Columnist.
Rep. Michele Bachmann, founder of the tea party caucus in the new Congress, gave more than a response to President Obama's State of the Union speech Tuesday night. We got a look at the new political woman in Washington. Some of the old Republican bulls looked like they were suffering a bad bout of indigestion. She's treading on old toes. She acquitted herself with poise and power, and that's what's scary to the party establishment.
If we've learned one lesson from the massacre in Tucson, it's that cause and effect are poor guides to explain human behavior. "Let us remember," President Obama said at the memorial service, "it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy. It did not." Those last three important little words were not in his speech when he stood up to deliver it. He added them during delivery because he knows the importance of staunching false blame. Rhetoric can make connections that reality must undo.
We mourn, we weep, we wonder why. How could such things happen? Smart phones and online libraries constantly feed us information, but we don't get any wiser. We blame others for what goes wrong and for what we don't fully understand. Pundits argue and provoke, pretending to seek wisdom from the dialectic, but they're merely in love with the sound of their own voices. Jeremiahs predict the worst, Pollyannas foresee a rosy future, and the ostrich buries his head in the sand (where insights as wise as any other may lurk).
The baby boomers who wouldn't trust anyone over 30 now must rely on young clerks to get their Social Security and Medicare checks in the mail. This is the year the first of millions of boomers turn 65, and their younger brothers and sisters will follow them into the next two decades at the rate of 10,000 a day. The boomers, like everyone before them, never believed that old age would afflict them "when they're 64," as the Beatles put it. Maybe for some of them, it hasn't. The hale and hardy claim they're "the new 50," with new knees, new hips, new ankles, new arteries and even the occasional new heart.
"True Grit" is a tale whose time had come and gone. It's the good fortune of a new generation that its time has come again. The novel by Charles Portis, which sold only about 25,000 copies between 2007 and 2009, has been bought by 10,000 new readers since the new version of the movie opened this month. In an age when twittering conversation is limited to 140 characters, where children become chubby couch potatoes changing channels with a remote control or playing war games moving fantasy soldiers around on a screen, Mattie Ross is an authentic heroine -- lean, mean, articulate and downright inspirational at the toughened age of 14.
BERLIN -- Berlin, Paris and London lie becalmed beneath a blanket of winter white. People come and go, talking only of snow, snow, snow. They're obsessed with the weather, as if their winters are usually balmy seasons of sunshine and warmth. They've forgotten, if only for a fortnight or so, fears of terrorism and anger over intimate pat-downs. Tourists are furious over cancelled airline flights. Museums are the winners. People are eager to stay inside. An especially sensitive and painful exhibit is drawing crowds in Berlin, breaking taboos and reviving a lively subject that no one could have expected to be a crowd pleaser. The German Historical Museum looks at Hitler and the ways the German people embraced him. For a nation where selling "Mein Kampf" or displaying Nazi memorabilia is forbidden, there's lots about how Germans of all ranks in society participated in the rise of Adolf Hitler.
BERLIN -- "Money, money, money makes the world go round, the world go round." Joel Grey and Liza Minnelli sang it loud and clear in the movie "Cabaret," based on Christopher Isherwood's tales of the high life among the lowlife in the Berlin of the early 1930s. Today, they might change the lyrics to "euro, euro, euro, euro." But no one here suggests the euro is making the world go round. The Germans grumble over the loans to Greece and Ireland as the cost of borrowing has risen for German consumers, along with the healthy economies in the European Union. Why should Germans help the profligate Greeks, who get to retire 10 years earlier than they do?
There are villains aplenty in the WikiLeaks scandal, but nobody looks better for it than Hillary Clinton. The purloined State Department cables show the secretary of state to be eager and willing to man up to both the nation's enemies and its faithless "allies" in the Middle East. She emerges in the confidential cable traffic as tough as any man, eager to deal with the Saudis as the unreliable ally they pretend not to be. In one signed memorandum, she calls Saudi Arabia the largest source of money for Islamist terror gangs.
"Homegrown" promises something fresh and tasty when applied to tomatoes, cabbage and beans straight from the farmer's field. But about terrorism, not so much. Homegrown terrorists, recruited from the newly arrived from the Muslim countries of the Middle East and Africa, are the latest menace to America. They're new transplants to these shores and sometimes even the native born.
The Thanksgiving holiday offers mixed blessings that run from anxiety to celebration. When the different generations gather together to mix memory with desire (as the poet sayeth), we recognize differences as well as affinities, angry feelings along with the affectionate. We hasten and chasten our will to make known.
Radical feminists are fussy, as usual, and now they're fidgety, too. They don't know how to enjoy success. They're restless, like combat veterans who, having returned home to peace, keep fighting old battles.
Happy politicians are all alike; every unhappy politician is unhappy in his (and her) own way. (Apologies to Tolstoy.) Nancy Pelosi, who in her heart of hearts must be unhappy about Nov. 2, insists publicly that disaster was an occasion for the losers to celebrate.
Let's raise a cup o' cheer for robust, aggressive debate, especially for a democracy in an election campaign. Truth will out. Sometimes it takes a while, but determined voters can find out what they need to know from many voices, even when the voices are raised (or especially when they're raised.) The voter, often dismissed by the elites as dumb and unrefined, knows how to select and separate the wheat from the chaff. This week, he left a lot of chaff on the wind.
Spooky election campaigns jump-start Halloween this year. Christine O'Donnell, a Tea Party Republican running for a Senate seat from Delaware, is looking for a metered space to park her broomstick. "That's the kind of candidate Delaware hasn't had since 1694," cracked a player on "Saturday Night Live," as a skeleton in the background plays the piano with boney fingers.
Maybe the radical feminists deserve a little pity, or at least a bit of tea and sympathy. Some of them are still living among "Mad Men."
Education, like politics, is local. You want it close to home, the better to monitor it. That's how it should be.
Every generation seeks a hero or an anti-hero, a trend or counter-trend, a fashion or non-fashion to define itself in both politics and the culture, pop and otherwise. Recall Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock in the movie "The Graduate," lolling about in his parents' swimming pool, fins and all, with no place to go. Quintessential '60s.
Conservatives who love to hate moviemaker Oliver Stone, who has never found a particular reason to love America, won't find enough venom to abet their passion against him for his latest movie, "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps."
What do women want? That was Sigmund Freud's endearing, if naive, question, asked when "Freudian" still meant a deep look into the unconscious. But the good Viennese doctor, as we've learned since, had not a clue to what he was talking about. He posed various notions, like envy of you-know-what, that anatomy is destiny. Some were cute, but no cigar.
NEW YORK CITY -- New York, New York, a wonderful town. The city is a study in "doubleness." The subway runs deep; the buildings scrape the sky. There's an east side and a west side, an uptown and a downtown, two rivers, two coastlines.
