Week of July 20, 2009

The police who arrested Henry Louis Gates the day before yesterday must have been a miracle worker, or at the very least a lay clergyman of some kind. After all, what else are we to make of the moment when a property owner whose house had recently been broken into was himself transformed into the perpetrator? Such things do not merely happen; divinity must have been involved.

Bret Stephens

It’s a safe bet that 100 years from now most half-way educated people will know about Neil Armstrong. It’s also a safe bet that in a century the name Michael Jackson will be familiar only to five or six cultural anthropologists and, possibly, a medical historian. So what does it say about the United States in 2009 that the late moon-walker is a household name but the living one is not?

David Kennedy

In our secular age, [Margaret] MacMillan adds [in her new book, Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History], history has also displaced religion as a means of “setting moral standards and transmitting values.” So we now expect the “judgment of history” to be not merely objective and fair — the professional historian’s usual criteria — but identity-affirming, nation-making, virtue-i­nculcating and generation-binding as well. Small wonder that history has become such a hotly contested battleground, or that otherwise unbellicose professors are so often pressed into front-line service in the culture wars.

Howard Fineman

I’ve been covering Barack Obama for a few years, and it’s usually crystal clear what he is up to. Not last night. This is the first time I’ve asked myself: What was THAT all about?

His prime time press conference was worse than a waste of time. He spent an hour (with the aide of a soporific White House press corps) pouring sand (one grain at a time) into the already-slowing gears of the machinery of health-care reform.

He made no real news on health care, but DID make news on race relations with his discussion of the Skip Gates case — thereby obscuring the topic he supposedly wanted to feature.

He issued no emotional clarion call, in the manner of Ted Kennedy. He didn't dwell much on heart-rending stories, in the manner of Ronald Reagan. He gave no clever policy lecture, in the manner of Bill Clinton. He issued no testosterone-fueled threats, in the manner of LBJ.