Sex, Race, and Precious
“IN THE beginning was not the shadow, but the act.” Ralph Ellison’s cause and effect dictum is applicable to any cinematic adaptation of a literary work: Before there was the movie, there was the book. But today—given the power of film, publicity, and celebrity—the cinematic shadow often takes precedence. The very title of Lee Daniels’s film Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire points viewers toward the original novel, but the great majority of viewers will never take the opportunity to compare film and text. They will never fully appreciate what was lost, gained, o... More
A Liberal Endures
True Compass: A Memoir
by Edward M. Kennedy.
Little Brown, 532 pp.
THE UNITED States Senate is the most potent legislative body in the Western world. It is also one of the least democratic. Under the Constitution, it has the exclusive power to ratify treaties, to consent to or reject cabinet and federal court appointments, and to throw a president out of office for committing “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Yet the vote of a senator from Wyoming—whose population of 540,000 is smaller than that of... More
Money Is Speech: Why the Citizens United v. FEC Ruling Is Bad for Politics and the Market
IN LATE January, a bare majority of the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment bars most restrictions on corporate expenditures to influence political elections. The decision, which turned the First Amendment on its head, was based on a simple syllogism: Corporate spending is speech; restricting speech is censorship; therefore, restricting corporate spending to influence elections is censorship and is banned by the First Amendment.
The syllogism is powerful—so powerful, in fact, that five members of the Court felt it justified overruling two major Supreme Court precedents and ... More
Meeting Ground
Where Heaven and Earth Meet: Jerusalem’s Sacred Esplanade, eds. Oleg Grabar and Benjamin Kedar (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi Press; Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 411pp.
THERE ARE many ways of making peace—even in the Middle East where one might think there wasn’t any way at all. Where Heaven and Earth Meet: Jerusalem’s Sacred Esplanade is an example of academic and intellectual peacemaking. It deals with what might be the m... More
Public Health and the Jobs Bill
ON FEBRUARY 25, President Obama will host a bipartisan summit that commences the endgame of health reform. I remain optimistic that Democrats will find a way to pass a comprehensive bill. However this process ends, I can’t help noticing how necessary and yet how narrow the effort to reconstruct our health care system has become. It’s all too easy to conflate population health with the provision of health services, health services with the provision of personal medical services.
America needs comprehensive reforms to address central issues of health care access and (ultim... More
Tiger Woods's Golf Lesson
LIKE SOUTH Carolina governor Mark Sanford, former president Bill Clinton, and former New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, golfing great Tiger Woods—the winner of fifty-six professional golf tournaments from 2000 to 2009—has become a charter member of the Celebrity Adulterer’s Club. His decision to hold a televised news conference apologizing for his transgressions is a familiar one, and in the conference, Woods—whose wife was not in the room with him—made a point of offering no excuses. “I convinced myself that the rules did not apply,” he declared. “I have... More
Will the Real Chinese Internet Please Stand Up?
In the new century, liberty will spread by cell phone and cable modem....We know how much the Internet has changed America....Imagine how much it could change China...[The Beijing regime] has been trying to crack down on the Internet—good luck. That’s sort of like trying to nail Jello to the wall.
-Bill Clinton, March 8, 2000
The Chinese Communist Party and Google
THE CCP regime has brushed off Google’s complaints about hacking into the Google email accounts of Chinese human rights activists, imposing political censorship on Google’s search engine, and seeking to steal invaluable Google codes. The Beijing government responded that it did not hack into Google and that Google should respect Chinese law—that is, the commands of an authoritarian regime that are intended to preserve its monopoly of arbitrary power.
Ever since Hu Jintao became the paramount leader in 2002, he has intensified repression and behaved with more hostility toward t... More
Sri Lanka's Post-war Crisis
THE DEATH of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) leader Velupillai Prabhakaran on May 19 was met with jubilation within much of the majority Sinhalese community. For many, it signaled the end of over twenty-six years of war and violence and offered the possibility of an almost unprecedented era of peace in post-colonial Sri Lanka. In some Tamil enclaves, the news was received with trepidation. While many Tamils were thankful that the war was over, the elimination of the LTTE meant that now there was no one to stand up for them. Many were frightened that the government, riding a wave of ... More
Who's Afriad of Shari'a?
IN MARCH 2009, the delicate matter of apostasy came before the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC). During a discussion of freedom of religion, the floor was opened to comments from representatives of the many non-governmental organizations affiliated with the Council. One such group, the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, presented a brief statement about the discrimination suffered by Egyptian members of the Baha’i faith and converts from Islam when attempting to obtain mandatory identification documents such as birth certificates and identity cards.
“Wi... More
In Place of a Hero (Spring, 1960)
J.D. Salinger (1919-2010) died on January 28, 2010. We are reprinting Michael Walzer’s 1960 consideration of Salinger’s fiction. - The Editors
YOUNG PEOPLE today have no spokesmen. The day of the youth league and its ideology seems to be over. Today we have the club again, and the gang, and perhaps the family. It might even be wrong to say that the young have heroes—models of courage, skill, commitment or self-sacrifice. Bright middle-class teenagers often have a developed sensitivity to each other’s problems, but are very... More
Obama's First Year: It Could Have Been Worse
AFTER OUTRAGE, disappointment is probably the easiest emotion of the left. I am always disappointed before the fact, so as not to be too disappointed afterwards. Right now, though, I am resisting disappointment. Granted, Obama’s first year has not seen a radical transformation of American society—not even the transformation that Roosevelt wrought in his first one hundred days. But there is a reason for that. Roosevelt came into office after three years of severe depression and frighteningly high unemployment. The country was ready for radical experiments. Obama came into office after only a... More
Obama's First Year: The Great Overlap and the Stall
IT IS an ancient assumption that tribulation is the threshold to deliverance. George Bush’s rule was so deeply ruinous in so many different ways and for so long that his successor’s campaign automatically lent itself to messianic hopes. It wasn’t that Barack Obama declared himself the messiah—to the contrary—but that many of his supporters tended to project onto him all their pent-up desires, while he practiced not only the politics of overlap but the politics of strategic vagueness. (“Hope.” “Change.” “Change You Can Believe In.”) It was as if in Barack Obama all the desires inter... More
Obama's First Year: Who is Obama?
GRANTED WE projected our fantasies onto him. But it wasn’t just that we deluded ourselves; it was more like a tango, a seductive dance in which we both played a part. We needed to believe, he needed believers. We were a perfect match: our hunger and his promise. After eight years of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Yoo, and the rest, he was like the coming of spring after a treacherous winter—the embodiment of a new era, a new politics, a sense of redemption and renewal. His name was Barack Hussein Obama, and he was the perfect vessel into which to deposit our progressive hopes: a sl... More
Obama’s First Year: Why He Deserves a More Enthusiastic Endorsement from the Left
THERE ARE two sets of questions one must ask about the first year of the Obama presidency and its disappointments. First, to what extent is the discontent on the left the product of Obama’s own hesitancies, limitations, and proposals? And to what extent are his low poll numbers and the obvious skittishness of Democrats and liberals a product of a program that is inadequate and misdirected?
Second, to what extent are the difficulties of the Obama presidency the product of forces and structures outside his control—the political opposition, the dysfunction of American political institu... More
Moral Icon
MORGAN FREEMAN was asked many years ago by Nelson Mandela to create a film based on No Easy Walk To Freedom, his 1994 autobiography. It never got made, but Freeman got his chance with Invictus, a big-budget Hollywood film, where he indeed plays one who is the “master of his fate.” Director Clint Eastwood uses sports, in this case rugby, to dramatize Mandela’s courageous political leadership. Rugby was the sport of the white Afrikaner minority (soccer was the game of black South Africans), and their nearly all-white team the “Springboks” was a symbol of aparth... More
Dear Mr. President: Make Lemonade
I’m wholeheartedly with Theda Skocpol at Talking Points Memo: Whether Martha Coakley loses to Scott Brown or squeaks out a win, Barack Obama, the empiricist, must learn from what is—one way or the other—a defeat.
He should take a hard, hard look at the last year. He tried post-partisanship, disdained the all-out fight, and the Republicans wouldn’t play. They preferred to organize for his Waterloo. The Obama movement, f... More
Deconstructing Palin
I HATE Sarah Palin. There, I said it. I hate her in a way that I’ve rarely hated a politician, although George W. Bush came close. When I hear the ex-governor of Alaska speak I suppress bile. Here she is when Katie Couric asked what other Supreme Court decision upset her besides Roe v. Wade: “Well, let’s see. There’s, of course, in the great history of America there have been rulings, that’s never going to be absolute consensus by every American.”
But as liberals, we need to push beyond this reaction. We need to know why this ex-governor draws crowds who wait in the col... More
I Predict a Riot: Italy After Berlusconi
LATE LAST month, Silvio Berlusconi was at last struck by the full force of the opposition to his premiership. It was a literal blow—a statuette to the nose—and as he tumbled to the floor, even il cavaliere, as the flamboyant Berlusconi is known, was forced to recognize the violent passions that have been aroused by his dogged refusal to resign.
The attack deserved condemnation, but it is hard not to agree with Antonio di Pietro—the leader of the centrist Italia dei Valori—that the climate of hatred that provoked the attack had been generated by il cav... More
What Happened to Canada's Liberals?
WHEN MICHAEL Ignatieff spoke at the Liberal Party convention in 2005, he was the country’s most buzzed-about politician since Pierre Trudeau. He was introduced as “the voice of our conscience” and seemed capable of uniting and broadening the ruling Liberal Party as well as expanding Canadian liberalism into a coherent philosophy instead of a laundry list of decades-old social programs.
But much has changed over the past five years. The Liberals now stand double-digits below the governing Conservative Party and in the November by-elections, the Conservatives unexpectedly won two seat... More
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