Austan Goolsbee won't be taking his economic policies with him. The shorthand for those failing policies is demand-side economics.
If the news from Syria isn't about another massacre, it's about preparations for one. Bashar al-Assad's once iron rule of that country is being challenged, and the result is almost daily bloodshed, especially on Fridays, the Muslim sabbath, when the crowds go directly from mosque to demonstrations. Or to the funerals of those slain the day before, which have a way of turning into more protests and attracting more gunfire. The deadly cycle continues, and nobody knows where it will end. Especially the dictator, who grows more than usually desperate and therefore more than usually dangerous. Maybe he'll survive, maybe he won't. The only thing for sure is that a lot of Syrians won't. Not that its ruler cares about their fate, but only about how all the death and destruction might affect his own.
stet -- verb (Latin, let it stand): to annotate with the word stet to nullify a previous order to delete or omit (a word or passage in a manuscript or printer's proof). First known use: 1875 -- From Webster's Some things an editor does every weekday, and often enough on nights and weekends. It goes with the territory, which is that of a daily newspaper. This ain't no quarterly.
What's to be done with the strange story, tabloid saga, curious case and general embarrassment that is The Honorable -- how ludicrous that title now sounds -- Anthony Weiner, congressman from New York's Ninth District and national object of derision? Here's my suggestion: Exactly nothing. Rise above this whole one-day story that now threatens to go on for a week and seems as if it's gone on forever. Somebody find the hook and get this guy off the stage. Here is just one more pitiable male who's made a beyond-absolute fool of himself. Except for his political position, he could be just another creep lost in well-deserved obscurity. Instead, it is his merciless fate to be the subject of glaring headlines and bad jokes.
Want to know what a major theme of our president's re-election campaign will be, at least in the rust belt? His vice president and running mate unveiled it just the other day. Here's the gospel according to Joe Biden: "Because of what we did, the auto industry is rising again. ... At the time, many people thought the president should just let GM and Chrysler go under." But the president "certainly wasn't going to abandon an industry that had meant so much to our economy...."
Dear Fellow Fan, It was wholly a pleasure to hear from another fan of that endangered species on American campuses, liberal education. It seems the more bureaucratic types in American education, whether they've burrowed into administration or become tenured members of the faculty, are busy transforming our universities into trade schools in every way but the name.
They got another one. First it was the world's most wanted man, who was living comfortably in a Pakistani resort -- until those Navy SEALs came calling. Result: Osama bin Laden was brought to justice. Or rather justice was brought to him. Then, just in time for Memorial Day, it was Ratko Mladic who was tracked down at last in some Serbian village. He'd been on the run so long that his name had become as hard to remember as it is for an American to pronounce.
Today we remember not just heroes but the cannoneers who didn't have time to learn their guns before they died in the mud, the troops whom disease took before the enemy could, the nurses blown apart while administering to the wounded and dying, the young conscripts -- ill-trained, ill-clothed and ill-prepared -- sacrificed in America's forgotten war in Korea. No, let no one think on this Memorial Day that war is all derring-do. It is disaster and chaos and death multiplied. You who read this in freedom, and I who write it in the safety and comfort of a clean, well-lighted office, can do so only because, in a thousand places at a thousand times, grimy, terrified, unsure young soldiers in the fullness of life were willing to give theirs. That is the price of our forgetful freedom.
Well, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, or DSK as he's known to those who follow politics in France or the doings of Big Money anywhere, did promise to give the International Monetary Fund a "totally different" face.
The separate but equal annual rituals are well established in the Middle East by now: First the Israelis observe a day of mourning for those who have fallen in their country's defense. For a little country, Israel has had a lot of wars, which means it has the mourners to match. Then a siren sounds, the solemn commemorations are done, and the country's Independence Day festivities begin. This was Israel's 63rd such celebration; the first was punctuated by air raid sirens even as its declaration of independence was being proclaimed -- against the advice of all the old Middle East hands in the U.S. State Department.
Remember our president's speech in Cairo at the bright onset of his tenure, the speech that was going to change everything? But the Middle East being the Middle East, and Barack Obama being Barack Obama, it changed nothing. Yet some things can change in that part of the world -- with the speed of wildfire. See events this year from, west to east, Tunisia to Syria. This administration is still trying to catch up with that whirlwind, aka the Arab Spring, and it still sounds way behind.
Dear Baseball Fan, It was wholly a pleasure to get your letter wondering how the home team here in Little Rock, the Arkansas Travelers, is doing this season. Much better, thank you for asking. After a fumbling start, the Travs' pitching seems to have kicked in, and they've got a beautiful young ballplayer in center field who's a joy to watch. He looks like the platonic ideal of a ballplayer that was in vogue when I started going to games as a boy in the long-ago '40s and '50s. More often than not, he even plays like that ideal.
Lanny Friedlander had pretty much disappeared from the world's sight for 40 years. As a college student back in 1968, he'd started a little magazine in his dorm room at Boston University -- with a ream of paper, a ditto machine, and a boundless enthusiasm for his own ideas. But he had to give up both college and the magazine, which he called Reason, when the first symptoms of his mental illness appeared. He wouldn't appear in the public prints again until his obituary was published in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago, and stirred thoughts of What Might Have Been.
LITTLE ROCK -- The other day a scholarly panel at the University of Arkansas' branch here was discussing what everybody else in the country had been talking about, too: The causes and effects of the long-awaited demise of one Osama bin Laden at the hands of parties well known and much admired: SEAL Team 6. One of the speakers, the university's director of international studies, said the SEALs' signal achievement vindicated this country's counter-terrorism strategy. No arguing with that. But then he had to add that the highly effective commando raid illustrated -- by contrast -- how costly and ineffective the whole war in Afghanistan had been. To which I would add only this scholarly comment: Huh?
There's nothing like bitter experience to test glib theories. But presidents can be remarkably slow learners, such is the power of their more cherished -- and fixed -- ideas. Following those ideas over the cliff tends to reduce politicians to explaining why their policies were really right all along, no matter how wrong they proved in practice. See Jimmy Carter -- or, for that matter, Jefferson Davis. The first, and last, president of the Confederate States of America could still fill up two unreadable volumes explaining why his constitutional theories were absolutely right -- even as he stood amid the ruins his theories had wrought.
Why write a newspaper column when someone else has said it so much better and shorter? The someone in this case is Natan Sharansky, who went from unsuppressible Russian dissident to outspoken Israeli leader without skipping a beat. Now he's summed up the basic problem with American policy in the Middle East, which has just come a cropper again. American policy continues to flounder, he contends, because it lacks sufficient respect and appreciation for man's yearning for freedom. His own faith in freedom has never faltered, even in the darkest hours, when faith such as his was considered folly.
For once I find myself firmly, indignantly and thoroughly on the side of political correctness. It's a strange sensation, but a deeply satisfying one. As if something needed to be made absolutely clear, spelled out, published far and wide -- and you proceeded to do just that. Which is the purpose of my writing this column. And this is why it had to be done: It seems the historical ignoramus who devised code words for the wholly admirable -- indeed, inspiring -- operation to get Osama bin Laden came up with "Geronimo EKIA" as the message that would signal OBL's long awaited demise.
How high's the water, Mama? Two feet high and risin' How high's the water, Papa? She said, "Two feet high and risin'" It took someone with country in his bones, Arkansas-born-and-bred Johnny Cash, to tell the story in song, but it's an old saga in these drenched parts, dating back at least to the Noahide flood of 1927. That was the big one, and it inspired not just songs but a literary flood, too. Books, memoirs, historical studies ... they've washed up everywhere over the years. Not to mention those now faded photographs of hordes of folks camping out on the bridges and levees, or anywhere halfway dry. Images of the great deluge embedded themselves long ago in the South's collective memory.
