Columnist.
"The Ides of March," the slick new movie with George Clooney as an unethical presidential candidate, is a morality tale for our time. It lacks tragic dimensions, it's melodramatic without complexity of character, and it has a neatly constructed plot that has no emotional depth, sliding over the surfaces of the political world as we have come to know it, up close and personal. But it entertains as an engaging tale about the dirty tricks of politics. Entertainment, after all, is what politics has become.
ISTANBUL -- A young American man with black hair and dark brown eyes checked into a small hotel in Cappadocia, where visitors to Turkey flock to see the famous lava formations carved into the landscape. "Are you Muslim," the clerk asked, acknowledging his Semitic features. "No, I'm Jewish," the young man replied, smiling and assuming the question was asked in good faith and good humor. "Oh," the clerk replied, disappointment in his voice. "This is not a good time for Jews in Turkey."
Some of the Republican candidates wanted to audition for Comedy Central the other night, aiming their one-liners at Herman Cain. But the pizza man is no joke. Cain is able, you might say. If his rivals are not taking him seriously, they should. Everyone else is. Stand-up comedy is for professionals, and the comedy candidates, particularly Jon Huntsman and Michele Bachmann, showed us why. Cain was the early target for his 9-9-9 tax reform scheme; he would tax personal income at 9 percent, and enact a national income tax of 9 percent and a corporate income tax of 9 percent.
BERLIN -- A united Germany turned 21 this week. Families celebrated a three-day weekend, with the children waving black, red and gold national flags in the bright sunlight of an unseasonal October summer in Berlin. In Bonn, the capital of West Berlin when Germany was divided into the Soviet east and the free West, fireworks flashed across the night sky. Unification has not been without problems, and the conventional wisdom is that it's been harder on Germans in the east, where unemployment is almost double that in the west. But it's difficult to find a German who would return the communists to power.
It's the Jewish New Year. Rosh Hashanah is followed by Yom Kippur. We listen to that strange instrument called the shofar, made of a ram's horn, with long plaintive and short bleating notes resounding in synagogues around the world. The mix of dissonance and energy calls for reflection and renewal, and we've got a lot to reflect on, particularly now that Israel and the Palestinians are once more the focus of ferocious debate. (As they always seem to be.) Jews once raised glasses of sweet wine with a toast, "Next year in Jerusalem." It was a wistful challenge to hope in remembrance of their ancient temple, twice destroyed.
It's gang-up time on Israel again. Right on schedule, here come the huffers, puffers and pipsqueaks. Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, arrives in New York to demand a seat at the United Nations. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, right on cue, arrives from Iran in a cloud of bluster and bombast. It's all for show, of course, irritating in the way a noisy neighbor's drunken fight with his wife at 3 in the morning can be irritating. But the show, such as it is, makes a convenient backdrop for what looks like an authentic hope for change in American presidential politics.
Jackie Kennedy is back, but the world she knew as first lady is gone forever. The woman Mamie Eisenhower said looked "younger than Barbie," the fashion icon who didn't want to wear hats but capitulated at Jack's inauguration with a chic pillbox worn on the back of her head so it wouldn't ruin her bouffant hairdo, the widow who described her husband's administration as Camelot, a romantic notion as fanciful as the legend from which it was based, speaks again through a gossamer haze of pre-feminist politics.
When the twin towers tumbled from the skyline of New York 10 years ago this month, the terrorists figured they had won a great battle. They were right. The two enormous buildings fell, burying almost 3,000 men, women and even children. We wept over personal tragedies and collectively vowed not to be bowed. We're winning the war. Recovery did not run smoothly. There were arguments, conflicts and delays. There has not always been a unity of purpose among the architects, government agencies, insurers, developers, families of victims and survivors about how what happened should be remembered. Often it seems as if the twin towers were transformed into Towers of Babel, with a cacophony of voices demanding different memorials of remembrance and revival. Creative reconstruction was difficult.
God will not be mocked, as the Scriptures tell us, but the pundits and politicians keep trying. Rick Perry is bringing out both the believers and the scoffers. This is a phenomenon that seems to happen with the presidential cycles. Jimmy Carter was born again, Barack Obama was once the messiah, and his followers -- millions of them -- thought he could walk on water. Now not even Michelle is sure he could walk to Alexandria without getting wet to the knees. All that is gone with the wind and Irene's rain.
Once upon a time, women complained that everything in the culture favored men, that it began when men and women were boys and girls. Boys got the advantage in kindergarten and kept it through high school and into their college years. Boys were more active than girls, and teachers called on them for recitation more often than girls. That was in the long ago. Teachers usually call on girls first now because they're more likely to have the answer. Girls typically score higher on reading tests.
If all politics were truly local, Tim Pawlenty might still be in the race. The former governor of Minnesota made the best offer to Iowans, promising to cook their dinner or mow their lawn. Of course, there was a catch. The winner of the dinner and a freshly clipped lawn had to come up with an example of something specific offered by President Obama to solve the economic mess. It was a trick question because there are no examples. The political rhetoric this season has focused so far on what's not there from this administration. Despite his failure to attract conservative enthusiasm in Iowa, Pawlenty demonstrated both a serious side and a light touch in a time when polarizing trivia make up the substance, such as it is, of the "debates." Most of the rhetoric is little more than a repetitious leveling of ideas.
We're all children of our histories. Some of us become victims, others reactors and rebels. Some of us just keep putting one foot in front of the other. Commemorations, celebrations and memorials become important, documenting what is, what was and what might have been. Germany commemorates the 50th anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall this week. That wall wasn't as lengthy as the Great Wall of China, nor did it have the mythic significance of the wall that Joshua's trumpet brought down at Jericho. But the Berlin Wall marks a significant milestone in the history of the Cold War, when a supposedly civilized nation locked in its people and described it, in the Orwellian rhetoric every government bureaucrat could envy, as an "anti-fascist protection rampart."
Nothing so focuses the mind on the nature of evil like mass murder. The numbers magnify a singular horror, and become collectively unfathomable. Josef Stalin, who knew something about mass murder, showed his cold-blooded ruthlessness when he called one death a tragedy, many deaths a statistic. Anders Behring Breivik, the Oslo shooter, would understand. He defies our ability to explain. He startles us with his ideological rationalizations, perverting Christian ideas beyond recognition, testifying only to his own crazy interpretations. But in sadness and fear, we endlessly probe his psyche, seeking causes and looking for reasons impossible for the human heart to comprehend.
What would a world without tabloids look like? Not as much fun, for sure, if the tattletales and snoopers and others of irreverent ilk lost their voices on the printed page. Who would supply headlines such as, "Headless Body Found in Topless Bar" (New York Post), "Ford to City: Drop Dead" (New York Daily News), or perhaps the pithiest of them all, the show biz tab Variety on the stock-market crash that announced the Depression, "Wall Street Lays an Egg." Who among us doesn't get a touch of schadenfreude watching feet of clay crumble in shoes? This is not high art, but it's the stuff that's sold in the penny press (as it was called in less inflationary times) ever since Johannes Gutenberg and his famous press shortened the time between illumination and publication. Most of us don't lust after the lurid details of the grotesque, but we don't mind a little titillation.
Like it or not, Michele Bachmann is a contender. She triumphed over low expectations in the opening Republican debate. She advanced from flaky to crusty, from outlandish to charismatic, from beyond the fringe to inside the ring. "She doesn't seem crazy at all," observes the piously liberal New Republic magazine, with what passes for praise for a conservative woman. The Minnesota congresswoman entered the mainstream by swimming smoothly into the lane vacated by Mike Huckabee.
"The Merchant of Venice" is back and plays for relevance, just in time for 2012. The Shakespeare drama is staged in the nation's capital, set in a troubled America struggling with cultural extravagance in New York City before the Great Depression. Al Pacino stars in a movie version, inviting reflection on the ambiguities of prejudice and greed, as familiar in 21st century Washington as 16th century Venice. There's enough corruption depicted in the play to indict an entire wasteful society. The famous "pound of flesh" is but a metaphor for all kinds of excesses of thinking and action. Anti-Semitism is only a part of it.
A neighbor of mine, age 15, left the picnic on the Fourth of July expecting to set off fireworks in the family. He had a declaration of his own: "I'm off to play one of those violent video games the Supreme Court says are protected by my First Amendment rights." He got a groan or two (probably less than he had hoped for), but one of the grown-ups expressed the hopeful view: "Well, at least the Bill of Rights has got his attention." Between the parades and the pyrotechnics that light up night skies above purple mountain majesties and fruited plain, we usually pay scant attention to the truths and values that bind us together as a nation.
Children can do terrible things. They can bully and maim, even murder. In our lifetime, we've seen young people arm themselves and shoot down classmates and teachers. We shake our heads in shock and wonder. How can such things happen? So we look for reasons -- sane, rational explanations for violent behavior and ways to curb it. We gather the usual suspects. Sometimes it's parents. Sometimes it's the culture. California blames violent video games. The state with the motto "Eureka," translated from the Greek to mean "I have found it" (with credit to Archimedes), thought it had a solution in keeping violent video games away from minors. These games were not re-enactments of Bonnie and Clyde, but of terrible crimes such as the assassination of President Kennedy, and the massacres at Virginia Tech and Columbine High, and imaginary narratives of unrelenting violence, all with innocent victims.
First, the good news: The nation's eighth-graders are doing better in history class. Now, the bad news: They're not doing much better. Gains in test scores are small, made by the lowest performers, and only 17 percent of those tested are "proficient," or competent. It gets worse. Only 12 percent of high-school seniors, who are getting ready to vote for the first time, have a proficient knowledge of history. If you're looking for a tinsel lining, you could point to 20 percent of fourth-graders who are described as proficient, but that means eight of 10 haven't learned very much during their tender years in the classroom
