Week of May 14, 2007

During the Nixon years, I never thought I would see another president who would almost make me wish we had him back. Almost. Thankfully, 21 months from now the voters will have other choices, whatever they turn out be.

In one of the most alarming examples [from the test scores of the new National Assessment of Educational Progress], Ms. Kozbial-Hess said, the eighth- and 12th-grade tests showed students a photograph of a wall being torn down, labeled"Berlin 1989." The students were asked what event was depicted and what influence it had on U.S. foreign policy, she said.

"More than half of eighth graders and almost one-third of 12th graders did not even give a partially correct answer that this photo showed the fall of the Berlin Wall, despite the strong clue," Ms. Kozbial-Hess said.

"Only 1 percent of eighth graders and 12 percent of 12th graders gave an appropriate or complete response that identified the event and also mentioned the impact of the end of the Cold War," she said.

It’s time to let Napoleon’s penis rest in peace. Museums are quietly de-accessioning the human remains of indigenous peoples so that body parts can be given proper burial rites. Napoleon’s penis, too, should be allowed to go home and rejoin the rest of his captivating body.

I believe that there is only one solution to the crisis we face. The American people must make the decision to dismantle both the empire that has been created in their name and the huge (still growing) military establishment that undergirds it. It is a task at least comparable to that undertaken by the British government when, after World War II, it liquidated the British Empire. By doing so, Britain avoided the fate of the Roman Republic -- becoming a domestic tyranny and losing its democracy, as would have been required if it had continued to try to dominate much of the world by force.

The only sure thing that can be said about the past is that anyone who can remember Santayana’s maxim is condemned to repeat it. As a result, the danger of not understanding the lessons of history is matched by the danger of using simplistic historical analogies. Those who have learned the lessons of Munich square off against those who have learned the lessons of Vietnam, and then they both invoke the bread-and-circus days of the overstretched Roman empire in an attempt to sound even more subtle and profound.

Now the tape recorder was important to two Americans, I think, more than anyone else. To myself and Dick Nixon. I call Dick Nixon and me the New Cartesians, as in Descartes [Rene Descartes, the 17th century philosopher and mathematician]. The Latin phrase is cogito ergo sum --"I think, therefore I am." In the case of Dick Nixon and me, it's,"I tape, therefore I am."

President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt warned Cheney against an Iraq War and said that it would produce a hundred Bin Ladens! Abdullah II spoke of the"apocalyptic" consequences and worried that the region would go up in flames. So were t hese leaders of the region right in 2002, or was smarty pants CIA-operative-betrayer Cheney? He'll be hunting quail in Texas in a year and a half, and Abdullah II will have to deal with a million extra residents in his country-- displaced Iraqis. Jordan only has 5.2 million citizens. And, Cheney won't be helping Jordan deal with the burden on services or with feeding the Iraqi refugees he helped create. It will just be Abdullah II and a volatile situation that could explode, just as did the Palestinian refugee problem created by Israeli expulsions and land expropriation in 1948 and 1967.

Why has it become impossible to admit a mistake in Washington and accept the consequences? The last time a senior government official quit over his own job failure was more than twenty years ago, when Rober McFarlane, President Reagan’s national-security adviser, resigned during the Iran-Contra scandal and taking accountability to a Roman level, swallowed an overdose of Valium, out of “a sense of having failed the country.” (He survived. Today, this mostly forgotten act of personal responsibility seems rather heroic. Recent years have seen such a steep decline in shame that a book like George Tenet’s “At the Cente of the Storm: My Years at the CIA,” for which the author was paid four million dollars, has become an expected destination at the end of a well-trodden path that leads from disaster through obfuscation and defiance to a well-rewarded self-justification.

So what's to celebrate? For one thing, Jamestown planted a seed, for both England and the land that became the United States. For England it was, as historian James Horn of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation has noted, a first successful stab at transatlantic colonization, a project that in time implanted English customs, laws, institutions and language throughout North America. For the United States, Plymouth Rock and the Mayflower (which landed in 1620) may loom larger in the national imagination. But it was Jamestown that began growing tobacco, which underpinned the mid-Atlantic region's economy for centuries. And it was Jamestown that, in 1619, spawned the nation's first venture with self-government and representative democracy -- the House of Burgesses, precursor to Virginia's modern-day House of Delegates. As bold experiments go, that one went far.