President-elect Obama has been working hard and making excellent appointments to his team.  He deserves a vacation.   I don't mean to be ingracious.  But do recall that President Bush was criticized for playing golf, as well as for refraining from playing golf.

I'm just saying...

 

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, or rather in Chicago, there are questions about Team Obama's contacts with Pay-Rod (read HERE to the end).

 

Designer Todd Oldham has been championing the work of 1950s graphic designer and artist Charley Harper. Ammo books has just published a collection. 

 

Tom Hanks "braved a nasty LA storm the other day to help his local, cash-strapped, independent shop, cozy Village Books in Pacific Palisades," who were behind on their rent. 

Hanks sat for two hours at a small table in the back signing everything put in front of him "until the last person," said the Village Books owner.

 

 

In Detroit, I've read, houses are being auctioned by the city, and selling for a dollar.   Given the prognosis for the car industry, these houses are not necessarily assets that will rise again in value should we emerge from the current recession in eighteen months or so.

Nonetheless, these are HOUSES, and it both reminds one how arbitrary house values are and makes one ponder what makes a house, or residential real estate, valuable... and how such could be MADE valuable.   Here's one idea:

The city and state should draft a Homesteaders Act, giving benefits (three years relief on real estate taxes) to those who move to Detroit from outside, buy a house, and live in it.  Young writers, musicians, artists should recognize the opportunity and migrate to take advantage of the free real estate.  If done in like-minded groups, the free real estate comes with a ready-made community.  Such communities could also form neighborhood associations to handle matters such as security and child-care.  Cafes and bars tend to sprout in artists' neighborhoods.  Galleries too.  Restaurants follow, then restaurant goers and art-buyers (well, let's not get our hopes up).  In the meantime these homesteaders would have performed a valuable function and created an asset for themselves.

It's a model that could be implemented in other neighborhoods and cities... some districts of New Orleans, sub-prime-blighted suburbs of Cleveland, Wilmington, DE, Philadelphia.  

Personally.. well, I'm chilly right now, so I'd like to hear about a city ripe for such in Florida...

 

In New York last month I saw Nelson Aldrich, editor... or perhaps more accurately choir master... for the oral biography of my old boss George Plimpton. 

Nelson said that the one great hole in book was the loss of a long discourse by Philip Roth on the meaning of George Plimpton during one of their interview sessions.  When Nelson, operating under "Paris Review rules," sent Roth the transcripts, the novelist insisted on removing that extended passage from the transcript, returning the edited text without explanation.  

A year later, presto, an extended version of this turned up in Roth's 2007 novel "Exit Ghost."  He riffs there: "To 'Be Happy' is another way of saying 'to be George Plimpton," and so forth, for some twenty page.  About Roth's last conclusion I'm not entirely sure, but it's a good line, and a great performance. 

It is also the best twenty pages of the book, and interesting that it had it genesis with words captured by a tape recorder.

 

"You don't know who's swimming naked until the tide goes out" 

- Warren Buffett

These days I find myself averting my eyes quite often.

 

There's another, often-overlooked side to archaeology.  As Dorothy King reminds us, it's not all Indiana Jones.  King points to an article by Heather Pringle about archaeologists and anthropologists working on mass graves of Saddam Hussein's victims in Iraq.  "Archaeologists who do this sort of work, often in very hazardous conditions, can lead to war crimes charges for genocide, as well as bringing comfort to families."

Pringle's article "Witness to Genocide" is in the journal "Archaeology," found on-line here.

Pringle's blog "Beyond Stones and Bones" features a related article, "Massacre of the Innocents," here.

As post-invasion inspectors failed to turn up battle-ready WMD in Iraq, mass graves containing tens of thousands of victims were being uncovered.  Such graves are still being uncovered.

Hat tip PhDiva blog.

 

In November Caroline Kennedy's name was floated as a prospective US Ambassador to the Britain.  While experience and area expertise are the prime qualifications for high diplomatic positions, I argued that she might not be a bad choice for the simple reason that she is not afraid to step in front of a camera, and she had good judgement when to do so and when not.  This after eight years when American public diplomacy has gone missing.

Meanwhile, Morton Abramowitz makes the case for, you know, um, actual professional experience:

"Obama should publicly declare that he will not appoint ambassadors who have in effect secured their posts through financial contributions and who have little background to merit any such appointment. Indeed, he can further state that he will permit the appointment of non-career ambassadors -- usually 30 to 40 percent of our ambassadors -- only if they are uniquely appropriate for the job. Otherwise, ambassadorial positions will be reserved for experienced, capable career officials."

Read the whole thing here in the Washington Post.

 

The Dancing

 

The Eating

 

The next national security team is solid, with no surprises.  They have their work cut for them.

Robert Gates will remain as defense secretary.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton will be secretary of state.

Retired Marine Gen. James Jones as White House national security adviser.

Former Justice Department official Eric Holder as attorney general.

Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano as secretary of homeland security

I'd heard rumors that President-elect Obama, concerned by the challenges his administration will face, would be appointing Bill Clinton to the post of President, but evidently that is not the case.

Details here.   

       
You dreamed a finch.
I dreamed a tree with an empty nest.

You dreamed a mirror.
I dreamed our reflection.

You dreamed an empty page.
I dreamed these words.

 

An oral biography of my old boss, the late great George Plimpton, Maximum Editor of The Paris Review literary magazine, has just been published.  The man is seen above, between William Styron and this writer on the occasion of a birthday for the magazine.   "George, Being George" is a wonderful read, and captures his mercurial, contradictory and charming self very well.

One thing about George I always loved is when we'd gather the staff readers together for a monthly go through the bales of unsolicited manuscripts.  He’d explain to the assembled why this task was so important, and then he’d  pronounce some instructions: “First, no stories about daughters and their mothers.  It just won’t work for us.”  Of course, a year later he published the beginning of Mona Simpson’s Anywhere But Here.  “Secondly, no stories of people dying of cancer.  That’s not a Paris Review story.”  Soon enough, we showed him a story by Charles D’Ambrosio about the man driving a girl with cancer to Mexico to die.   George flipped, just loved it.  I said, “George, what about the … you know…”  At the end of the year we gave the story the Aga Khan Prize.  That was George.  He’d sternly deliver these Old Testament injunctions of what we were forbidden to publish, and then he’d turn around and be so excited about a story that was exactly.  Of course, these were always the best examples.  

A recent review of the book can be seen HERE. A Charlie Rose program remembering George can be watched HERE.

 

Yesterday Tom Smith wrote a smart and funny post, "Is it too late to become a French Socialist" (link below), in which he pondered the implications of government taking a stake in US banking and industry.  He concludes that if we HAVE to, well... bring on those Gallic-style technocrats, who at least are sometimes models of civic responsibility.  Touche.

Along the way, however, he takes a swipe at Latin American left systems... which actually are NOT all alike.

Consider the case of Chile, now governed by Michelle Bachelet's center-left coalition.  As Bloomberg News reports, with the global economic downturn, the Chiliean government will only now tap $28 billion in reserves, "built up while copper sold at near-record prices, for a stimulus plan aimed at easing the impact of the global financial crisis"

Bloomberg continues:

"The $1.15 billion package will expand credit for small and mid-size businesses and help bolster home sales, Bachelet said at a news conference in Santiago with Finance Minister Andres Velasco. The steps unveiled today add to $850 million of stimulus funding announced last month.

"`Today we see that yesterday's prudence brings fruits,'' Bachelet said. ``The fiscal discipline in the boom years will allow us to face this international crisis without that affecting fiscal spending.''  While its neighbor Argentina nationalizes pension funds to support spending and Ecuador lines up emergency loans from China, Russia and Iran, Chile has enough savings to pay all its debts four times over. That money will help Bachelet loosen lending after foreign banks choked off dollars amid the global credit crunch....  The government built its reserve by refusing to increase spending as the price of copper, Chile's biggest export, more than quadrupled to a record $4.07 per pound in July.... The government's plan includes a $500 million capitalization of state-owned Banco del Estado de Chile, which will become more active in mortgage lending and in offering credit lines to small and medium-size companies, Velasco said."

A year ago, in Santiago, Chile, I interviewed Finance Minister Velasco, who is also a professor of economics at Harvard, regarding his counter-cyclical fiscal policies for Monocle magazine.  These policies are already being studied in economics departments around the world.

The full text of my interview with Velasco can be read HERE.

 Tom Smith link HERE, and hattip Instapundit.

 

Yesterday I posted about the military victory concluded in Iraq, and the account in Mudville Gazette (link here).

Today comes news that Iran has nuclear fuel for one atomic weapon.  Remember that in the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq invasion Britain, France, and Germany were going to demonstrate to Bush's "cowboy" adminstration how to deal properly with the threat of a rogue regime developing weapons of mass destruction.

We now see the fruit of the European efforts.

Comment here from some directly menaced, who ask "Does this mean it's too late"?

Perhaps not, but now an effort should be made in the next few years to disperse some of the critical elements necessary for continuance of government and the economy.  There's no reason that so much should be concentrated in half-mile radii in New York and Washington. 

Broadband is an excellent thing.

 

This Evening, 7 PM for 7:30 PM

 

Ron Radosh thinks so:

He writes HERE and HERE about the Weather Underground founder whose office was next door to that of future President-elect Barack Obama.

Radosh is right that Ayers matters, but not so much for what it tells us of Obama, who is a moderate consensus-builder, as for what it tells us about the media who  refused to report in a thoughtful and thorough way the implications and extent of his friendship with Ayers.

 

The Times (Nov 16) reports:

"A spy at the heart of Nato may have passed secrets on the US missile shield and cyber-defence to Russian Intelligence, it has emerged.  Herman Simm, 61, an Estonian defence ministry official who was arrested in September, was responsible for handling all of his country's classified information at Nato, giving him access to every top-secret graded document from other alliance countries"

As the Times reports, Estonia is the most I.T.-savvy nation in NATO, and Simm was an important player in devising information protection systems for NATO, and for the European Union as well.

Journalists in Tblisi told me (the above signed blogger)  that the invasion of Georgia was accompanied by a sophisticated and sustained cyber-attack.  Apparently they had even more difficulty filing electonic copy than I do filing via BT broadband from North London.

Meanwhile, in a recent New Yorker essay, spy novelist and long-ago British intelligence operative John LeCarre decries the air of free-floating paranoia that has gripped the UK.  He makes no mention of which paranoia, or paranoia about what.  Thanks for the observation Mr. LeCarre.  Now, let's everyone just relax and stop worrying.

Oh, but wait, do read the Times report HERE.

 

 

Finally I understand the appeal of The Huffington Post.

Their Ethan Imboden draws a parallel between the increasing popularity of knitting as a hobby and trends in the prostitution trade:  calls for "the porn-star experience" have declined in favor of requests for "the girlfriend experience."  Imboden finds root cause for both phenomenon in the looming recession economy.

So apparently in their commentary Huffington Post have been aiming for a grand cultural/sexual/economic synthesis.  I always wondered.

In any case, as Orwell said, some ideas are so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.

 

In New York last night, the presentation of The National Book Awards (ie, the American award that most often gets it right):

Nonfiction: Annette Gordon-Reed's account of three generations of a slave family owned by Thomas Jefferson, "The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family.”

Fiction: Peter Matthiessen took the Fiction Award for "Shadow Country," about a sugarcane farmer and outlaw suspected serial killer.

Poetry: Mark Doty's "Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems."

Young People's Literature Award: "What I Saw and How I Lied," Judy Blundell.

2008 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters: Maxine Hong Kingston.

2008 Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community: Barney Rosset, publisher, Grove Press and The Evergreen Review.

Also, from the award evening, commentary about literature-making in a reduced economy, via Galleycat.

 

 

George Clinton, the musician, of Parliament, Funkadelic, and "Atomic Dog" fame, to whom I turn regarding all existential questions, makes an interesting point:

"The Pyramids?  They was for cloning.  That's why embalming lasts so long.  Get the DNA and pull 'em back."

Did they Egyptians know something we didn't?

I know George Clinton does.  And the sphynx always looked like a dog to me anyway.

Clinton is here... until blastoff.

 

"Flight controllers were revamping plans Wednesday for the remaining spacewalks planned during space shuttle Endeavour's visit to the international space station, after a crucial tool bag floated out to space during a repair trip.  The briefcase-sized tool bag drifted away from astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper on Tuesday as she cleaned and lubed a gummed-up joint on a wing of solar panels on the space station."

See here.

I want a space station.

 

 

 

... was costly and divisive, but has now arrived, and should not go unremarked.  The military blog Mudville Gazette offers a comprehensive account, a "first draft of history," of how it happened and how it was reported.  

Read it HERE.

Someone should offer a parallel history, how the last five years would have progressed had Saddam Hussein and his sons been left in place, and had force of arms not been employed.

I believe that in time the Iraq War will be recognized not as a Bad Choice but as a classic Tragic Choice... a necessary choice between two unappealing alternatives. 

 

November 15, 2008, as the G-20 meets in Washington, DC...

 

 

Comments welcome below.

 

Adam Platt says New York chefs, who once dreamed up ever more elaborate hamburgers ("kobe beef with black truffle, anyone?"), now strive to out-do each other in the area of their handling of pork:

Thanks to the rise of high-profile carnivore cooks like Mario Batali and David Chang, many young chefs channel their creative energies through the innumerable and variegated possibilities of pork. One of the most promising young luminaries of this “pighead” branch of haute cuisine is Ryan Skeen, who rose to prominence at Resto, an excellent Belgian-style restaurant in the Flatiron district. Skeen’s specialties there included pork-centric dishes like crispy pig-ear salad and a fiendishly delicious innovation called “pork toast,” composed of squares of mashed, deep-fried pork jowls topped with caviar, among other sinful things. Skeen left Resto not long ago, and now he’s taken over the kitchen at Irving Mill (he replaces John Schaefer), bringing his intricate brand of trencherman cooking to a larger, more ambitious stage for the first time.

He recommends Irving Mill and Inside Park at St. Barts.

Read the whole thing HERE.

 

Authors rarely get the reviewers they would choose. 

By all accounts "The Forever War," a book of reportage by Dexter Filkins, is a tome to put alongside Lawrence Wright's "The Looming Tower."  To put alongside, that is, after you've read it, and re-read it.

As one remarkable review notes:

Filkins highlights the murderousness of the Taliban, of the Baathists, and of the jihadist terrorists who think of themselves as "forever" at war with the infidels. He introduces us to an Afghan boy, Faiz Ahmad, "seventeen, wearing a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, a hajj cap, and no beard," who seemed listless but came to life when he had a chance to respond to a question about his religious education. He said his teacher taught him that "it is written in the Koran that we must kill the non-believers." Filkins writes that Ahmad was "as close to a perfect specimen as the Taliban could imagine," and quotes him as declaring: "There is no end to the jihad. . . . It will go on forever until doomsday."

...

Filkins recounts how the insurgents warned those Iraqis who were considering participating in the elections that "we will cut off your heads and the heads of your children." On Election Day, he visited a polling place in a school. Loud explosions boomed from outside. An Iraqi there exclaimed: "Do you hear that, do you hear the bombs? . . . We don't care. Do you understand? We don't care. . . . We all have to die. . . . To die for this, well, at least I will be dying for something." 

...

[Filkins'] writing shows self-awareness, is modest in tone, and appreciates moral complexity. There is none of the all-knowing certitude of the self-righteous. At one point, Filkins wonders: "Why do the insurgents let us [journalists] stay in Baghdad? . . . I assumed they had decided that we were useful to them. That was not a comforting thought, even if it meant they would let us survive."

This modest, self-aware, and morally complex appreciation of the NYT correspondent's work was written by Douglas Feith, under secretary of defense for policy from 2001 to 2005, and published in the National Review.

 

"In my imagination, I know exactly how it goes. Bedecked in nothing but a ragged top hat, a pair of cashmere socks and a tremulous snakehipped boy, I finally breathe my quavering last in a secluded riad, ravaged by a life of intellectual and sensual excess. As weeping acolytes pile in to preserve any secreted scraps of unpublished prose, one sobbing lover burrows ‘neath the Nobel, pushes aside the Pulitzer, and nudges away the nest of squeaking ermines to unearth two hundred slim volumes bound by a blood-stained garter and crammed with sloping script.

"Rejoice! The Blonde Journals! The ultimate, intimate insight into the greatest scribe of our time! Finally her iconoclastic, eclectic originality, engaged with every important issue of the age, can be revealed, free from the constraints of society, salary or shame!

"They open a page at random,  mewing with moist anticipation, and read: ‘Late train. Cold. Chocolate brazils. Boyd’s AHH. What happened to my blue hat?’"

Read the whole thing by estimable ink-stained friend HERE.

 

 

Well, here's a marmalade dropper:  

A remarkable interview has been posted with the Editor of London Daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi.   Two years ago Mr. Atwan said, on MBC-TV: "If the Iranian missiles strike Israel – by Allah, I will go to Trafalgar Square, and dance with delight if the Iranian missiles strike Israel."

Now the Mr. Atwan has called on US President Elect Obama to 'Impose American Model of Equality, Rights, and Opportunities on All Arab Countries.'

Following are excerpts from an interview that aired on BBC Arabic TV on November 7, 2008:
 
Interviewer: "Is it really so difficult to achieve a breakthrough in the Arab ruling system, similar to what happened in the U.S? Will it take decades or centuries, Abd Al-Bari 'Atwan?"

Abd Al-Bari 'Atwan: "By coincidence, at a time when a black president was elected in the U.S., President Bouteflika amended the Algerian constitution so that he could remain in power for the rest of his life.
   
"What a paradox this is. In the U.S., not only is the change of power carried out by peaceful means, but there is [now] a black president – [who came] from the lowest ranks of society to the top.
   
"If Obama was in an Arab country, like Saudi Arabia or one of the Gulf states, they might have required him to have a 'guarantor' [like any foreign worker]. Under no circumstances – even if he died – would they have given him citizenship. They'd say to him: You are a slave, you are black, you need a 'guarantor,' you are a Kenyan, and your origins are unknown.
   
"I'm sad to say that we Arabs are the epitome of racism. Look at the foreign [workers] in the Gulf – they have no rights. These workers demonstrate, demanding to be placed 10, rather than 20, in a room, demanding to be transported in buses like human beings, rather than in trucks like beasts.
   
"We are the epitome of racism, and I believe that Obama will demand that these Arab countries carry out reforms: First, to abolish the 'guarantor' system, and then to grant rights not only to the blacks, but even to the Arabs themselves, to the whites. The whites in the Arab world are humiliated. Unless you have the 'holy' citizenship of a certain country – you are humiliated.
   
"Obama should impose the American model of equality, rights, and opportunities on all the Arab countries."

Hat tip MEMRI.  To view the clip visit them HERE.

 

Joan Didion's commented on the election, and its context, at an NYPL event last night celebrating the 45th Anniversary of the New York Review:

'"We were getting what we wanted..." ... a smart, qualified, decent candidate the Eastern elite could get behind. And yet the frenzy surrounding Obama made her uneasy — both the sense that he was a young person's candidate, "a generational thing we couldn't understand" and the unthinking embrace of "naivete transformed to hope, partisanism as consumerism." Didion bridled at the wanton use of "transformational" and said she couldn't count the number of times she heard the 60's evoked "by people who apparently had no memory that the 60s" didn't involve decking babies out in political onesies.

'Didion was at pains to say that she did not think any of this was Obama's doing, nor to his tastes. He would, she speculated "welcome healthy realism" and achievable expectations. In our frenzy, we are doing him a disservice, expecting miracles "at a time when the nation can least afford easy answers." She recalled, the day after the election, an overexcited newscaster declaring that we now possess "the congratulations of all the nations." She likened this to the naivete of thinking we'd be regarded as beloved saviors in Iraq. But, she ended, "in the irony-free zone that our country has become, this is not what people wanted to hear.'

This sharp reporting via an unlikely source... celebrity news-site Jezebel link here.  Hats off to their Sadie.

And hat-tip to Althouse.

 
I’ve been re-watching “Wall Street,” apropos of these times.  Also the “Boiler Room,” noting that Vin Diesel could actually act.

Molly Flatt has been reading poetry, and think it needs to move out of the garret for good.  

Camille Paglia still likes Sarah Palin.

Jeffrey Scott Shapiro thinks the treatment of President Bush has been a disgrace.  (There's a proposal in San Francisco to name a sewage treatment plant after the president.)  He asks what must our enemies be thinking?  And he's right.  I'm still a Democrat but I believe Bush may turn out to be the most underestimated president ever.  Or perhaps that's "mis-underestimated"...  Read JSS here.

Meanwhile, here's a moving true story -- the daughter of a slave explains the significance of last week's election. 

Not everyone was moved by last week's milestone... Russian President Medvedev chose election day to announce deployment of missiles near the Polish border in response to the US missile shield.  I believe President Medvedev would achieve better results with the next administration if he proposed sitting down to talk "without preconditions."

One hopes someone will do so... the government of Iran has issued their preconditions for talks--withdrawal of the US from any activity in the Middle East.  I'm not sure they're showing the right election-week spirit.

Jeremy Paxman marked the election by inviting on BBC Newsnight the urban rapper Dizze Rascal.  This American viewer deems Paxman's choice a non sequitor, and will turn the channel away for the next month.

Question: President Elect Obama's choice for chief of staff the bare-knuckled centrist Rahm Emanuel augurs what exactly?  Perhaps, as I predict, that O's more intransigent opposition may come from the left wing of the Democratic congress (Schumer, Waxman, Frank). This would repeat Clinton's experience in his first term, and one notes that Bush is hated also by his own party precisely for his accomodations.  Obama seems a consensus builder, and Democrats now that they're finally in power seem disincined to compromise.  

 "Prozac Nation" author and now power lawyer Elizabeth Wurtel writes that Obama's triumph is American's too, stengthening the country through diversity.  Obama is of course diverse all by himself, and is amusing on the subject.

Ignatius opined sagely on foreign policy change and challenges, and the Washington Post has shined all this fall... so much less strident than the NYT opinion pages who increasingly make the paper seem like another player in the media scene trying to occupy a niche rather than the arbiter they were for so long.

Eugene Robinson, with whom I'm rarely in agreement, stopped me in my tracks with this: "I always meant it when I said the Pledge of Allegiance in school. I always meant it when I sang the national anthem at ball games and shot off fireworks on the Fourth of July. But now there's more meaning in my expressions of patriotism, because there's more meaning in the stirring ideals that the pledge and the anthem and the fireworks represent.  It's not that I would have felt less love of country if voters had chosen John McCain. And this reaction I'm trying to describe isn't really about Obama's policies.  For me, the emotion of this moment has less to do with Obama than with the nation. Now I know how some people must have felt when they heard Ronald Reagan say 'it's morning again in America.' The new sunshine feels warm on my face."   Well said.

Hey... Hail to the Chief.

 

Winners for the Kenny Tooker Longboard Classic are posted at Squid Force.

 My "surfing injury" has healed nicely.  Thanks for asking. 






 

 

I have decided to unwrite my poem.
I am unwriting the second line
and the third.
I am unwriting the sparrow at the window,
flying away as you open the window
that I have unwritten.
I am unwriting you opening the front door,
walking to the mailbox you are opening,
searching for a letter that has yet to be written,
or is being unwritten.
I am unwriting the letter I wanted to send you.
I am afraid to send it, of what you might think.
I am unwriting "I have decided to unwrite my poem."
It was a letter, not a poem.  This
is a poem and I will not send it to you.

 

An oral biography of my old boss George Plimpton has just been published in NYC by Random House, edited or "choir-mastered" by Nelson Aldrich.  A daunting task to take on such a tome about the multi-faceted man who, with "Edie," invented the oral biography form.

I'll be interviewing Nelson this week for a featurette on this site.  Meanwhile, this personal memory of "The Boss."

... George used to write on his grandfather’s typewriter, a massive thing that rose form his desk like an upright piano.  I’d say why don’t you get a computer?  “A MACHINE?” he’d say. “You know, James, there are many advantages to this typewriter that you may be unaware of.  When every once in a while I come to a word and am buffaloed as to whether there should be one ‘t’ or two, I just type three ‘t’s, and the person reading the letter assumes it’s the typewriter.”

 

“Antitrust theory is theoretical. Losing jobs and plants is real."

...so says superlawyer David Boies, in conversation with NYT's Andrew Ross Sorkin, in arguing that the Obama administration will be more deal-friendly than expected.

Boies also underscores the danger of the increasing prospect of companies that are not simply "too big to fail" but "too big to compete."

Read the whole thing HERE.

 

Marcello Simonetta looks for lessons from the past in his essay "The Medici Meltdown," in Forbes on-line.

"The fear of being annihilated by foreign powers, combined with the lack of transparency, allowed the ruler of the Republic to turn it into an effective tyranny. With the declared purpose of defending Florentine freedom and its way of life, Lorenzo raised taxes for the war and embezzled banking funds with the result of creating a huge credit crunch.  The Medici Bank had tenuous cash reserves that were usually well below 10% of total assets. Lack of liquidity was an issue for banking since its origins. Of course, in the Renaissance they dealt with thousands or millions of florins--billions were yet unthinkable. But would a bailout have been thinkable at the time? Lorenzo certainly bailed himself and his family out of a political and financial mess with public funds. He eventually gained for himself the superlative epithet of "The Magnificent" by obtaining foreign military support and by compromising his city's liberty."

Read the whole thing HERE.

And don't miss Simonetta's recent tome "The Montefeltro Conspiracy," dubbed a nonfiction "Davinci Code"... um, except that it's a historical investigation of fine quality.

A conversation here with Georges Soros, Nouriel Roubini, and Jeffrey Sachs.  They're pessimistic in the short term.  While I usually disagree with George Soros I wouldn't want to bet against him.

Link here.

Descartes is sitting in a bar, having a drink.

The bartender asks him if he would like another. 'I think not,' he says and vanishes in a puff of logic.

 

I’ve been away from this blog for too long while toodling around the states.  I’ve parked myself for the moment at a beach house on the north New Jersey coast.  Until the weather turned yesterday, it had been beautiful--sunny, the surf high, the water warm.  I’m looking out the window at the waves now.

Last week I spectated at the Kenny Tooker Long Board Classic, sponsored by Beach House Surf Shop, and I was inspired to get out on the waves the very next day.  Consequently I’ve been nursing, and complaining about to anyone who’ll listen, a surfing injury.  Actually, it’s more a boogy-boarding injury.  My Malibu correspondent, filmmaker and surf aficionado Steve Gaghan, suggests it’d be better to say, “I was pulling a floater high and inside at Bondi when my back fin hit the back of a great white.  I tumbled down the face, at least six feet aussie size meaning triple overhead anywhere else, went through the washing machine, fortunately my momentum carried me back over the shark nets and I was saved.” 

The truth is I tripped on a flipper… here on this beach in New Jersey.

But being laid up with this surfing injury has afforded copious time to read.  I’ve been consumed with, and consuming, the galleys of  “George, Being George,” an oral biography of my old boss George Plimpton, to be published next week (assessment HERE).  Also reading old Raymond Chandler novels.

I’ve been meaning to get to my friend Edward J. Epstein’s “Dossier,” about shady international financier Armand Hammer, and have been asking myself why has no one made a movie of this.  VARIETY offers a comprehensive supplement on how to produce a movie in the UK… maybe the solution is there.

George W. Bush… it’s always struck me that the decision presented him whether or not to go to war in Iraq was a classic “Tragic Choice.”   Disastrous perhaps, but the alternative much less attractive than critics allow.  Of this presidency Oliver Stone has decided to make a comedy.  His film, and first draft of a cool media history, apparently required some financing from a Chinese entity.  Nikki Finke details HERE, but I think she makes too much of this.  After all, the movie “Buffalo Soldiers,” depicting American soldiers running rampant on a base in Germany, was made with German and British money and almost no one raised an eyebrow. 

I was interested to see that Dame Stella Rimington, ex-chief of MI5, deems the response to 9-11 a huge over-reaction.  In an interview with the Guardian, she called al-Qaida's attack on the US "another terrorist incident," but not one qualitatively different from any others.  "I suppose I'd lived with terrorist events for a good part of my working life," she said, "and this was as far as I was concerned another one."  Brits indeed are unflappable, aren't they?  Of course, it was New Yorkers and Washingtonians in the crosshairs in that instance.

Some of course go further than Dame Rimington.  I'm reminded that a German author, Lutz Kleveman, published a book a few years ago suggesting that, far from simply an over-reaction, the NATO invasion of Afghanistan was an outright imperialistic natural resources grab. 

Eric Alterman in a video debate tries to convince Christopher Hitchens he was wrong about Iraq. 

Here are the top hits of the Youtube election.

An excellent new website, Lebanon in Focus, has launched.  Bookmark it.

Frederick Kagan finds Senator Obama’s foreign policy pronouncements vague.  A point I’ve made in my Hard Questions series. 

John Kass continues to explore Obama’s exploits in Chicago.  More interesting than exploits would be his absence of reported exploits, including the complete lack of a paper trail as a law professor (no publications whatsoever) and relative lack of a record as a state senator (his tendency to vote “present”).  Did the presidential aspirant have a strategy to keep his positions vague for future re-positioning?  Probably.

Also listening to New York poet Frank O’Hara.

I too worry that Fed Chairman Bernacke is fighting the last war.  Also am reading all James Grant commentary I can find.

With times tight and budgets skinny, I’m entering this drawing to win a meal at the Fat Duck.

Bernard-Henri Levy tries to explain why Europeans love Obama, here.  BHL understand nothing of America whatsoever, but he’s well-intentioned and interesting and I always read him.

I’ve noted that since he invaded Georgia, President Putin and Russia have become isolated, and that only Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua has recognized South Ossetian sovereignty.  I continue to think Putin and Medvedev miscalculated.

I happened to watch the US presidential debates alongside Georgian President Saakashvili, about which more in a future post.

Did the Cold War never go away in Georgia?  Investigators return to Tblisi, and to 1993, see here.  I believe things may get interesting with this.

House Speaker Pelosi predicts 100% Barack’s Gonna win; but the FT asks will a funny thing happen on the way to the election… and I think perhaps so.

Governor Palin appears in TWO segments on Saturday Night Live… full video HERE.  Not very presidential perhaps, but she’s got timing, comic and otherwise.  The Huffington Post describes this appearance as a “disaster.”  ("Nothing to see here, move along.")  Excuse me but the Huffington Post is out to lunch... so thank goodness for the launch of Tina Brown’s The Daily Beast.

Aside from the two segments, Palin subsequently spoke to the press three times over two days.  Senator Biden meanwhile has been kept off-stage... and with ill-advised remarks HERE we can see why.  Really, NEITHER of these two should be a heartbeat away from the presidency.

I can’t for the life of my tell what it’s about, but I’m looking forward to Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut Synechdoche, New York (trailer HERE).  I saw an article illustrated with a photo of him smiling, and I found it disappointing that he was smiling… as if he’d lost a little bit of himself.  He was always funniest at his most miserable.

Volokh’s commentator commends Al Jazeera’s election coverage and that reminds me to tune in to their English language site.  Last I looked at their English site, I found some of their articles annoying, but nothing objectionable, and the English website seemed less biased than most of the US media.  I wouldn't want it as my only source of news, but it's a real achievement.

I still find it hilarious that New York Times reporters, WHO ARE SO IN THE TANK (for guess who?), are not allowed to manifest any sign of a political affiliation or inclination.  They can be zombies and werewolves on Facebook but they cannot be political beasts.  (For the record I voted for Obama in the primary, and still admire him, but it’s long past time for him to clarify his positions, and I no longer entirely trust his eloquence.)

I’m especially looking back fondly to Senator Obama’s putting a stop to the attacks on, bizarre speculation about, Governor Palin’s family.  The man can be a prince, taking the high road, rising above conflict, seeking consensus.  We are very lucky to have him as a leader, now and in the future, in one role or another. 

That said… regarding Bill Ayers… he, it turns out, was not simply "a guy next door" to Senator Obama.  He was an early employer and a long-time professional colleague.  And Bill Ayers is a largely-unrepentant, former domestic terrorist.  Ayers' 1974 book "Prairie Fire" is dedicated to, among many others, Sirhan Sirhan (page 5).  This is simply appalling.   Senator Obama was less than truthful about his relationship with Ayers.  I do wish he would have clarified this earlier, and that he had put distance between them long ago.  To understand the implications of the relationship between Ayers and Obama, or how it strikes those outside Georgetown and Manhattan, it might be clarifying to turn matters around and amplify the comparison… if a Republican politician had any association ever with a former domestic terrorist, “successful” or “unsuccessful,” or with a member of a militia movements, or with someone who planned direct action against obortion clinics, there would be a clear need for full explanation.  Efforts by Georgetown and Manhattan media elite to try to contextualize Ayers away strike me as parochial.  I've been called an apostate for saying so.  Apparently membership in this group may be up for review.

In former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s recent endorsement of Senator Obama he conflated some voters’ concern about the candidate’s “terrorist” associations, with the untrue suggestion that Obama was a Muslim, this later a purported smear.  Powell's statement seems to me very strange.  I would still have voted for Senator Obama in the primary if he had happened to be a Muslim, which he is not.  Yet I’m now not sure that I would want to vote for the Senator in the general election because of his misrepresenting his association with Bill Ayers, which is in fact a close, long-standing relationship.  I believe  Senator Obama may need to re-examine this before he's ready to become commander in chief.

Oh, and I'm back to reading Instapundit every morning, where I found some of these stories.  "Hat tip."

Back to my usual more-essayistic posts soon...

 

Frank O'Hara was the quintessential poet of New York, he got its sounds and texture and thrum, but more than that he saw poetry could be simply slightly elevated language, made from the most everyday experiences, and the things around us.  You'll never encounter a symbol-heavy split pomegranate in his poems, but you will come across a headline in the morning newspaper, coffee in a cup from the deli... and a bottle of coca-cola... as you'll hear in the poem in this video.

William Carlos Williams, sometime in the 1930s, wrote that "the pure products of America go crazy."  Well, more on that another time...

 

 
I want to be wrong in a beautiful way

like the stagehands who wheeled out the sun when the lead
was under the moon; like the scientist who thought the seeds of trees
blown into the sea make birds—
"I have seen them fly from the waters," he wrote;
like me denying that you had left in the night—
"He'll come back, I said;"
like Newton dividing white light into the seven colors of the spectrum
for the seven notes of the musical scale for any other way would break
the Pythagorean principle of harmony.
 

“Money ... has often been a cause of the delusion of multitudes. Sober nations have all at once become desperate gamblers, and risked almost their existence upon the turn of a piece of paper. To trace the history of the most prominent of these delusions is the object of the present pages. Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”

- Charles Mackay in "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” 1841

 

... a film that proceeds, like memory, as a series of flashes, rather than by flashback...

 

 

A friend of ours recently took the Orient Express all the way from Paris to Istanbul, just after the Russian invasion of Georgia, and reports: 

"It was on the minds of both the passengers and people through whose lands we were passing.  In Budapest, our guide took us to the Citadel the Austrians built after the 1848 revolutions, a spectacular artillery platform below which the entire city, on both sides of the Danube, lies totally exposed.  He pointed out, in the far distance, a tall thin tower rising high above a building.  It was the chimney, he told us, of a nineteenth-century power plant now converted from coal to natural gas.  Today, he told us, all of Hungary's electricity, power for industry and business, and heat, comes from natural gas; and, he said, 'Ninety-eight percent of it comes from Russia.  Think what that may mean someday.' -- And in Bulgaria, we were taken at the end of a tour of the Black Sea port of Varna to its Eastern Orthodox cathedral, built in the 19th century after Bulgaria won its independence from the Ottomans.  Half a dozen priests chanted prayers for us, and the bishop, as he seemed to be, spoke to us for  ten or fifteen minutes, but what he said can be reduced to this:  'Make no mistake about it, the Cold War is coming back.  And this time, you nobles who travel on the Orient Express, spare some thought for the poor Balkan peoples, who have known so little liberty, and suffered so much unhappy history.'"

 

This column's Misery Mountain correspondent, Caleb Carr, responds to Norman Berke's recent post (link at bottom), regarding the RNC convention.

Carr writes:

This is a genuine, A-one crock of Obama rationalization.

First of all, this writer does not know his American history. Even a little. Oh, no one asked FDR about his religion? No, they didn't. Because, in the first place, his religion was plainly known, and in the second, he was -- or had MADE himself -- precisely the kind of "good friend" to average people that this moron so decries. Now, what FDR DID have to hide was his crippling by polio -- and had it become the common knowledge it is today, HE WOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN ELECTED. Same goes for JFK, although a far more inconsequential man and president. But his back problems, his almost constant "treatments" for pain, his womanizing -- had ANY of this become common knowledge -- had it gotten out that the man who supposedly led us through the Cuban Missile Crisis was on opiates and having cortisone shot into his spine 24/7, not to make decision-making easier, but to make it easier to pound his mistresses -- what would this author have had to say? But Jack was the Kennedy everybody liked, that EVERYBODY wanted to have a drink with, and that's why the media left him, like FDR, alone.

All this comes from their possessing the increasingly elusive COMMON TOUCH -- that would be that thing Obama simply has no clue about, keeps vainly grasping for by HAVING a beer, by BOWLING, by talking about pigs and lipstick -- and every step more tin-eared than the last. Because the flaw is very evident:
Obama IS common: a man of dubious philosophical greatness, for all the HOPE and CHANGE platitudes, a man of common achievement, and a man of common experience; certainly nothing that would have given him -- as war did JFK, as polio and his own search for a cure in Warm Springs gave Roosevelt -- a truly life-changing and class-defying, humbling experience. And common men do not possess the common touch. Greatness does not require a fine mind; it requires great character and shrewd judgment of others. Both of which Obama lacks, because his common experiences have never required them. The most famous description of FDR from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., could easily have been said of JFK: "Second class intellect. First class temperament."

Obama? Third class intellect. Steerage class temperament.

Barring some new seismic event (and they can never BE barred, thankfully), this campaign is, as of today, over; and the common man has lost, and the man with the common touch has won: the man for whom not merely BEING a P.O.W., but being broken by his captors, and then forgiven by his comrades, was the experience that provided the perspective from which he could identify and attain the common touch, which he demonstrated with enormous deftness by picking Sarah Palin, who, whatever her politics and however absurd one considers her beliefs, is, as a character, a truly common American. One that can take Obama on, one on one, while McCain practices for the White House, above it all, and that other common ego, Joe Biden, rants and screams at workers in battleground states, insisting he is still the smartest man in the world, although he'll grant he's running with the second most intelligent, and why the HELL can't we all SEE THAT?!! Sound and fury, signifying nothing, makes Joe... the idiot.
Almost as much of an idiot as the author of the column posted below.

Caleb Carr is a military historian and novelist.  He resides on Misery Mountain, in New York State.

Link to Berke post here.

 

We recently received this pointed missive from our Languedoc correspondent Norman Berke.  (For a rejoinder to Burke, we point readers to last week's comment by Christopher Hitchens, available at link below.)

Berke writes:

It's crystal clear that the radical right, the religious right, the cultural values right - or however else one can name it - are firmly in control of the Republican Party. This was a process going back several decades to be finalized in '04, and it still holds tightly. If you are pro-life, even in cases of rape, if you believe the only qualification for a supreme court judge is to veto Roe V Wade, if you believe in no funding for stem cell research, if you believe in teaching young, impressionable minds the false science of creationism, then this is your party. Palin, as VP, in personifying “bible toting, God is on our side” ideology, iced it even more. Clearly, the base is energized, ecstatic, and the voting bloc is solid.

This was aided and abetted by the twists and turns and the pandering by McCain, worthy of a circus contortionist, as he fought for and gained the nomination of his party. It was hardly the McCain we knew throughout most of his career. When he challenged Bush in 2000 he was a breath of fresh air in his appeal to the vital center. He won in New Hampshire, and he won in Michigan, only to be trashed in the South by the foulest, dirtiest politics.. It is well known to media stars such as Brokaw, the late Russert, the main anchor heads, even Maureen Dowd, what McCain’s private attitude was during the ‘04 convention. Still hurting, he mocked the delegates, and all the Bush contingent. However, the public McCain fell in line, positioning himself like the good soldier, waiting and hoping for the ultimate promotion. So much so that the very same Reuben Askew, who orchestrated the trashing of McCain for Bush in South Carolina, is now a McCain strategist-advisor. What does this tell you? That just about every advisor he now has is a former “Bushie“. His flagging campaign really didn’t catch on, until these experts at character assassination came on board.

In his acceptance speech, he spoke of ending partisan rancor, reaching across the aisle, etc.etc. As someone said, it was an attempt to show that diversity does exist within the party, in spite of the stale Republican “red meat” of the previous speakers. So who is the real John McCain? Now that the base is secure, can the obvious tactic of reaching out to the center really succeed? It is, of course, a question the American people must decide.

At this moment, sixty days before the presidential election, it is not as clear as it should be. The fakery, the shameless hypocrisy, somehow, does not resonate; it is hidden, obscure. Something new - brewing for some time, undoubtedly - has crept into the election process of selection. Call it the cult of personal values. The politician now must configure himself as someone you can relate to, someone with whom you would like to have a beer, play a game, cook up a barbecue. Forget or ignore whether he can lead, whether his intelligence level and judgement is considerably above yours, so that you have confidence that he can solve problems, anticipate troubles, and deal with them wisely when they come. Somehow, that seems to have gone by the wayside. The important thing is, can I relate to him? Is he like I am? Nowadays, does the voter ask himself if he could sit in that office, be the president, make the decisions affecting the welfare of an entire population? It seems in the present climate that such questions are simply not contemplated. The important questions today are concerned with the candidate‘s private beliefs. This has forced politicians, the prospective leaders of our country, custodians of the economy, the decision makers regarding war or peace, to waste time in silly revelations, which have nothing to do with their responsibilities once in office.

This whole matter of selection has gone off the track. While such conversations dominate campaign news in the present day, it wasn’t always like that. This is a latter day phenomenon. In 1932, with the country in deep depression, no-one was asking FDR about his religious beliefs. Today, many voters believe they can go up to Alaska and hunt moose with the Palins, but how many ever thought of going to Hyannisport to play touch football with the Kennedys.
 
Obviously, such a selection process does not exist across the broad electorate. How much or how many may fall into this category, we don’t know at this time, although we won’t have long to wait. Will the issues count, the serious ones facing a country with a hurting middle class, in a world now challenging our power? This election will be a test of the maturity of a country.
 
- Norman Berke
6th September 2008`
 
Norman Berke is a retired businessman and a nonagenarian blogger.  He resides in Florida and the south of France.  Thanks to the estimable Christopher Maclehose for his counsel and the introduction.
 
For a rejoinder on these matters, read today's by Christopher Hitchens in SLATE, link HERE.

 

Billy Wilder’s “Ace in the Hole” has just been released on DVD.  It’s his most tart film, and was a personal favorite of his.  More about “Ace” tomorrow.  Earlier on this blog (here) I recounted a conversation I had in Los Angeles with Wilder shortly before his death.  Wilder then was discussing his collaboration with the noir novelist Raymond Chandler on the adaptation of “Double Indemnity.”  The studio informed Wilder that Chandler had just quit…

BILLY WILDER
Apparently he had resigned, because while we were sitting in the office with the sun shining through I had asked him to close the curtains and I had not said "please." He accused me of having as many as three martinis at lunch. Furthermore, he wrote that furthermore he found it "very disconcerting that Mr. Wilder gets two, three, sometimes even four calls from obviously young girls."
Naturally. I was just looking out for myself.

JAMES LINVILLE
Wasn't there something about shaking a riding crop?

BILLY WILDER
Well, when I work it's true I can sometimes have a temper, but that was just ridiculous. Later, in a biography he said all sorts of nasty things about me--that I was a Nazi, that I was uncooperative and rude, and God knows what.  I told them forget about all that shit, let's just go on with the script. I would say, "Would you please move your legs so I can walk past to the toilet?" Always, please, please, please. And, of course, I agreed not to use the crop anymore.
Maybe the antagonism even helped. He was a peculiar guy, but I was very glad to have worked with him.  In any case, he must have learned something, because he went on to write two pictures at Paramount without me. When “Double Indemnity premiered in Westwood, Chandler didn't show, had disappeared, but Mr. Cain” had come to see it. Afterwards, he was crying.  He was delighted with what we'd done.

Copyright: James Linville, 1996.  Read the whole thing in The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1

France’s opposition Socialists have fallen far from their glory days under Mitterand. Overtaken by Chirac and then Sarkozy, now they’re outflanked by the left as the public falls under the spell of Olivier Besancenot, aged 34, “the red postman” from Neuilly.

A fascinating Times profile HERE.

 

... now posting primarily on my blog here at STANDPOINT, as well as in the On-Line Only section, available via the button above.

My archives remain up at The Main Point blog...

 

This week we received a missive from our friend the heroic Jeannie Vanasco, poetry consultant to my former blog, The Main Point, and scholar in residence at Lapham's Quarterly.

Vanasco has been reading the work of French poet Pierre Martory, an example of which, translated by John Ashbery, can be found on my Standpoint blog HERE.

Martory is a challenging poet, but his work rewards the effort, as Vanasco scribbles here:

"writing about martory is hard work! knitting together my observations into a coherent argument--i may end up knitting a scarf instead; much easier (for ex, the technical incompleteness of his sentences reflects the temper of his mental movement as distracted and hurried; his strongest, most surreal turns occur with the use of dialogue, probably because who can question what has been directly "said"?). ashbery said in an interview somewhere that he wanted to write in a way to evade criticism (hence, the seemingly obscure nonsense) and i get the same impression from martory. maybe that's my argument. that said, the poetry is good. "there are infinite things on earth," says a character in one of borges's fictions; "any one of them may be likened to any other." martory furthers this statement and finds infinite things on earth that may be, in fact, any other. he goes for the overt metaphor. i don't know. reading and writing poetry criticism..."

 

The Democratic campaign appears to be gaining traction, and the Clintons perhaps have swung behind this effort. John Kerry zinged McCain and poked fun at himself. If he'd campaigned this way in 2004, he might have won. Hillary appeared gracious and rousing and very appealing, and Bill was masterful, as you may read here and here.

But hold on a second. A question lurks:

What does it mean that Senator Obama, in order to compensate for his lack of foreign policy credentials and experience, has chosen for his Vice Presidential candidate someone who voted for going to war with Iraq, and whose foreign policy judgment he therefore condemns along with Senator McCain's and President Bush's? And if he doesn't intend to rely upon Senator Biden for foreign policy judgment, what's Senator Biden good for?

Over at Reason, Matt Welch, noting the prominence of Madeleine Albright, explores a similar issue in depth, HERE.

 

This video, via The Onion, reveals the demographics vital to presidential victory.  Click the space below.

 

 

Ted Strickland of Ohio echoed the 1988 Democratic convention joke about George H.W. Bush, that he was born on third and thought he hit a triple. Strickland said of George W. Bush that he was born on third and then stole second.

Michael J. Totten, one of the most respected on-line correspondents in the US, is best known for this reporting from Lebanon and Iraq.  This week he reports from Georgia. Read his latest...

 

The Truth About Russia in Georgia

TBILISI, GEORGIA – Virtually everyone believes Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili foolishly provoked a Russian invasion on August 7, 2008, when he sent troops into the breakaway district of South Ossetia. “The warfare began Aug. 7 when Georgia launched a barrage targeting South Ossetia,” the Associated Press reported over the weekend in typical fashion.

Virtually everyone is wrong.

Read the whole thing HERE.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy traveled to Afghanistan last Tuesday to pay homage to the French soldiers killed the day before, and to offer his support to the troops serving there.

Standing between Bernard Kouchner, Foreign Affairs Minister and Herve Morin, Minister of Defence, the French President addressed the soldiers:

‘I came because I wanted to tell you that the job that you are doing here is essential. Why are we here? Because it is here that a part of the freedom of the world is in jeopardy. Here, the battle against terrorism is fought,’ he stated. ‘I have no doubt that is necessary we are here. I tell you in all conscience that if the decision to be here had to be made again, I would decide again the same. I don’t mean the patrol that came to grief nor the succession of events this week, but the decision to affirm what those who came before me decided… that the French army should be here.”



Standing beside the wall of armament warehouse, soldiers from the 8th Regiment parachute marine infantry exchanged words with the President. The soldiers recounted for him events of the day before, the Taliban ambush and the subsequent battle in Uzbeen Valley, of the district of Saroubi District, 50 km east of Kabul. President Sarkozy responded, "The best way to be faithful to your comrades is to continue this work, to raise your head, to act as soldier.”

Links to Figaro here and here.

Thanks to Michael Burleigh for the tip.

 

We recently received the following note from our sometime correspondent Norman Berke. While I disagree with some of Berke's analysis and prescriptions, this is all thoughtful, so we share it...

If I were a politician, or just an ordinary citizen, in any one of the Baltic States, or one of the former Eastern European Soviet satellites, or even down around Azerbaijan, I would be feeling nervous and mighty uncomfortable as a resdult of the Georgian crisis. And I would certainly hesitate about counting on American help, as indeed, the Poles are, in signing the missile agreement with the US. There is a clear signal of a sea change in geopolitics, a reversion to the time honored diplomacy of spheres of influence, briefly suspended when the Soviet Union imploded, leaving America alone as the world's superpower. Now we are back in the old days where central powers must respect each others backyard and where there are limits on each one's power, challenged only by military confrontation.

How to explain this to an America in the throes of the ultimate of political campaigns. Certainly not by Maccain, who would be in denial of any change in the geopolitical setting, and whose national security credentials are based on the unilateral military superiority of American forces. Nor by Obama, who, if he tried, would be accused of being unpatriotic, an appeaser, a betrayer of American interests, and worse.

And yet, the West cannot stand by in utter pusillanimity and face the possibility of a rampant, murderous Russia. This w