Columns, pieces and posts
I bumped into a great artist on the morning of New Year’s Eve and he smiled and asked: “Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the coming year?” We were on the street in a little town and it wasn’t too cold and he and his wife looked beautiful in their wool hats. His question surprised […]
When we think about current history we tend to be expecting or predicting something as opposed to experiencing something. But what we need to understand now is that the 21st century isn’t new. It still feels new, but it isn’t. We are entering its third decade. We have been waiting for the century to take […]
The Democrats think they’ve just had a big triumph. The president’s been impeached. But Republicans see themselves as gaining the upper hand. The House couldn’t lift the event into an air of historical gravity. They dressed in dark clothes and never smiled, as at a wake, but the deceased was making kicking sounds from the […]
Cedar Rapids, Iowa The famous caucuses are Feb. 3. Christmas is coming, the calendar tightening, and candidates zooming through the broad expanse in tinted-window SUVs. A surprise is there’s little surprise. Reporters say interest in impeachment is minimal, and it’s true: in three days not a single question from the floor, not a stray comment […]
During presidential scandals, members of the media often speak of the Iran-Contra affair. I’m not sure they really understand it In retrospect that scandal was distinguished by two central, shaping characteristics. First, it was different from other scandals in that its genesis wasn’t low or brutish. It wasn’t about money, or partisan advantage, or sex; […]
As I watched “The Irishman” a few weeks ago in a Manhattan movie theater I felt an ache, a kind of grief sneaking up on me, and toward the end I thought I knew why. I realized: I am watching John Ford’s “Cheyenne Autumn.” I am watching a great artist say goodbye to a world […]
Look, the case has been made. Almost everything in the impeachment hearings this week fleshed out and backed up the charge that President Trump muscled Ukraine for political gain. The pending question is what precisely the House and its Democratic majority will decide to include in the articles of impeachment, what statutes or standards they […]
A young foreign-affairs professional asked last week if the coming impeachment didn’t feel like Watergate. He was a child during that scandal, I in college. I said no, Watergate had the feeling of real drama, it was a reckoning with who we were as a people; it felt grave. This is more like the Clinton […]
It is all so very grave, yet it feels only like a continuation of the past three years of fraught and crazy political conflict. But impeachment of the American president came much closer this week. I believe retired Gen. John Kelly, President Trump’s former chief of staff, when he told the Washington Examiner that he […]
I was writing a rather stern column about the mess in Washington, but I got kind of swept Thursday by the beautiful bipartisan tribute to Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings, in Congress’s Statuary Hall, a ceremony held just before his burial back in Baltimore. I want to get beyond the merely sentimental. Everyone seems to have […]