Sitting here in India, I'm often surprised at the how conservative "freedom's land" has become from my days in college there--which is reflected in some of these letters. It wasn't long ago that my son inquired why my cigarette sometimes "pops out." My wife & I very occasionally smoke pot and we recently admitted as such to the boys with a very similar talk as Gary's. We both think that we've raised smart kids by paying particular attention to their "hypocrite antenna". It has served us well.

I'd however agree with some poster's that Gary would have done well to clarify in what state he was in when he drove, but otherwise a very good piece.

The ad's an ironical take on racism. Indeed, it satires the way we think about colour and our own prejudices. Excellent work: creative and intelligent

No...!

Fall Semester, Columbia, '87: Critic & Audience. Seems like yesterday. John, sagely below a billowing mushroom cloud, ashtray parked within easy reach.... He taught us of course to think and write critically, but gave so much more of himself. For all the half-baked reviews I handed-in, he returned brilliantly perceptive, witty, and provoking typed comments, often equal in length to my own prose and stapled in place through the review. Indeed, his rejoinders were the recompense that we waited for. I still have my/his missives! I'm left with many images of that wonderful semester and I ache to hear that he is no longer with us. Heilbrun, Sayres, and now Leonard--all gone, and I feel as if I've lost mentors who helped me navigate not only those years but the ones following....

Not sure I follow Cole's thesis: that the neocon project is dead in Gaza because events there and Iraq will/did not go as planned. For the neocons, the philosophy is not debunked--they merely believe that the war was not prosecuted properly ie they didn't "win" it, whatever winning may mean to them.

Sadly, the only real threat to their project (for Israel/US) would be a commensurate response from the other, continuing the circle of catastrophic revenge. Israel continues to demonstrate that they have no respect for weakness or compliance--even a shuttered, walled, Gaza is not enough. Hence, the radicalization of the other--Hamas/Hizbollah and the new radical front which will certainly emerge in Iraq, post the US adventure.

As for peace, Dovi Weisglass, Sharon's lawyer, said it all: "The disengagement plan is the preservative of the sequence principle. It is the bottle of formaldehyde within which you place the president's [Bush's] formula so that it will be preserved for a very lengthy period. The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that's necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians."

Will US forces shoot down crack dealers and users on the streets of Freedomland? Also, by what calculus is shooting more than 10 somehow more correct than shooting merely 9?

@NP NP

Zinn's book makes an effort to present an alternative narrative of what we otherwise believed to be true. One would not normally label an attempt to provide the other side of the argument as having an agenda ie a one-side dogmatic, unipolar view.

MacMillan's point, if I understood Laura, is that reading history requires "humility" without the reductive tarnish of "relativism"--history without an absolute singular narrative.

What's agendize?

The reason why it is next to impossible to win a war against terrorism is two-fold: terrorists don't fight wars and, more importantly, terrorism is an idea. And you can't kill an idea with a bullet.

Which begs the question: where do you go from here? The answer is so simple that it almost always is met with the charge of being not merely simple but simplistic: you drain the "idea" of its fuel by addressing its grievances.

Yes, I know serious journalists would call this appeasement. But on the birth anniversary (tomorrow), let's remember a mahatma who fought violence with non-violence. What conceit!

But then, what to do with a thousand overseas military bases and the recession-defying military industrial complex and that too at a time when we all are being tutored to spend our way out of poverty?

@GG

A couple of days ago, you reprimanded a letter writer who suggested that the singular reason for the US occupation of Iraq was Oil; instead, you stated, there are always multiple reasons for political actions. While I agree with you of the existences of multiple narratives, I believe that there is invariably a single, overriding driver for these imperatives. I think Iraq was Oil (Wolfowitz's reasons for fastening around the popular narrative (WMDs) and the Downing Street Memo clearly revealed that the drivers were not WMDs, nor Saddam; and Greenspan, a political simpleton, clearly illuminated the driver when we stated that he was "saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."

I'm curious to know what you think are the reasons for US's occupation of Afghanistan. It's clearly not about AQ, an entity so opaque and minor that the current response appears to be akin to using mortars to kill ants. It's almost as if the US has reconciled itself to decades to engagement against what will clearly become a full-blow fight for independence and civil war with collateral and devastating responses. What could be worth this--a Caspian pipeline to neutralize Russian & Iran?