Week of May 7, 2007

[M. Shahid Alam is a professor of economics at Northeastern University.]

Occasionally, a student at Northeastern University, troubled by my analysis of US foreign policy, will challenge me with the question, 'Why are you here if you don't like the United States?' I answer that this is the most rational thing to do. I came to the United States only after I had tried living in several countries on four different continents. I was born in Palestine, but the Zionists took over that country in 1948, and the Haganah expelled my family from our ancestral village in Galilee. We moved to Korea, but the Americans soon followed us there with a devastating war to defend their 'freedom.' My next destination was democratic Iran, but a CIA-inspired military coup overthrew its government in 1953. I left the medieval city of Isfahan when the coup plotters restored the Shah to the Peacock Throne. One after another, I tried living in Congo, Chile, Nicaragua and Guatemala, but each time the CIA destabilized these countries. In 1988, after many misadventures, I finally understood that there is only one country the CIA was not very likely to destabilize: the United States. That is when I moved to Massachusetts.

A Kentucky historian suspects he found a long-lost piece of history. Ron Elliot found a handwritten filing with the signature"A- Lincoln" while digging through an old box. Elliot's discovery is a court document believed to have been written by Abraham Lincoln in 1853 to his father-in-law's law firm in Lexington concerning a debt for $472.54. Elliot says his hands were shaking.

The GOP muddle is George Bush's fault. After more than six years of the Bush presidency, the Republican template is broken. Largely this is the result of presiding over a war presidency for nearly two terms. The war has dropped virtually all else in the nation's political life into the footnotes. One has to wonder what the political legacy of the Bush presidency would have consisted of without September 11 or the Iraq war.

His commitment to incentivizing, Reaganite tax cuts is solid. George Bush is a social conservative. His Supreme Court nominees, notwithstanding the Miers hiccup, articulated recognizably conservative legal philosophies. But he lacked enough political capital in his second term to privatize Social Security or secure personal Health Savings Accounts, so there's little to mitigate the ideological confusion of lavish spending on education and prescription drug insurance. If he hadn't needed Congress's support for a war, would he have issued an astonishing zero vetoes of their spending bills? The Bush presidency leaves behind a puddle of confusion.

“I have never wanted to cover politics, except in Caribbean countries,” [Tom Wolfe] says. “The United States is so stable that political victories consist of minor variations. Our government is like a train on a track, and there are people on the right-hand side and on the left screaming at the train. But the train has no choice: it’s on a track! It just keeps going. And it’s really quite marvellous how stable that situation is. You can’t suddenly have parliament deciding there has to be an election.

“And when the most unbelievable things happen, there’s no backlash. For example, when Richard Nixon was forced out of office, he really had no choice. Now did a junta rise up? No. Were there any demonstrations by Republicans? No. I don’t even know of anybody throwing a brick through a saloon window – [even] a drunk Republican. Everybody, like me, sat back and watched it on TV. It was an event on television...nothing really.”

In one sense Wolfe’s view of democracy in action is reassuring: Iraq, too, will pass, though such disengagement might equally appear unnerving, as events in that country fail to pass into history quickly enough.

“Bush has, essentially, a couple of years to rectify things,” he says. “Right now there doesn’t seem to be any possible way, but who knows?

“Everything that’s said now was said about the war in Vietnam,” he continues. “It was also said that we had a very stupid president. You should have been here when Eisenhower was president; he was not very good in a press conference because he would start a sentence with a relative clause and by the time he started adding more relative clauses and appositions, he never got to the subject or the predicate. So he was called really stupid. How can this guy run the country? But, you see, all he did was win World War II! There must have been something there!

“Very few people remember the way Reagan was portrayed as an idiot,” he adds, citing a comment by Henry Kissinger that, after 20 minutes in Reagan’s company, one found oneself asking: “How on Earth can the fate of the free world be in the hands of this man?” And yet for all that, says Wolfe, Reagan kept making the right decisions.

“Bush is portrayed as a moron. I’ve only conversed with him a couple of times – not for very long – but I found he was more literate on literature than the editor of the New York Review of Books, Bob Silvers. I’ve talked to both of them, and he makes Bob Silvers look like a slug.” He laughs, possibly at the idea of New York’s literary-set frothing into their cappuccinos over the latest blow in a long but low-intensity conflict. (In the 1960s Wolfe mocked the Review as the “chief theoretical organ of Radical Chic”, after it published a cover picture showing how to make a Molotov cocktail. Three decades later Silvers published Norman Mailer’s review of A Man in Full, in which the veteran pugilist remarked that reading Wolfe’s 742-page novel of power and racial politics in Atlanta was like “making love to a 300lb woman. Once she gets on top, it’s over. Fall in love or be asphyxiated.”) “Unfortunately,” continues Wolfe, possibly sensing that making someone look like a slug is neither very presidential nor very promising, “We don’t win wars with literature.”

The failure of men to rise to the occasion has been an irresistible topic since the dawn of humanity, but never before the focus of extensive historical study. In _Impotence: A Cultural History_, Angus McLaren remedies scholarship's woeful inadequacy with a dazzling and often entertaining examination of impotence throughout history. We assembled a special feature drawn from the book,"Two Millennia of Impotence Cures."

What went wrong? Why did Blair the laughing cavalier turn into Blair the hunted stag? Why did he risk his popularity, his integrity and his place in history in a cause that won vir tually no support from anyone of substance outside the range of Downing Street's blandishments? One possible explanation should be jettisoned straightaway. There was nothing unprincipled about Blair's Iraq folly. Over Iraq, as Roy Jenkins hinted on the eve of the war, Blair was much too principled for his own and his country's good.

He was certainly devious, tricky and flagrantly economical with the truth, but these qualities were less in evidence over Iraq than in other, far less important episodes. Blair's downfall owed more to his strengths - his resilience, his courage, his blazing self-belief and his near-magical persuasive powers - than to his weaknesses.

The true origin of his tragedy lies in an intellectual deformation that is becoming more and more prevalent in our increasingly paltry public culture. The best word for it is"presentism". Blair sometimes bewailed his ignorance of history; and, in his early days at No 10, there were rumours that he was taking history lessons from Roy Jenkins. But his presentism was impervious to Jenkins's tutorials.

Blair's fatal flaw was not just that he knew no history. It was that he had no sense of history, that he was constitutionally incapable of thinking historically. He was a sucker for novelty, particularly when it was wrapped up in pompous sociologese. His fascination with fashionable glitz, his crass talk of a"New Britain" and a"Young Country" and his disdain for the wisdom of experts who had learned the lessons of the past better than he had were all part of the same deadly syndrome. No one with a sense of history could possibly have thought that 9/11 marked a historic turning point, that Saddam Hussein posed an unprecedented threat to the world, or that Iraq, of all places, could be transformed, at the point of a gun, into a beacon of western-style democracy. But, by a terrible irony, the presentism that brought Blair to his doom had been new Labour's passport to power. Not for the first time in political history, the road to hell mimicked an earlier road to heaven.

You watch “The Tudors” for the history the way you read Playboy for the articles. You watch “The Tudors” for the history the way you read Playboy for the articles. So far, five weeks into this popular Showtime series about a young, buff and lusty Henry VIII, there’s a lot more off-with-your-velvet-frock than off-with-your-head. But not — yet — between two of history’s most famous lovers, Henry Tudor and Anne Boleyn. (Henry does seem to sleep with everyone else, with the possible exception of his wife, while Anne sleeps with no one, with the possible exception of her brother.)