Week of July 19, 2010

North Korea, like Cuba, is a country suspended in time, one that exists off modernity’s grid. It’s a place where the cold war never ended, where the heirloom paranoia is taken down and polished daily.

Korea’s cold war chill is heating up. Four months ago a South Korean warship was sunk, and a South Korean-led international investigative team concluded that North Korea was responsible. Next week the United States and South Korea will begin large-scale naval exercises off the coasts of the Korean Peninsula and Japan in a show of force.

The world will be watching, and here’s a book that American policymakers may hope it won’t be reading: Bruce Cumings’s “Korean War,” a powerful revisionist history of America’s intervention in Korea. Beneath its bland title, Mr. Cumings’s book is a squirm-inducing assault on America’s moral behavior during the Korean War, a conflict that he says is misremembered when it is remembered at all. It’s a book that puts the reflexive anti-Americanism of North Korea’s leaders into sympathetic historical context.

To put it mildly, Madison Avenue's mid-'60s dress code is quite a bit more formal than most of what we see on the street today. With the sort of snug tailoring that demands industrial-strength undergarments, the clothes seem at first glance like a direct reflection of the punctiliousness, even the oppressiveness, of the era. We may appreciate those cinched waists and gloved arms aesthetically — and it's fun to incorporate a little old-school glitz into wardrobes that increasingly suggest the whole world has become a yoga class — but the average 21st century woman isn't about to wear a girdle and stockings to the office every day.

But for all the ways those clothes remind us how far women have come, they also shed light on how fast we hit another wall, one that may be even more constricting than everyday girdles and pointy bras. The post-feminist sensibility eschews such gear yet demands flat bellies; it prizes large breasts but also expects them to stand up miraculously.

Historians may...think of the Great Recession as Decline, Interrupted.

The thing to remember is that these are different kinds of events. The bursting bubbles, and the associated market panic and credit freeze, was a heart attack, to which the authorities responded with emergency measures.

But"the fate of the middle class" in a global era is different. It's more like cancer -- a slower yet more profound threat, requiring a fundamental renewal of American competitiveness. And without a galvanizing"emergency."

Bill Clinton was perhaps the first liberal president to embarrass progressive populists, who by rote caricatured those who played golf or amassed millions in post-presidential huckstering. The point is that BarackObama's"them" rhetoric against those who supposedly make tons of money and won't pay enough in taxes to fund the Obama technocratic class's redistribution schemes seems almost fossilized. The more the polo-shirted Obama seems obsessed with golf, and the more he seems to prefer the landscape of the elite (who navigate the Ivy League, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Upper East Side, Cambridge, etc.), the more we wonder whom exactly he's railing about.