A Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, and the Making of American Freedom

by Jedediah Purdy

Chapter 3
 
War and Its Equivalents

One of the best pieces ever in The Onion, the satirical newspaper whose articles make up a parallel history of the last two decades, appeared just after September 11, 2001. It opened, “Feeling helpless in the wake of the horrible September 11 terrorist attacks that killed thousands, Christine Pearson baked a cake and decorated it like an American flag Monday.” True to form, the article is lightly ironic as it traces the fictional Topeka legal secretary’s rummage through her kitchen cabinets in a frenzy of distress and media saturation. It concludes, though, with a middle- American version of the “Yes” at the end of James Joyce’s Ulysses as Pearson presents the confection to her neighbors:

“I baked a cake,” said Pearson, shrugging her shoulders and forcing a smile as she unveiled the dessert in the Overstreet household later that evening. “I made it into a flag.”

Pearson and the Overstreets stared at the cake in silence for nearly a minute, until Cassie hugged Pearson. Read More

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

By Stieg Larsson

A Friday in November

It happened every year, was almost a ritual. And this was his eighty-second birthday. When, as usual, the flower was delivered, he took off the wrapping paper and then picked up the telephone to call Detective Superintendent Morell who, when he retired, had moved to Lake Siljan in Dalarna. They were not only the same age, they had been born on the same day—which was something of an irony under the circumstances. The old policeman was sitting with his coffee, waiting, expecting the call.

“It arrived.”

“What is it this year?”

“I don’t know what kind it is. I’ll have to get someone to tell me what it is. It’s white.” Read More

[Posted by Paul Gleason]

Outside the Window: May 14, 2009. New York, New York. Cloudy and cool.

Inside the Book: 2000-2001. Oxford, England. Continual rains and mists. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Chiang Mai, Thailand. Giza, Egypt. Jerusalem, Israel. Istanbul, Turkey. Crowded and confusing.

I’m now halfway through The Unforgiving Minute, and Mullaney still hasn’t left for Afghanistan. As I read, this began to wear on me. Although his travel writing nicely captures the sheer weirdness of globalization (in Bangkok, “…an elephant walked past sporting a blinking taillight suspended from its tail … one woman who had parked her ox-driven cart on the street came back with a bucket of chicken from KFC.”), Mullaney is a soldier, and it’s his growth as a soldier, not as a citizen of the world, that brought me to the book.

The educational value of his trips becomes clearer when an old man in New Zealand interrupts him in the grocery store with the news that the World Trade Center has been attacked. Suddenly, the world he has sallied out into has come charging back, and with nothing like his obvious good will. In light of the attacks, small moments appear foreboding, even menacing:

Televisions beamed American sitcoms and a Thai replication of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. My favorite was an original Superman cartoon with a slightly altered introduction. Instead of fighting for “truth, justice, and the American way,” the Thai Superman fought for “truth, justice,” and a second of muted silence.

In another revealing encounter, a local man chases Mullaney (a Catholic) and his two friends (both Jewish) out of Malaysia’s national mosque. This is a shame because moments earlier Mullaney had found, in Islam, a parallel to the quiet ritual of his Catholic Mass: “The air inside [the mosque] was cool and clean, a contrast with the choking pollution outside. This was refuge.” Mullaney, I think, is suggesting that both he and the Muslims at prayer are looking for a sense of order in a chaotic world. He can’t communicate this thought to the angry Malaysian, though, and has to leave. Even if he could, it might not help. Mullaney may be interested in understanding, but not everyone he meets is interested in being understood. Not everyone wants to eat at KFC and Starbucks, not everyone wants to adopt “the American way.”

He and his friends began their vacation as “innocents abroad,” a term Mullaney borrows from Mark Twain. By the end of their travels this innocence, about the world and their place in it, is gone. Mullaney understands that all of his preparation (from Ranger School to reading Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars) is no longer academic: “there [will] be boots on the ground—one day, my boots.” I’m eager for Mullaney to get to Afghanistan, but I also see why he’s lingering. He wants to show us that, despite all the warnings, September 11th, 2001, still took him by surprise. I don’t think he thinks he was alone.

Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth

By David C. Korten

Chapter 1

Looking Upstream

A man was standing beside a stream when he saw a baby struggling in the water. Without a thought he jumped in and saved it. No sooner had he placed it gently on the shore than he saw another and jumped in to save it, then another and another. Totally focused on saving babies, he never thought to look upstream to answer the obvious question: Where were the babies coming from, and how did they get in the water?
—Anonymous

Our economic system has failed in every dimension: financial, environmental, and social. And the current financial collapse provides an incontestable demonstration that it has failed even on its own terms. Spending trillions of dollars in an effort to restore this system to its previous condition is a reckless waste of time and resources and may be the greatest misuse of federal government credit in history. The more intelligent course is to acknowledge the failure and to set about redesigning our economic system from the bottom up to align with the realities and opportunities of the twenty-first century.

The Bush administration’s strategy focused on bailing out the Wall Street institutions that bore primary responsibility for creating the crisis; its hope was that if the government picked up enough of those institutions’ losses and toxic assets, they might decide to open the tap and get credit flowing again. The Obama administration has come into office with a strong focus on economic stimulus, and particularly on green jobs—by far a more thoughtful and appropriate approach.

The real need, however, goes far beyond pumping new money into the economy to alleviate the consequences of the credit squeeze. We need to rebuild the system from the bottom up. Read More

The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women

By Jessica Valenti

Introduction

There is a moral panic in America over young women’s sexuality—and it’s entirely misplaced. Girls “going wild” aren’t damaging a generation of women, the myth of sexual purity is. The lie of virginity—the idea that such a thing even exists—is ensuring that young women’s perception of themselves is inextricable from their bodies, and that their ability to be moral actors is absolutely dependent on their sexuality. It’s time to teach our daughters that their ability to be good people depends on their being good people, not on whether or not they’re sexually active.

A combination of forces—our media- and society-driven virginity fetish, an increase in abstinence-only education, and the strategic political rollback of women’s rights among the primary culprits—has created a juggernaut of introduction unrealistic sexual expectations for young women. Unable to live up to the ideal of purity that’s forced upon them in one aspect of their lives, many young women are choosing the hypersexualized alternative that’s offered to them everywhere else as the easier—and more attractive—option.

More than 1,400 purity balls, where young girls pledge their virginity to their fathers at a promlike event, were held in 2006 (the balls are federally funded). Facebook is peppered with purity groups that exist to support girls trying to “save it.” Schools hold abstinence rallies and assemblies featuring hip-hop dancers and comedians alongside religious leaders. Virginity and chastity are reemerging as a trend in pop culture, in our schools, in the media, and even in legislation. So while young women are subject to overt sexual messages every day, they’re simultaneously being taught—by the people who are supposed to care for their personal and moral development, no less—that their only real worth is their virginity and ability to remain “pure.” Read More

My Hope for Peace

By Jehan Sadat

Introduction

Peace. This word, this idea—this goal—is the defining theme of my life.

First, and perhaps most obvious, I refer to the ongoing struggle for peace in the Middle East: a just, comprehensive settlement between Arabs and Israelis, one that will help to eliminate at least one source of hatred, extremism, and misery in the world; one that will allow the inhabitants of these most holy places to live side by side, amicably, securely, productively. This is the cause for which my husband, Anwar Sadat, gave his life. On October 6, 1981, he was assassinated by Islamic fanatics who believed that the peace he forged with Israel would perish along with him. They were wrong. The 1979 Egyptian-Israeli treaty, signed as a direct result of the Camp David Accords of 1978, has endured some thirty years, a reminder of the fact that seemingly insuperable rifts can be bridged and a foundation for a just resolution can be constructed. In one of his last interviews, my husband was asked what three wishes he would like to see fulfilled in his lifetime. He answered, “One, peace in the Middle East. Two, peace in the Middle East. Three, peace in the Middle East.” For him, this dream is finished. His dream is now mine.

Since 1985, I have been lecturing, teaching, and fund-raising to further that dream. Living in both my native Cairo and in a suburb of Washington, D.C., and being a professor, a peace activist, a former first lady, and a private citizen, I have had a front-row seat to the agonizing cycle of progress and setback in the Middle East and noted how my husband’s ideas, once unilaterally rejected by the Arab world, have come to be widely accepted. Now, with the thirtieth anniversary of his historic trip to Jerusalem just behind us and the urgent need for a new paradigm all too plainly before us, it’s high time we reexamine his legacy. Read More

The Global Deal: Climate Change and the Creation of a New Era of Progress and Prosperity

By Nicholas Stern

From the Introduction

How did an economist who had worked on public policy, growth, and development for most of his career come to work on policy on climate change? The logic of the problem, the relationship between economic development and climate change, and a little history can explain. My first fieldwork at the end of the 1960s had been on tea smallholdings in Africa, which profoundly influenced my thinking on public policy, as it showed what could happen if the entrepreneurship of the farmer was combined with the skills of the private tea factory in an environment shaped by sound policy, good infrastructure and effective agricultural extension. Of particular importance to me has been my work over more than three decades with splendid collaborators, in the village of Palanpur in India. I have been following Palanpur and its economic and social change since I first went there in 1974–5 to study the effects of the Green Revolution, witnessing both the vulnerability and creativity of those in poor rural areas at first hand. Good policy unleashes entrepreneurship and achievement. I had been an academic for twenty-five years, from 1969 until the end of 1993. After ten years lecturing at Oxford, I had become a professor at Warwick and then at the London School of Economics, and also led a very international life teaching and researching in India, China and Africa as well as the École Polytechnique in Paris and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the USA.

Since 1993, I had been more directly involved in the making of public policy as chief economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, chief economist and senior vice president of the World Bank, and then head of the Government Economic Service in the UK and second permanent secretary at the Treasury—positions I occupied whilst writing the Report of the Commission for Africa. I am now an academic economist again, as I. G. Patel Professor of Economics and Government at the London School of Economics, Chairman of the Grantham Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and Director of the India Observatory. I am an economist, a researcher and a writer.

In 2005 I was asked by Gordon Brown, then the UK Finance Minister, and Tony Blair, then its Prime Minister, to undertake an economic analysis of climate change. I hoped to determine the magnitudes, in economic terms, of the risks which the science had identified, and the policies and strategies that could help us manage those risks. These were the basic questions at the heart of what became known as The Stern Review. They required both a strongly international perspective, and the rigorous toolbox of the modern economics of public policy. I had no special knowledge, beyond that of a concerned citizen anywhere, of the science of climate change. Read More

[Posted by Paul Gleason]

Chapters 11-12

Outside the Window: May 14, 2009. New York, New York. Rain again.

Inside the Book: 2000. Oxford, England. Continual rains and mists.

Mullaney’s education changes markedly when, after Ranger School, he reports to Oxford on his Rhodes Scholarship. While his instructors at West Point and at summer training camps tightly controlled his schedule, his dons at Oxford don’t give much direction at all. They’re hard to find, and not especially helpful once found. (“Read and think,” says one. “Simultaneously if possible.”)
He learns more from his fellow students. In the dining hall, Mullaney says,

It was as if I had landed on the planet Scrabble. Matt [a statistician] used words like “defenestrate” and “lachrymose.” Hayden [an M.B.A. student] was even stranger. He combined a Ranger’s command of curse words with Matt’s triple word scores. Dinners with them were verbal obstacle courses, but a complex vocabulary helped unlock complex ideas.

I perked up when I read this because it reminded me of my favorite moment in Joan Didion’s The White Album. The year is 1968, and Didion is reporting from San Francisco State College, where the students have shut down the campus. In that dry, sardonic tone of hers (I’ve always thought “pitiless as the sun” describes her work better than “slouches towards Bethlehem”), Didion dissects the scene:

“Adjet-prop committee meeting in the Redwood Room,” read a scrawled note on the cafeteria door one morning; only someone who needed very badly to be alarmed could respond with force to a guerrilla band that not only announced its meetings on the enemy’s bulletin board but seemed innocent of the spelling, and so the meaning, of the words used.

I love Didion’s notion, admittedly snooty, that spelling a word correctly is a prerequisite for understanding it. Clarity of expression and clarity of thought are inseparable. And not only are our ideas no better than the words we use to articulate them, but the words we know determine what kind of ideas we can grasp and act on. No one, in her mind, who can’t spell “agitprop” could possibly produce it.

At Oxford, Mullaney’s academic freedom results in new perspectives on his education thus far. Mullaney’s Reading Foucault’s Madness and Civilization and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest “convinced [me] for a period of weeks that West Point had much in common with an insane asylum (and not just because cadets routinely streaked nude during full moons). Oxford, in general, made me much more skeptical of authority.”

—Paul Gleason

The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier’s Education

By Craig M. Mullaney

From Chapter 1

Reception Day

In case of Sudden and Temporary Immersion, the Important Thing is to keep the Head Above Water.—A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“Get off my bus!” screamed the cadet in charge.

“You’re not moving fast enough. Move it. Move it. Move it!” We stampeded from the bus like a startled herd of wildebeest, clutching our small gym bags with white-knuckled grips. As we poured into the hot July sunlight, chiseled senior cadet cadre aligned our crooked ranks.

“Left, face.”

Forty eighteen-year-olds turned at different speeds toward another white-starched cadet cadre. We must have looked ridiculous—a ragtag collection of shorts, untucked T-shirts, and long hair. Read More

Sag Harbor

by Colson Whitehead

Notions of Roller-Rink Infinity

First you had to settle the question of out. When did you get out? Asking this was showing off, even though anyone you could brag to had received the same gift and had come by it the same way you did. Same sun wrapped in shiny paper, same soft benevolent sky, same gravel road that sooner or later skinned you. It was hard not to believe it belonged to you more than anyone else, made for you and waiting all these years for you to come along. Everyone felt that way. We were grateful just to be standing there in that heat after such a long bleak year in the city. When did you get out? was the sound of our trap biting shut; we took the bait year after year, pure pinned joy in the town of Sag Harbor.

Then there was the next out: How long are you out for?—and the competition had begun. The magic answer was Through Labor Day or The Whole Summer. Anything less was to signal misfortune. Out for a weekend at the start of the season, to open up the house, sweep cracks, that was okay. But only coming out for a month? A week? What was wrong, were you having financial difficulties? Everyone had financial difficulties, sure, but to let it interfere with Sag, your shit was seriously amiss. Out for a week, a month, and you were allowing yourself to be cheated by life. Ask, How long are you out for? and a cloud wiped the sun. The question trailed a whiff of autumn. All answers contemplated the end, the death of summer at its very beginning. Still waiting for the bay to warm up so you could go for a swim and already picturing it frozen over. Labor Day suddenly not so far off at all.

The final out was one-half information-gathering and one-half prayer: Who else is out? The season had begun, we were proof of it, instrument of it, but things couldn’t really get started until all the players took their marks, bounding down driveways, all gimme-fives. The others were necessary, and we needed word. The person standing before you in pleated salmon shorts might say, “I talked to him on Wednesday and he said they were coming out.” They were always the first ones out, never missed June like their lives depended on it. (This was true.) Someone might offer, “Their lawn was cut.” A cut lawn was an undeniable omen of impending habitation, today or tomorrow. “Saw a car in their driveway.” Even better. There was no greater truth than a car in a driveway. A car in the driveway was an invitation to knock on the door and get down to the business of summer. Knock on that door and watch it relent under your knuckles—once you were out, the door stayed unlocked until you closed up the house. Read More