Rubicon

Grab the nearest book

I'm trying to wrap my mind around resuscitating Rubicon from its long hibernation, and I want to start with something easy. So the blog meme I ran across today at Crooked Timber looks like fun, and I'll give that a whirl. Now I know you're not supposed to pick a meme randomly out of the digital ether, and Eszter Hargittai did not actually tag me, but I'm going to carry on anyway, as though all the webby proprieties had been observed.

Instructions:

1. Grab the nearest book (that is at least 123 pages long).
2. Open to p. 123.
3. Go down to the 5th sentence.
4. Type in the following 3 sentences.
5. Tag five people.

The nearest book to my chaotic desk is Ilan Pappé's The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Page 123 is toward the end of chapter 5, "The Blueprint for Ethnic Cleansing: Plan Dalet." Here are the three sentences:

US representatives on the ground were by now fully aware of the expulsions that were going on and had suggested to their chiefs back home to halt the implementation of the partition plan and try to work towards an alternative solution.

Already by 12 March 1948, the State Department had drafted a new proposal to the UN, which suggested an international trusteeship over Palestine for five years, during which the two sides would negotiate an agreed solution. It has been suggested that this was the most sensible American proposal ever put forward in the history of Palestine, the like of which, alas, was never repeated.

Well, that cries out for some amplification, don't you think? A complete book review, perhaps, in light of George Bush's long record of nonproposals and half-hearted mummeries. Some thoughts about related books might be in order: Jimmy Carter's Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, or Mearshimer and Walt's The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, or the essay collection Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory.

Another day, perhaps. It's not an easy subject any time for Americans, but particularly today, the day of Tom Lantos's death. Lantos was the only survivor of the Nazi Holocaust to serve in the US Congress, and he was unbending—understandably so—in his attachment to the founding myth of an innocent Israel. Over the years he was an obstacle to reexamining US policy in the Middle East, though, as Steve Clemons writes at TPMCafe, he had recently become more amenable to real negotiations in the region, more open to alternative approaches to Israeli security. As, we hope, the next president will be.

Well, back to the meme. Like Eszter, I wasn't tagged, so it's not my place to tag five more bloggers. But I will just pass this idea along through the tubes of the Internets to anyone else who might find it an amusing pastime. Grab the nearest book and see what you find.

The Omnivore's Dilemma: Food and its discontents

Michael Pollan's delectable new book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, examines the wretched state of modern agriculture—and the unhealthy relationship most of us have with what we eat—by tracing the origin and consumption of four very different meals. He concludes that Americans now live in a wasteland of bland, interchangeable commodities, dominated by monocultured corn and fueled by imported oil. It's not a pretty sight, but Pollan writes with such verve and insight that the book is hard to put down.

For the first meal, Pollen takes his family to McDonald's; like 19 percent of all meals in the US, this one is eaten in the car. Next, he prepares a meal from ingredients labeled "organic," a feel-good label that is now often applied to food produced in industrialized, energy-wasteful ways. He then visits a farm in western Virginia where sustainable multicrops, free-range animals, and ecological reuse create a happily updated version of the traditional family farm. And finally, he turns hunter-gatherer to create a meal with ingredients from the gardens and forests of Northern California: he shoots a feral pig, hunts mushrooms, picks cherries and lettuce, and even captures wild yeast for his bread.

As Pollan describes the making of each meal, he examines various aspects of the dysfunctional agribusiness system that feeds us cheap food but extracts the cost in other ways: degraded ecosystems, bankrupt farmers, hollowed-out communities, tortured animals, tasteless food, increased obesity and diabetes, and military expenses to protect our sources of oil. The consequences of how we eat ramify in every direction, affecting economy, environment, psychology, and government—and the effects are usually bad.

But there are heroes in the book, notably Virginian Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm, who practices a holistic, hands-on "grass farming" that produces large quantities of chickens, eggs, turkeys, rabbits, beef, and pork in a recycling dance of interrelated growth, consumption, decay, and regrowth. He calls his work "grass farming" because most of the energy input is sunlight transformed by chlorophyll into grasses that are eaten by the animals, who in turn replenish the soil with manure. It's a nearly closed system in which Salatin buys almost everything he needs locally, and he sells all of his output locally.

The lesson, as Wendell Barry said, is that "eating is an agricultural act." Pollan adds that is is "also an ecological act, and a political act, too," and we can do many things to improve our own eating habits that will also improve, bit by bit, the agricultural system that feeds us. He does not suggest that we return entirely to hunting and gathering, though growing a small garden is a feasible gesture even for many urbanites. Buying organic food is also a step in the right direction, though the label often means only that the food is free of chemical pesticides, not necessarily that it has been grown sustainably or humanely.

Buying from a local farmers' market—or a local farmer—is the best approach, and the more frequently we can eat locally (and seasonally) the better it will be for our health and for local farmers' finances. It is a way to avoid wasting energy by transporting food long distances and at the same time to create a living community of producers and consumers who operate outside the industrialized world of big agribusiness. Pollan puts it like this:

[T]here exists a fundamental tension between the logic of nature and the logic of human industry, at least as it is presently organized. Our ingenuity in feeding ourselves is prodigious, but at various points our technologies come into conflict with nature's way of doing things, as when we seek to maximize efficiency by planting crops or raising animals in vast monocultures. This is something nature never does, always and for good reason practicing diversity instead.…

Another theme, or premise really, is that the way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world. Daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds.… Our eating also constitutes a relationship with dozens of other species—plants, animals, and fungi—with which we have coevolved to the point where our fates are deeply entwined.

The dilemma of the omnivore? It's simply that since our bodies have evolved to digest anything from carrots to chicken eggs, from radicchio to seal blubber, we must make decisions every time we eat. Unlike the koala, for whom eucalyptus leaves are in the class of edible things and all else is in the class of inedible things, humans have to choose, and the line can be drawn in many different places. It's easy enough to rule out poisonous items, but harder to balance more or less healthful, cheaper or tastier, greater quantity or higher quality. And harder still when we begin to consider buying locally, or buying only well-treated animals, or eating only organic foods, or becoming vegetarian.

I can think of no better primer for these vexed questions than The Omnivore's Dilemma—Pollan is an engaging storyteller and a challenging thinker. Just don't try to read him while eating a Big Mac. You may lose your appetite.

[Cross-posted at Scholars & Rogues]

Absurd, Criminal, and Impeachable

It's been one month since the Democratic tsunami of 2006, and the principal question being discussed about Iraq now is not how the US might win but how the US will get out and when. The midterm election marked a new starting point for the subject, and the Iraq Study Group moved past that point to specific recommendations. George Bush still insists that victory is possible, but his intransigence merely demonstrates his confusion and detachment from reality.

The latest milestone on the path to total withdrawal was a speech this week by Senator Gordon Smith of Oregon. Smith has been a cheerleader for Bush and his Iraq adventure, but on Thursday he announced a change of heart:

I, for one, am at the end of my rope when it comes to supporting a policy that has our soldiers patrolling the same streets in the same way, being blown up by the same bombs day after day. That is absurd. It may even be criminal. I cannot support that anymore. I believe we need to figure out how to fight the war on terror and to do it right. So either we clear and hold and build, or let's go home.

There are no good options, as the Iraq Study Group has mentioned in their report.… But we have no business being a policeman in someone else's civil war.

I welcome the Iraq Study Group's report, but if we are ultimately going to retreat, I would rather do it sooner than later. I am looking for answers, but the current course is unacceptable to this Senator. I suppose if the President is guilty of one other thing, I find it also in the words of Winston Churchill. He said:

After the First World War, let us learn our lessons. Never, never believe that any war will be smooth and easy or that anyone who embarks on this strange voyage can measure the tides and the hurricanes. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.

When Gordon Smith no longer supports Bush's war, it won't be long until supporters are as rare as Republicans in New England. Just Laura and Barney, perhaps. Bush once told Bob Woodward he would not withdraw from Iraq even if his wife and his dog were the only ones supporting him. We may soon find out whether he was joking.

If Bush does maintain his ruinous course, there may be no alternative other than impeachment, perhaps followed by criminal trials. When that day comes, there will be no better place to start than Elizabeth de la Vega's new book United States v. George W. Bush et al. It constitutes a legal indictment of Bush and his fellow defendants Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and Powell, all charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States (under law 18 U.S.C Section 371). This is not a joke; it is a complete "theoretical indictment," with all the legal i's dotted and t's crossed, written by an experienced federal prosecutor, and it includes speeches de la Vega would give to the theoretical grand jury. You can read significant excerpts of the book at TomDispatch: the introduction here, the 63-count indictment here, and the grand jury testimony here. If your local bookshop doesn't yet have the book in stock, you can order it directly from Seven Stories Press.

Another excellent book on the subject of presidential crimes was published earlier this year: The Case for Impeachment, by Dave Lindorff and Barbara Olshansky. Lindorff, an investigative journalist, and Olshansky, deputy director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, describe the legal history of impeachment and the specific acts Bush has performed that merit impeachment, in great detail. They also provide, in appendices, evidentiary documents such as the Downing Street Memo, the Niger Forgeries, and the torture memos by Gonzales and Rumsfeld. You can check for the book locally, or order it from Amazon.

In the same way as we are now talking about how to leave Iraq rather than whether to leave, it's time to begin discussing how to impeach Bush, not whether. Lindorff and Olshansky conclude their book with a fervent call to action:

We the People of the United States, who for too long have been negligent about the obligations of citizenship, must stand up and demand action from our elected representatives to defend the Constitution, to defend the Bill of Rights, and to defend the tradition of separation of powers that has sustained this nation for over two centuries from attack by a power-mad president who has broken his oath of office.…

We must stop listening to the president and his supporters as they pour scare stories in our ears and ask for more dictatorial power to "keep American safe." American was not built by a flock of cowering sheep.

If we fail to stand up for the Constitution now, it may be only a piece of paper by the end of President Bush's second term. Then it will be time to be afraid.

Impeach George Bush. Impeach Dick Cheney. Remove them from office. And then we can move on to the criminal trial for conspiracy. We have the proof of crimes, we have the growing political support, and with these two books we have the blueprint.

No Man a King

Huey Long's motto, which inspired his struggling Depression-era listeners, was "Every man a king." But the Kingfish of  Louisiana didn't quite get it right. The deeply resonant American idea on this subject—part of the country's political DNA since 1776—is that all citizens are equal in the eyes of the law, that no person has the royal prerogative to choose whether to follow the law simply by virtue of his wealth or position. The motto should be: "No man a king."

George Bush doesn't get it. He has broken the law many times, but when he is caught, as with his authorization of domestic NSA surveillance without warrant, he claims that he must break the law to protect Americans from dangerous terrorists. He claims, in fact, that his authority is unlimited—whatever laws Congress may pass, whatever decisions the courts may issue, he is above the law. Until last week, with the Supreme Court's Hamdan decision, the other branches of government have not been very forceful in disabusing him of his monarchical notion. But that opinion is clear and unambiguous: The president "may not disregard" Congress or the Supreme Court.

Glenn Greenwald has been cataloging Bush's royalist tendencies nearly every day since he started his blog Unclaimed Territory last October. As a nonpolitical lawyer, liberal on some issues and conservative on others, he was comfortable that the US government's system of checks and balances would shield us from any power grab. Until recently, that is. When José Padilla, a US citizen, was arrested and imprisoned but not charged or tried or even allowed to see a lawyer for years, Greenwald realized that something out of the ordinary was going on, and he was shaken out of his complacency. He came to believe that:

a creeping extremism has taken hold of our federal government, and it is threatening to radically alter our system of government and who we are as a nation. This extremism is neither conservative nor liberal in nature, but it is driven by theories of unlimited presidential power that are wholly alien, and antithetical, to the core political values that have governed this country since its founding.

Greenwald has written a powerful book—How Would a Patriot Act?—that is a succinct, eloquent summary of the legal and political history of presidential power and a  recounting of the ways that the Bush administration has ignored the law and broken historical bounds. As the subtitle has it, he is "defending American values from a president run amok." That's American values, he stresses, not liberal or conservative values: No man a king.

After explaining his new-found sense of urgency, Greenwald examines the most blatant instance of presidential lawbreaking, NSA eavesdropping on domestic phone and data communication. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Act of 1978 was amended in 2001 to allow additional authority to the executive branch, since the attacks of 9/11 seemed to require it, but the president was still required to obtain warrants from a special FISA court before eavesdropping within the US. Bush decided not to ask for such warrants and unlawfully initiated extensive domestic surveillance, repeatedly renewing his authorization. When the New York Times made his actions public in December 2005, he admitted the reports were correct but claimed that he had the right to do so, despite the fact that the FISA law specifically states that such actions, whether in peacetime or wartime, are federal felonies, punishable by up to $10,000 in fines and 5 years in prison for each offense.

In short, Bush broke the law, then bragged about it. Greenwald draws this conclusion:

The National Security Agency eavesdropping scandal is not an isolated act of lawbreaking. It is an outgrowth of an ideology of lawlessness that has been adopted by the Bush administration as its governing doctrine. Others include the incarceration in military prisons of U.S. citizens who were not charged with any crime or even allowed access to a lawyer, the use of legally prohibited torture techniques, and the establishment of a military detention center in Guantanamo Bay, a no-man's-land that the administration claims is beyond the reach of U.S. law. In the media and the public mind, these issues have been seen in isolation, as though they are unconnected.

In fact, all of these controversial actions can be traced to a single cause, a shared root. They are grounded in, and are the by-product of, an unprecedented and truly radical theory of presidential power that, at its core, maintains that the president's power is literally unlimited and absolute in matters relating to terrorism or national security.

Using the 2001 terrorist attacks as the justification, the Bush administration has embraced theories, generated by ideologues in its Justice Department, that are simply alien to the American system of government. The administration has claimed—and has repeatedly asserted and applied the principle—that any presidential actions relating to terrorism or security cannot be limited by Congress, the courts, or the American people. Decisions about such matters are, to quote the principal Bush administration document that legitimized these theories, "for the President alone to make."

Greenwald's brief treatment of each instance of presidential overreach is well worth reading, even for those of us who have been following the scandalous revelations all along. He unravels many of the often tangled narratives on the subject: torture, Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, the cases of Padilla and Hamdi and Hamdan, congressional attempts to address the issues, and the media's bungled reporting. He also provides concise historical information on the framers of the Constitution and on previous presidential attempts to test the bounds of authority, and how the courts and Congress checked Truman's and Nixon's power grabs. Greenwald continues to discuss these issues daily in his blog, including extensive analysis of the Hamdan decision (here and here), which was released after the book went to press.

In the book's epilogue, Greenwald mentions another potential instance of Bush's overreaching: the threatened war on Iran, which Seymour Hersh examined in the New Yorker last April. Hersh has just published another article on Iran, which raises the question of whether Bush's latest overtures toward Iran were merely "laying the diplomatic groundwork for future military action." The only heartening information from Hersh is that the US military is pushing back against the notion of attacking Iran—and has fortunately convinced him to take the nuclear option off the table.  However, Bush clearly thinks he has the authority to attack any nation at will, so Iran continues to be in great danger. After all, he's the King of the United Kingdom of America.

Jane Jacobs Is Dead

When Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961—a time of sleek glass-and-steel skyscrapers and antiseptic "urban renewal" schemes—she championed an architecture scaled to human life and conducive to human interactions. She was not a trained architect or city planner, but she knew a robotic cityscape when she saw one.

Jacobs was an idealist, but her idealism was scaled to realistic capabilities and social needs. The joy and excitement of urban life, she pointed out, cannot be minutely planned by governmental fiat. It flourishes naturally, organically, in the rich, variegated streets and public places where people bounce off each other, in chance encounters and happy coincidences. But government does have a role: it must provide the freedoms and the strictures that enable the growth of  a complex social web, and then it must get out of the way. Writing in the New York Times, Douglas Martin explains:

At a time when both common and inspired wisdom called for bulldozing slums and opening up city space, Ms. Jacobs's prescription was ever more diversity, density and dynamism — in effect, to crowd people and activities together in a joyous urban jumble.…

"Death and Life" made four basic recommendations for creating municipal diversity: 1. A street or district must serve several primary functions. 2. Blocks must be short. 3. Buildings must vary in age, condition and use. 4. Population must be dense.

Ms. Jacobs's thesis was enlarged by her deep, eclectic reading. But most compelling was her description of the everyday life she witnessed from her home above a candy store at 555 Hudson Street, near 11th Street.

In that description, she puts out her garbage, children go to school, the dry cleaner and the barber open their shops, women come out to chat, longshoremen visit the local bar, teenagers return from school and change to go out on dates, and another day is played out. Sometimes, odd things happen: a bagpiper shows up on a February night, and delighted listeners gather around. Whether neighbors or strangers, people are safer because they are almost never alone.

"People who know well such animated city streets will know how it is," Ms. Jacobs wrote. "I am afraid people who do not will always have it a little wrong in their heads, like the old prints of rhinoceroses made from travelers' descriptions of rhinoceroses."

Unfortunately, many Americans do not understand, since they never experienced such city life. Some grew up in urban landscapes that were already profoundly damaged by "outrageous" (her word) governmental clearances and forced migrations, creating a city with more fear than excitement. Many more grew up in the saccharine flatlands of suburbia. But Jacobs knew, and she understood the ways in which a melange of varied architecture and bustling streets provides the canvas for urban richness.

Jacobs did not stop there. After moving to Toronto in 1968, she wrote a series of other penetrating books, including:

• Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics, in which she distinguishes two complementary modes of structuring organizations, and points out how dangerous it is, for example, to import business practices into governmental activities.

• The Nature of Economies, in which she extends her earlier organic view of city life to more general economic activity and other ecosystems, with similar strictures on the hubris of excessive planning.

• Dark Age Ahead, in which she explains how a culture can malfunction and deteriorate to the point that it begins to lose its accumulated working knowledge, the glue that holds its way of life together, and in particular how that is happening now in the US and Canada. (My review is here.)

We will miss her iconoclasm, her encyclopedic knowledge, and her down-to-earth pragmatism. But the ideas live on in her rich, accessible writings. Read a book by Jane Jacobs. You'll be glad you did.

Mourning Becomes Joan Didion

When Joan Didion's husband suffered a massive heart attack at the dinner table on December 30, 2003, at first she focused desperately on immediate demands: calling 911, getting help to save his life, taking him to the hospital. Like any spouse, she did everything possible to rescue him. But he died—in fact, was probably dead almost immediately, within the five minutes before paramedics arrived.

Like any bereaved spouse, she fell into a deep, disabling grief, made more intense by the unusual intimacy she and John Gregory Dunne had shared, two writers who wrote together and edited each other's work, together twenty-four hours almost every day for forty years. Sometimes she forgot that he was gone, making a mental note to talk to him about a new shop in the neighborhood or an interesting phrase she had read. Sometimes she imagined he would return, or refused to accept that he would not, holding on to his shirts and shoes so he would have something to wear when he reappeared. She had always been observer, writer, rationalist—and now she had bouts of magical thinking, irrational hopes and fears, confusions and imprecise memories.

But unlike most bereaved spouses, Didion is a writer, someone whose habit it is to notice details with care, to find out what is going on and why, to perceive patterns and make sense. As her mind began to clear, returning to that mode of thought came naturally to her. And as the material of her life became increasingly medical—with her husband's death and her daughter's life-threatening illness—that was the material she worked with. She asked doctors for information, she learned the concepts and the jargon. Her mantra was:

Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature.
Information is control.

Restoring Democracy

Rick Perlstein has written a long, thoughtful essay about the troubles of the Democrats and what they (we) might do to turn the tide. It's been published by Prickly Paradigm Press as the first item in a pocket-size, 114-page pamphlet titled The Stock Ticker and the Superjumbo: How the Democrats Can Once Again Become America's Dominant Political Party. The essay is followed by a dozen trenchant responses from a range of party luminaries, including Stanley Aronowitz, William Galston, Elaine Karmack, Robert Reich, and Ruy Teixeira. If you care about regime change in Washington, this pamphlet is a good place to start. The participants represent a variety of Democratic political shades, and their writing is well informed and clearly argued.

Perlstein argues for a long-term plan to restore the Democrats by returning to the traditional strengths of the party—that is, unabashed liberalism instead of Republicanism Lite. That means using the power of government to protect the weakest among us and to promote egalitarian ideals, rather than hobbling government and promoting the interests of corporations and the superrich. As Congressman Maury Maverick put it in the 1930s, that kind of liberalism is "freedom plus groceries." It is not an apologetic "We're just like the Republicans, but not as mean."

Perlstein says that the changes may take decades. He hopes Democrats will regain conrol of Congress by 2018, but he warns to plan for a 30-year war. That's how long it took the radical conservatives—the followers of Barry Goldwater—to construct their ideological edifice and their organizational steamroller over the ruins of the 1964 presidential election and to capture Congress with Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America." True, they had better luck with the White House in the interim, but Nixon's domestic policies were Roosevelt Lite, and even Reagan raised more taxes than he cut. Those presidencies were only partial victories for the truly radical Republicans, those for whom government is the enemy.

Taking decades to return to dominance is not bad, Perlstein says—though we can certainly hope and plan for some more immediate victories too—because what he recommends is a rebranding of the Democratic Party, or more precisely a revival and restamping of the benign and powerful brand of liberalism that was forged in the New Deal and World War II. He summarizes:

Its philosophy is rooted in the notion of human beings as autonomous agents.  With the realization that formal autonomy meant little without the means to sustain a decent life, its practical definition in this century came to encompass the various kinds of government arrangements democratically devised to share the social burden.

Here's an example: three-fourths of Americans, when polled, favor a federal mandate "requiring business to offer private health insurance for their employees." And yet 45 million Americans are without healthcare protection, and the political terrain is so unfriendly to any such mandate—in fact, to any meaningful reform of the healthcare system—that few Democrats engage the issue at all, and when someone like John Kerry does propose a comprehensive plan, it is almost completely ignored.

But Perlstein is not suggesting a laundry list of specific policies. The rebranding is what's important, the overarching ideas, and the policies will naturally follow. In a sense, his call to arms is simply a more specific version of George Lakoff's plea to frame the discourse in a progressive way. That means defining a clear, understandable vision and sticking to it through thick and thin, even in those election years when the vision may not immediately win over the swing voters. And yet it also means making the hard political choices that will win elections and put the party back at the levers of power. So there is a tension, but Perlstein insists that the emphasis should be on the vision, on consistent messages over time, and that the result will be a loyal base and a persuadable swing bloc.

The title of the essay, "The Stock Ticker and the Superjumbo," refers to the long-term success and the more recent decline of Boeing. For many decades, Boeing maintained "the willingness to stake itself to the long term for the sake of building something enduring." The company bet a bundle—gambled its very existence—on the superjumbo 747. The prospects did not seem good; in fact, during one 18-month period, the company failed to get a single domestic passenger-jet order. But the persistence paid off, and Boeing made $20 billion over a decade on the original $2 billion investment.

Then came the stock-market mania of the 1990s, and Boeing succumbed to the fervor for ever-improving quarterly reports and ever-rising stock prices. The focus on the short-term bottom line has reduced innovation, cut long-term research and development, and caused Boeing to fall behind its European rival Airbus. That's the parable, and I would add from personal experience that it describes the rise and fall of Hewlett-Packard with equal accuracy, along with many other once-proud American companies.

The moral of the story for the Democrats is clear. Think long term. Invest for the future. Be consistent. Don't compromise.

A one-party government is not a democracy. Therefore, restoring the Democratic Party—or, less plausibly, creating another viable progressive alternative to the GOP—is a necessary step toward restoring democracy. Let's hope we have time to effect the changes soon, before the military-religious-corporate wing of the Republican Party decides to cancel all future elections.

Curious about George

Today, we know who he is—and, by inference, who we are. We, too, are susceptible to bloodlust, and he is our ringleader.

—Justin Frank

When I first heard of Justin Frank's book-length psychoanalysis of George Bush, I was not particularly interested in reading it. Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President, to judge from the mixed reviews, is either a completely misguided attempt based on sketchy information or a somewhat interesting compendium of everything we already know. Logically, of course, it can't be both.

In fact, it's something larger, and much better, than either. The book contains everything we (shudder) already know about this man's pathological patterns of thought and repressed emotions—plus a lot more—all cast within the illuminating context of traditional psychoanalysis and related in the sensible, measured tones of a concerned family doctor. Well, not always measured—Frank is sometimes so appalled at Bush's psyche that he occasionally waxes shrill. That's OK by me—shrillness comes with the territory, given the patient's excesses. I have been driven to it myself now and again.

Frank, a clinical professor of psychiatry at George Washington University, is disarmingly, well, frank about his initial impressions of Bush and the reasons he took on the task of dissecting the mind of someone so famously nonintrospective, someone who would never actually agree to place himself on any analyst's couch.

If one of my patients frequently said one thing and did another, I would want to know why. If I found he often used words that hid their true meaning and affected a persona that obscured the nature of his actions, I would grow more concerned. If he presented an inflexible worldview characterized by an oversimplified distinction between right and wrong, good and evil, allies and enemies, I would question his ability to grasp reality. And if his actions revealed an unacknowledged—even sadistic—indifference to human suffering, wrapped in pious claims of compassion, I would worry about the safety of the people whose lives he touched.

For the past three years, I have observed with increasing alarm the inconsistencies and denials of such an individual. But he is not one of my patients. He is our president.

We have all observed these disjunctions and self-deceptions; and Frank, using the tools of his trade, is able to examine fruitfully their sources and significance. Critics have questioned Frank's methodology, however, raising doubts that anyone can meaningfully analyze a patient who refuses to be analyzed, who even disparages what he calls "psychobabble." But Frank recalls that Freud himself wrote theory-rich observations of several public figures, including Moses and Leonardo da Vinci; and he points to the OSS/CIA office that has, over the years, provided US presidents with incisive profiles of Adolf Hitler, Anwar Sadat, and Menachen Begin, to name a few. (Ironically, that office is housed in the CIA building named for George Bush's father.)

America the Predator

The American empire rose to its singular towering eminence in the last 60 years, and it will certainly fall … sometime. The question is when. Perhaps in 25 years, perhaps not for two or three centuries. Or is it already on the way down, as its recent erratic actions in Iraq attest? Emmanuel Todd, observing from France, is puzzled:

The most disturbing thing about the present situation is the fundamental absence of any satisfactory explanation for American behavior. Why is today's superpower not behaving in the good-natured and reasonable way it put into practice in the wake of World War Two? Why is it being such a destabilizing busybody? Is it because it is all-powerful? Or, on the contrary, because America feels it is losing its grip on the new world that is being born?

Todd, a demographer, anthropologist, and political scientist at the French National Institute for Demographic Studies in Paris, is unusual among those who address the question of American preeminence because he uses data. Numbers. Rows of hard, empirical facts. Unlike grand theorists like Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama, and Niall Ferguson, he stays close to the ground with tables of trade surpluses and deficits, for example, or changing national rates of literacy and fertility.

Also unlike these grand theorists, Todd comes to conclusions that are not comforting to the corporate and governmental elite of the US. In his devastating 2002 book After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order—translated into English last year—he argues that America is acting like a big bully not as a result of its great power but precisely because it has begun to slip—it is no longer a prudent, productive, or peaceful nation. America expresses its fear and uncertainty, therefore, in baseless threats and "theatrical micromilitarism" against small, helpless foes like Panama, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

War through Other Eyes

While strolling through the hot streets of sunny Juneau today and thinking about global warming's disproportionate effect on Alaska, I stopped at Rainy Day Books for my accustomed visit to an independent bookseller, that unheralded guardian of the nation's treasures. Yes, it's true, people read books everywhere, and small independent bookstores—along with public libraries—are the local repository of book knowledge and the meeting place for bibliophiles.

At Rainy Day I picked up a clever, biting book by Micah Ian Wright called You Back the Attack! We'll Bomb Who We Want! It's subtitled Remixed War Propaganda, and it contains posters, mostly from World War II, with text revised to reflect our current woes. The finger-pointing poster above, for example, in its original 1942 British version, said, "Someone Talked! U.S. Ship Sunk By.…" After Wright photoshopped it to fit today's politics, he changed the words and added, "The Nail That Sticks Out Gets Hammered Down." (Click on the thumbnails for larger versions of all three posters.)