Week of Oct. 29, 2007

I think that if you can tell people, ‘We have a president in the White House who still has a grandmother living in a hut on the shores of Lake Victoria and has a sister who’s half-Indonesian, married to a Chinese-Canadian,’ then they’re going to think that he may have a better sense of what’s going on in our lives and in our country. And they’d be right.

After living in New York for a year as a graduate student, I was convinced that governing an all but ungovernable city was the second toughest job in the U.S. I've also come to believe that it can only be done successfully by Italian-Americans with authoritarian tendencies. (See LaGuardia, Fiorello and forget about Impellitteri, Vincent.) Frankly, I didn't much like Giuliani before he became mayor, but I think he was a stunning success in the job despite his flaws. And I have confidence in his ability to be a"national security president."

From Spain recently came news of a proposal by the government to erase all physical signs of the Franco dictatorship, as if by getting rid of the plaques and statues and street names from the old regime the country could rectify and obliterate a past it has preferred not to linger over. Meanwhile Polish voters just threw out a conservative government that wanted to drag up the past by holding job seekers accountable for their dealings under the Communists.

Americans tend to be amnesiacs. Europeans, however, worry history ....

Thomas Jefferson’s legacy is much admired in the US and beyond, and for good reason. Without his contributions it’s hard to imagine how the American system of “democracy” would have evolved. I’ve always admired him a great deal, too, although for somewhat different reasons than most. Yes, he was critical to the development of democracy, but what was so brilliant about this is that democracy is arguably the cleverest tool for the oppression of the masses ever devised.

If the 2008 presidential election comes down to a choice between Hillary Clinton and front runner Rudolph Giuliani, Americans will elect a woman before they will elect a bald man. The U.S. has had more than five bald Presidents, but Americans haven't voted one into office in 51 years, when Dwight Eisenhower won a second term over Adlai Stevenson--the second consecutive election in which two bald men went head to glorious head.

That was 1956, when 20th Century Fox released The King and I, starring Yul Brynner as the King of Siam. It was an annus mirabilis for hairless potentates but also the twilight of their brief golden age--the last time heads of state were not synonymous with heads of hair.

When President John F. Kennedy went hatless during his Inauguration speech in 1961, he committed in essence a double homicide: of the hat industry and of the prospect that any bald man would ever have to the nation's highest office.

The Army Corps of Engineers is worried that a dam north of Mosul will collapse. CBS warns, ' A catastrophic failure, engineers believe, could unleash a 60-foot-high wall of water that would be inundate Mosul - and flood Baghdad to a depth of 15 feet. The casualty count would be in the hundreds of thousands. ' If this happened on the Bush administration's watch, it would certainly be blamed on the United States, and even the lack of dam upkeep can be traced in some part to the UN/ US sanctions on Iraq of the 1990s, which debilitated its infrastructure. An article in the Scientific American in 1999 warned that a Katrina could happen to New Orleans. Now we have the ACE warning of this dam/ flood catastrophe. I have a sinking feeling that George W. Bush is incapable of taking such threats to civilian lives seriously. Imagine if the great United States, having occupied a major Muslim Arab country in the world's driest region, managed to drown two of the most revered cities in Islamic history.

I was always fascinated by my own life, frankly.

This was the Afghan burning of the books. The Nazis burned Brecht. The Taliban, then sheltering Osama bin Laden, bombarded the “un-Islamic” Buddhas. The burning presaged war. The destruction presaged 9/11: two Buddhas, two towers.

Heinrich Heine noted that “When they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings.” When Buddhas buckle, people will be crushed.

There is talk of reassembling the Buddhas, or of using solar power to beam laser holograms of their forms onto the cliff. I say, reassemble one, for hope, but not both. Absence speaks, shames, reminds.

Though it has been a topic of much attention in recent years, the origin of the term “terrorist” has gone largely unnoticed by politicians and pundits alike. The word was an invention of the French Revolution, and it referred not to those who hate freedom, nor to non-state actors, nor of course to “Islamofascism.”

A terroriste was, in its original meaning, a Jacobin leader who ruled France during la Terreur.