“Americans are just SOooo arrogant!”
This isn’t Baghdad. It’s a suburban Melbourne post office and the young woman with the vehement opinion is about 20—she would have been a schoolgirl on September 11, 2001. What riles her as she weighs my New Yorker re-subscription envelope is the pre-printed address: it doesn’t include a country, just the street, state and zip code.
“How am I expected to know it’s America? They just think they run the world. I’ll show them!” She brandishes a black texta and scrawls "USA" across the envelope, sabotaging the urbane decorum of the New Yorker’s form letter.
Let the Hero born of woman
Crush the serpent…
I’m so distracted by the morning’s news about President Bush’s proposed detainee legislation—torture by another name, habeas corpus traduced etc.—and the Australian government’s winking at it, that I mumble a cowardly “mmm, uhuh” and retreat home to pack for Providence, Rhode Island. Lost opportunity.
In the Providence Journal (founded 1829) chief political columnist M. Charles Bakst notes that in the Democratic state of Rhode Island, "Bush" is just short of a swear word. The New York Times condemns the detainee legislation in an editorial headed “Rushing Off a Cliff”.
It doesn’t spare the Democrats either, from any state, concluding that Americans of the future won’t accept their pragmatic cave-in—so they can’t be branded as “soft on terrorism” (sound familiar?). Rather, trumpets the Times, the American people will know that “in 2006, Congress passed a tyrannical law that will be ranked with the low points in American democracy".
I can read his righteous sentence
By the dim and flaring lamps
On the leafy campus of Providence’s Brown University, you can hear, as I did last week, Newsweek’s senior editor Jonathan Alter in a public lecture on democracy and leadership under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Comparison with the Bush administration is implicit and unavoidable. Alter is a careful journalist, hard-nosed, scrupulous in his assembling of facts, of evidence—not much red stuff bleeding from his liberal heart.
He lists FDR’s many faults first, then praises the Depression and World War II-era President’s “bold, persistent experimentation”, his flexibility, his practical ability to get things done in a time of crisis. Alter isn’t shy of rhetoric, invoking phrases like “the winds of chance, the hurricanes of disaster”.
The audience immediately conjures Katrina and manifest government inaction—Bush not getting things done. Almost as an aside, Alter says: “I think