It’s often said our government is a cosmology of checks and balances, and lately it’s often said the Bush Administration has labored mightily to subvert it in favor of executive authority. In nature, too, there seem to be checks and balances that humanity labors mightily to subvert.

I have been wondering lately whether advertising has played the role of the Bush Administration in subverting culture in favor of appearance over content. It seems clear to me that a precariously broad segment of the electorate favors appearance over discourse and slogan over an intricate interplay of facts and ideas. (more…)

The only thing keeping us from becoming a federal police state is our
nostalgia for the ideals of our founders and the need to pretend that
we’re still living up to them.

Perhaps I’ve figured out why we clumsily call it a health care system. It’s because it exists to take care of the health care industry. Otherwise we might more felicitously call it patient care. The way it is now, the patient is so named for patience while being screwed. (more…)

Once you’ve been nuts in New York City you wouldn’t want to do it anywhere else. I know this because I occasionally write and edit in Manhattan’s streets and attract no more attention than the millions of look-at-me’s who gab on their hands-free cell phones. I could be having phone sex or translating Proust, it wouldn’t make any difference to anybody. (more…)

Columnists are like binoculars. They help you see something
differently. You may not like what you see, you may prefer your
old assumptions, but at least you’ve had a chance to see something from a different angle.

News is a heap of pieces until somebody puts the pieces together. But where a puzzle consists of a finite number of pieces cut from a predetermined picture, there are an undetermined number of pieces that comprise news, and they are often jammed together ham-handedly. (more…)

(A Cartography of Peace, Jean L. Connor, Passager Books, 78 pp, paperback, French flap, $13.95)

A life well examined is a bequeathal to humanity. So, when Jean Connor writes in a poem called Riding to Hounds and Other Papers of “friendship and similar perils” we’re aware of being handed an exquisite legacy.

These gracious and wry poems were written between Connor’s seventy-fifth and eighty-fifth year. They constitute her first book of poems, an event consonant with Passager Books’ mission as a vehicle for writers over fifty. This also happens to be Passager’s first book, and it’s an auspicious debut; the production values of the book make it an objet d’art, a true collectible. (more…)

—seriously diminished U.S. standing in the world

—diverted “manpower, materiel and the attention of decision-makers” from “all other efforts in the war on terror”

—severely strained our armed forces

—made Iraq an incubator for terrorism

—emboldened Iran to expand its influence in the region

                        —Conclusions of National Defense Institute

The first rule of the corporado press is to bury the inconvenient story in plain sight, so that’s exactly what the press did last week to the National Defense Institute’s authoritative report calling the Iraq war a “major debacle.”

The press reported the story, to be sure, but then it kept on yakking incessantly about the Pope and Barack Obama’s alleged elitism, and it kept on giving John McCain a free pass regarding his wife’s failure to make public her tax filings and his own medical records, to say nothing of the free pass he can now count on whenever he deliberately confuses the many kinds of insurgents in Iraq with Al Qaeda. (more…)

Daniel Cabrera, the towering Baltimore Orioles starter, plunked Yankee left fielder Hideki Matsui twice Friday night. The second hit smelled bad. Matsui grimaced in pain both times, but by the time he got to first base he chatted amiably with the voluble Orioles first baseman Kevin Millar. The presidential hopefuls could learn something from Matsui’s grace under fire.

What we seem to have lost in this period of polarization and political deafness is that governing the nation, or a small town, is not about retaliation. It’s not about hits, it’s about runs. It’s not about piling on. It’s not an eye-for-an-eye blood sport, even though Bill Clinton calls it a contact sport. The big sport should get a life instead of playing spoilsport. (more…)

The surpassing silliness of arguing about which politician has flip-flopped on an issue reminds me of my own flip-flopping around Oscar Wilde’s (inset) famous observation that we pretty much have the faces we deserve by the time we’re forty.

I’ve always loved his remark so much that I’ve neglected to notice that it flies in the face of my own experiences. I want him to be right just as the ninnies who complain about flip-flopping want to be right. But a soldier’s long-held photographs have prompted me to confess I have my doubts.

They’re the recently published photos of the staff at a Nazi concentration camp having themselves a high old time, picnicking, singing, playing accordions and slapping each other the back. Look at those faces: hardly a demon among them. Just folks. (more…)

How disheartening — for Americans and everyone else — to see all three wannabe presidents acting like schoolyard goons, backbiting, pandering to the worst instincts of the media and ideologues. How disheartening the media in their preference for the shallow.

The media are fond of speaking of right-wing and left-wing ideological bases, but they have their own bases: witness the Lou Dobbs xenophobes and the Fox swift-boaters.

Is Barack Obama’s unfortunate failure to foresee what might be taken
as elitism worse than Hillary Clinton’s squalid harping on it? It looks as if these two, whose electability has always been questionable, are in self-destruct mode. And leave it to the press to project onto others its own worst  characteristics. (more…)

(Human Dark With Sugar, Brenda Shaughnessy, Copper Canyon Press, 77 pp, $15)

Anyone who has ever watched—observed—a dragonfly alight on a leaf will appreciate Brenda Shaughnessy’s poems. The difference between the poems in her second book, Human Dark With Sugar, and my own poems or those of any number of poets whose work I read is the difference between plunk and alight, not that there’s anything wrong with plunk, but the ability to make words hover like hummingbirds and dragonflies is cause for celebration:

This planet spins so it shouldn’t be so hot.
You’ve never felt the sun

on me. And nothing will fall with the exact
weight of itself until you do.

When I study her poems—hummingbirds and dragonflies—I experience a kind of ecstatic aggravation because there is nothing quite like the electrifying, itchy whir that enables them to so improbably stand in air. There is an incomparable energy, a celestial anxiety. (more…)