Today is Ethnic Cleansing Day in America. Or it would have been if a federal judge had not temporarily barred Arizona from enforcing parts of its Draconian immigration law. The law would turn undocumented immigrants into something like prey in Arizona, and other states plan to follow suit. If Arizona has its way it will [...]
Read More...Where, oh where, David Brooks, you thoughtful and elegant writer, have you been hanging out that you can write, as you do in today’s New York Times, that if Sonia Sotomayor had entered Princeton and Yale in the 1980s “her ethnicity and gender would have been mildly interesting traits,” but nothing more? At a time [...]
Read More...They’re not like us. So, who’s us? They‘re not like us, they don’t look like us. Those are the operative political and cultural code words in America. Why else would the government look as if it had been exported from Northern Europe while the rest of us look like our army? Why else would a [...]
Read More...The news industry is worrying itself from its 19th Century decrepitude to the ether, but it needs to redefine the concept of news itself. What we read in our newspapers and watch on television is antiquarian. In some ways magazines, with their broader perspectives, are ahead of the curve. What the news needs more than [...]
Read More...When you search the web for Sinbad you’re likely to find David Adkins, the comedian, before you find that wealthy young sailor of Basra whose adventures are immortalized in The Thousand and One Nights. When you search on Odysseus you find Homer’s mythological sailor immediately. We are, after all, Eurocentric, and worldwide accessibility to the [...]
Read More...The New Yorker magazine’s incendiary new cover caricatures Barack Obama in Osama bin Laden head dress. Michelle Obama is seen sporting an afro and an AK47, and they’re fist-dapping in the Oval Office. The cover article is favorable to the couple, the cartoon’s defenders say, being intended as satire. It’s meant to drum up attention, [...]
Read More...The ability to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes is as rare and precious in our private lives as it is in the affairs of nations. Word that young Muslims are flocking to the tribal areas of northwestern Pakistan to take up arms against the West has Washington beltway insiders beating the war drums [...]
Read More...If we are the world, as we say we are, how is it possible to have a foreign face in America? Not all immigrants come by this question the hard way. If you come from Northern Europe or Slavic Europe, you may grasp the question in your head but not your gut, because the chances [...]
Read More...Parallels too closely drawn invite intellectual train wrecks, but it might not be too far a reach to connect yesterday’s Supreme Court decision overturning the District of Columbia’s strict handgun control law to our gunpoint involvement with Arab society. Every Arab civilization since the advent of Islam in the 7th Christian century has been forced [...]
Read More...John McCain, who knows a thing or two about the Navy, thinks military recruits should be instructed in our foreign policy. But foreign policies fluctuate with our political EKG, while our national ideals, however soiled they may be by scare tactics, hold fast. My most memorable experience in Navy boot camp in the early 1950s [...]
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