Week of Dec. 3, 2007

Seventy years ago, Winston Churchill repeatedly took to the floor of the House of Commons to warn his nation against the growing menace posed by the steady accretion of military might by Nazi Germany. He contested the determination of his party (which at the time ruled Britain) to appease the Nazis, in the face of enormous public resistance to his message and over the blithe assurances of his nation’s intelligence services that Hitler’s build-up either was not real or posed no threat.

Upwards of 40 million people subsequently lost their lives in the horrific, global conflagration that ensued. Many of them died and untold millions of others lost their homes, their livelihoods, and even their countries because Churchill’s warnings were not heeded at a time when the danger could have been dispatched with relative ease.

Today, we find ourselves at a similar crossroads. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, a regime animated by apocalyptic visions every bit as dark as Mein Kampf, is steadily working to acquire the means to carry them out. In the name of bringing back the Mahdi — the messianic 12th Imam whose arrival will usher in the Golden Age of Islamic rule following the end of days — Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the mullahs he fronts for are determined to acquire and use nuclear weapons.

When this country was founded, James Madison envisioned a noisy public square with different religious denominations arguing, competing and balancing each other’s passions. But now the landscape of religious life has changed. Now its most prominent feature is the supposed war between the faithful and the faithless. Mitt Romney didn’t start this war, but speeches like his both exploit and solidify this divide in people’s minds. The supposed war between the faithful and the faithless has exacted casualties.

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If we accept Iran as a nuclear power that is like accepting Hitler in 1933-34.

Before the Annapolis meeting, some said the operation would save the patient; others that it would kill the patient. In fact, the patient is exactly the same but the doctors had a hell of a big party and congratulated themselves on doing a terrific job.

Complaints about the condition of book reviewing in this country are as old as Ben Franklin's bifocals. [Gail] Pool acknowledges this [in her book, Faint Praise]. It has been steadily downhill since day one."Book reviews first appeared in America at the end of the eighteenth century," Faint Praise begins."They have been frustrating people ever since.... For two centuries reviews have been lambasted by critics, often reviewers themselves, who have complained that reviews are profligate in their praise, hostile in their criticism, cravenly noncommittal, biased, inaccurate, illiterate, or dull. Generally, the argument runs, American reviewing has never been worse." Pool cites a well-known essay by Elizabeth Hardwick published in Harper's in 1959 titled"The Decline of Book Reviewing," which read like a requiem then; and yet here we are, almost a half-century later, still crabbing and singing the same old blues.

My guess is that average literate Americans know of three 20th-century economists: John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman, and Alan Greenspan. Perhaps they also know of Paul Samuelson (but as textbook author, not economic theorist), of Friedrich Hayek (but think that he is the father of an actress), and of John Kenneth Galbraith (as William F. Buckley Jr.'s friend who appeared on TV). The rest of us disappear into a blur of gray suits, spectacles, and, usually, baldness — an assemblage of personalities too bland to be successful accountants.