Peggy Noonan

In the lives of interesting people, there are bound to be interesting events. This is about one in the life of Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. troops in Iraq.

Gen. Petraeus of course will be all over television in September, reporting to Congress on the war, and America will be getting used to him. He is not in an easy position. The left and most Democrats are invested in the idea of Iraq as disaster. The right and most Republicans placed their bets on the president and the decision to invade.

Normal Americans just want Iraq handled. They want America to succeed: for the war to end in a way and time that prove if possible that the Iraq endeavor helped the world, or us, or didn’t make things worse for the world, or us. My hunch: The American people have concluded the war was a mistake, but know from their own lives that mistakes can be salvaged, and sometimes turned to good.

Whatever Gen. Petraeus says, it will be used politically, by politicians. “They’ll be trying to fit his round facts into their square holes,” as the novelist Tom Clancy, who has followed Gen. Petraeus’s career, put it.

But Gen. Petraeus is also in a good position. America is still open to good news that is also believable news. They will welcome hope that is grounded in data.

They have no faith in Republican boosterism or Democratic pandering. They’re tired of blowhardism on all fronts. But if Gen. Petraeus comports himself like what he is, a professional soldier, if he seems to be giving it to you straight, if he sounds as if he didn’t get rolled by the White House or pressured by the political atmosphere, if he seems to be thinking clearly, he can make a big and even decisive impression. And he will buy time.

I write as if we can guess what he will say, and to some degree we can, because he’s already said it in interviews: The job is not done and won’t be done for some time.

Gen. Petraeus graduated from West Point in 1974, 10th in his class, and his career has been the very model of the new Army: a master’s in public administration, Ph.D. in the lessons of Vietnam, a fellowship in foreign affairs at Georgetown. Wrote the book, literally, on counterterrorism. Ten months in Bosnia. Time in Kuwait. Fought in Iraq, in Karbala, Hilla and Najaf, and became known and admired for rebuilding and administrating Mosul. Academically credentialed, bureaucratically knowing, historically well read. Also highly quotable. Of his use of discretionary funds for public works in Mosul, he said, “Money is ammunition.” He is said to have asked embedded reporters after Baghdad fell, “Tell me where this ends.” That was the right question.

He is decisive. Which gets us to the interesting story.

*   *   *

It happened on Sept. 21, 1991, when Gen. Petraeus was commanding the Third Battalion of the 101st Airborne in Fort Campbell, Ky. He was at a live-fire training exercise. A soldier tripped on his M-16, and it discharged. The bullet hit Gen. Petraeus in the chest.

He was taken to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. A local surgeon got beeped and called in. He was told there was a Life Flight helicopter coming in with a guy with a gunshot wound to the chest. He was hemorrhaging.

The surgeon rushed to Vanderbilt and arrived before the helicopter. It landed, the elevator doors opened, and the surgeon saw a soldier on a gurney with a tube in his chest. A uniformed man was next to the patient, along with a nurse carrying bottles of blood draining from the wound.

Doctors at busy Vanderbilt hospital were used to treating gunshot wounds, and the fact that the patient was military was “a nonissue,” as the surgeon said the other day in a telephone interview.

What was an issue was that the patient had lost a lot of blood, was pale, and was losing more.

The surgeon had to decide whether to open Gen. Petraeus up right away or stabilize him. The general was conscious, so the surgeon said, “Listen, I gotta make a decision about whether to take you straight to surgery or stabilize you first, give you blood.”
Gen. Petraeus looked up at the surgeon and said, “Don’t waste any time. Get it done. Let’s get on with it.”

“That’s unusual”, the surgeon told me. “Usually patients want to stabilize, wait.” This one wanted to move.

*   *   *

At this point I’ll note that the surgeon that day 16 years ago was Dr. Bill Frist, who later became Sen. Frist, and then Majority Leader Frist. He had never met Gen. Petraeus before.

Dr. Frist got Gen. Petraeus to the third-floor operating room, opened his chest, removed a flattened bullet that had torn through the top of a lung, stopped the hemorrhaging, took out part of a lung.

The operation was successful, and within 24 hours Gen. Petraeus asked Dr. Frist if he could be transferred back to the base hospital so his soldiers wouldn’t be too concerned. “As soon as he was stable, we got him over there. His soldiers were first and foremost in his mind. That’s why they like him so much.”

Gen. Petraeus, says Dr. Frist, now describes his wound to troops as damage done by a round “that went right through my right chest—happily over the ‘A’ in Petraeus rather than over the ‘A’ in U.S. Army, as the latter is over my heart.”

Over the years, Dr. Frist and Gen. Petraeus became friends. They found they’d both done graduate work at the Woodrow Wilson school at Princeton, where Dr. Frist is about to return as a teacher. They ran the Army 10-miler in Washington together—”He left me in the dust!” exclaims the doctor—and the Frists spent time with Holly Petraeus when her husband was fighting in Baghdad.

The majority leader also visited Gen. Petraeus in Iraq, and wound up, three years ago, standing with him “on a hot, dusty compound” where the general was leading exercises training young Iraqi soldiers.

Mr. Frist says that after observing the young recruits carry out their exercises, Petraeus gathered them around and told them what happened on that fateful day in 1991. He introduced the senator and told them of the role he’d played. “He didn’t say we got the majority leader of the Senate here, he said, ‘This was my doctor.’” Why was he telling them the story? “The point was to tell them, ‘Listen, if you’re not perfect right now you can grow, you can make mistakes, people are forgiving, you’ll grow.’” The point was also to thank the soldiers at Fort Campbell who cared for them in the minutes after he was shot.

*   *   *

What does it all mean? Life is interesting, mysterious, and has an unseen circularity. You never know in any given day what’s going to happen or who’s going to have a big impact on you and on others. A future military commander got shot, and a future leader of the Senate stopped the bleeding.

What Mr. Frist, a supporter of more time for and renewed commitment to Iraq, gets from the story is this: What he saw and heard that day 16 years ago, is what he’s seen from Gen. Petraeus in the years since: “straightforward decisiveness” and a “call for action with results.”

It’s gotten catty out there. Jeri Thompson is a trophy wife, as is Cindy McCain. Michelle Obama is too offhand and irreverent when speaking of her husband, and Judith Giuliani is a puppy-stapling princess. Even Hillary Clinton was a focus, for wearing an outfit that suggested, however faintly, that underneath her clothing she may be naked, and have breasts.

Why these stories? Because it’s August and no one wants to think. Because the campaign is too long and reporters have to write about something. Because cable news has an insatiable need for guests, and if you write a story cable producers can easily find tape for, you get to go on Olbermann or O’Reilly and seem to publicize your paper, which will please your bosses, with the added benefit of giving you personal face time, which essentially asserts, in the world of high-level politics, that you exist.

None of these stories have come from blogs but from Pulitzer Prize winners at major newspapers and veteran journalists at magazines. For all their harrumphing about the crucial role they play in democracy (and it is crucial) and the seriousness of their professional intent (and it is sometimes serious), the mainstream media is full of the cattiest human beings in history with the exception of the vast political consulting/advising class of Washington, i.e., the gargoyles with BlackBerrys in the back of the SUV, whose job is not only to help their guy but hurt the other guy. Their email gossip reminds me of Johnny in the movie “Airplane!” When the frantic wife of a pilot rushes into the control tower, Johnny solicitously removes her coat and then reveals his actual interests: “Where did you get that dress?”

However. It is also true the press is paying attention to prospective first ladies because in an age in which presidents are always in your face, first ladies are often in your face. It actually matters if people like them, and it can hurt, on the margins, if they don’t. And these days wins are marginal.

The challenge for the spouses of modern candidates is that what is expected of women in general has changed. This is reflected in the first lady’s role, and the role of the candidate’s spouse.

Mamie Eisenhower was a housewife, Bess Truman so ordinary that she didn’t want to live in Washington preferring the more normal humans of Missouri. Lady Bird Johnson lived for Lyndon. Eleanor Roosevelt was the exception, a groundbreaker. But Jackie Kennedy shivered at the thought of being compared to Mrs. Roosevelt, and said Jack doesn’t want to talk politics when he comes home.

First ladies were once more or less average, and were expected to be. Now they are accomplished, worldly, and expected to be. Candidates for the first lady’s job have to find a balance. It’s delicate. Strong is good, aggressive not. A person who cares, yes; a person who pushes an agenda, no.

*   *   *

Some old rules apply as the transition from old style to new style continues.

• Americans would prefer a first lady who doesn’t seem like she ever hungered for it. They don’t want someone who needs the job, they want someone who puts up with it with grace. This gets us to Laura Bush, who seems from the beginning to have had no particular desire for the White House. She always telegraphs that she’d have been happy staying home, smoking cigarettes, and admiring her family. First lady is an elevated title. We’d rather elevate someone who’s making a sacrifice, not someone who’s grabbing a rung.
• Detached good nature goes far. From the beginning of her public life, Mrs. Bush has operated as if she had an invisible shield around her, her own invisible popemobile with thick plastic windows that kept her from getting the gunk on her. She never let it touch her. “Your husband is the savior of mankind”—she’d smile pleasantly and not let it touch her. “Your husband is the spawn of Satan”—she’d smile and not let it touch her. This took profound discipline, some wisdom, and perhaps a natural detachment. Mrs. Bush should be studied. She never attacked, rarely defended, and only carefully shared. Connected to this:
• “They do not want your drama. They do not want your mess.” The presidency is a complicated job. Since we have to have presidents, we’d prefer they come with something like domestic peace. They don’t want unneeded temperament, high jinks, vanity or acting out. If you can’t be normal, imitate normal.
• Just because it’s true doesn’t mean we have to know it. We do not want to hear all that much about your relationship. We actually do not want you making out in the pages of Harpers Bazaar. On so many issues the unspoken American attitude, and not only on the romantic aspects of your life but on most of the private life of their leaders is: Get a room. Put your grievances, vanity and temperament in it. Close the door.
• We don’t want to think you’re a policy maven too deep in the game. We don’t want to think you’re leading the inside movement to get rid of the veep or the spokesman. At the same time we like to think, and assume, that you have views that you share. It’s your job. But we want you to know we elected him, not you, and that you know it. This of course was Mrs. Clinton’s problem: she thought it was also about her. She took on an extraconstitutional role in the White House. Ever since, she’s had to work to overcome the impression made in those days.
• People respect you when it gets out that there are areas of your life that are off-limits. Pierre Salinger had to wait until Mrs. Kennedy was out of town on vacation to get the kids in a picture. Mrs. Bush has made it clear that her girls deserve a private life. The Clintons protected Chelsea. At the same time, never say “off-limits.” Forget those words. Just tell the press guy no, and in time everyone will get the message.
• Redirect the spotlight. There is a famous TV journalist who, whenever she is photographed with her husband going to something swell, does not walk forward smiling in a beautiful dress. Instead she pauses and drapes an arm around him, subtly redirecting the cameras toward him. Redirecting the camera is a form of love. People like to see love, and respect it when they see it.

*   *   *

Is Bill Clinton an exception? Of course. He’s always been an exception, that’s his history. He’ll never dodge the spotlight. If his wife is elected, he will speak at conferences and be ambassador to the world. Will he bring drama and mess? Yes. He brings drama wherever he goes because wherever he goes, there he is. Will he bring the particular drama everyone expects? He is officially and forever The Rogue. If Americans hire her as president they will do it knowing he is going to bring his Billness with him.

So we are agreed. We are living in the second great Gilded Age, a time of startling personal wealth. In the West, the mansion after mansion with broad and rolling grounds; in the East, the apartments with foyers in which bowling teams could play. Or, on another level, the week’s vacation in Disneyland or Dublin with the entire family—this in a nation in which, well within human memory, people with a week off stayed home and fixed things in the garage, or drove to the beach for a day and sat on a blanket from one of the kid’s beds and thought: This is the life.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average has hit 14000. The wealthy live better than kings. There isn’t a billionaire in East Hampton who wouldn’t look down on tatty old Windsor Castle. We have a potential presidential candidate who noted to a friend that if he won the presidency the quality of his life would go down, not up.

The gap between rich and poor is great, and there is plenty of want, and also confusion. What the superrich do for a living now often seems utterly incomprehensible, and has for at least a generation. There is no word for it, only an image. There’s a big pile of coins on a table. The rich shove their hands in, raise them, and as the coins sift through their fingers it makes . . . a bigger pile of coins. Then they sift through it again and the pile gets bigger again.

A general rule: If you are told what someone does for a living and it makes sense to you—orthodontist, store owner, professor—that means he’s not rich. But if it’s a man in a suit who does something that takes him five sentences to explain and still you walk away confused, and castigating yourself as to why you couldn’t understand the central facts of the acquisition of wealth in the age you live in—well, chances are you just talked to a billionaire.

*   *   *

There are good things and bad in the Gilded Age, pluses and minuses. I write here of a minus. It has to do with our manners, the ones we show each other on the street. I think riches, or the pursuit of riches, has made us ruder. You’d think broad comfort would assuage certain hungers. It has not. It has sharpened them.

Here’s a moment in the pushiness of the Gilded Age. I walk into a shop on Madison Avenue daydreaming, trying to remember what it was I thought last week I should pick up, what was it . . .

“Hi! Let me help you find what you’re looking for!” She is a saleswoman, cracking gum with intensity, about 25 years old, and she has made a beeline to her mark. That would be me.

“Mmmm, actually—”

“We have summer sweaters on sale. What size are you?!” Her style is aggressive friendliness.

In another shop, as soon as I walk in the door, “How are you today? How can I help you?” Those dread words.

“Oh, I’m sort of just looking.”

“I like your bag!”

“Um, thanks.” What they are forcing you to do is engage. If you engage—”Um, thanks”—you have a relationship. If you have a relationship, it’s easier for them to turn you upside down and shake the coins from your pockets.

It is like this in all the shops I go in now, except for the big stores (Macy’s, Duane Reade drugstore), where they ignore you.

There are strategies. You can do the full Garbo: “Leave me alone.” But they’ll think you’re a shoplifter and watch you. Or the strong lady with boundaries: “Thank you, if I need help I’ll ask.” But your reverie is broken. Or the acquiescent person: “Take me under your leadership, oh aggressively friendly salesperson.” But this is bowing to the pushiness of the Gilded Age.

*   *   *

You leave the floor for the street and meet the woman with the clipboard. “Do you have two seconds for the environment?” Again, not a soft question but a challenge. Her question is phrased so that if you don’t stop and hear her spiel, you are admitting you won’t give two seconds for the environment, or two cents for it either. You give the half-smile-nod, shake your head, walk on. She looks at you as if you’re the reason the Earth is going to hell.

Do they know they’re being manipulative? If they have a brain they do. Their trainers certainly know. Do they know it’s also why no one quite trusts them? Do they care? Why would they? They’re the manipulators on the street.

Or: I’m in a local restaurant with a friend. We sat down 40 seconds ago and are starting to catch up when: “What do you want to drink?” An interruption, but so what? We order, talk, my friend is getting to the punch line of the story when: “We have specials this evening.” Not, “Let me know when you’re ready to hear the specials.” We stop talking, listen. The waiter stands there, pad in hand. “You ready?” If you ask for a minute, he’ll nod and be back in exactly one minute. “Do you know yet?” Again, this is not a request. One is being told to snap to it. Get ‘em in, get ‘em out. Move ‘em.

It’s funny. In a time of recession, you’d think salespeople would be more aggressive, because so much might hinge on the sale—a commission, a job. In a time of relative wealth, you’d think they might be less aggressive. But the opposite seems true.

*   *   *

Technology has not helped in this area. Cellphones are wonderful, but they empower the obnoxious and amplify the ignorant. Once they kept their thoughts to themselves. They had no choice. Now they have cellphones, into which they bark, “I’m on line at Duane Reade. Yeah. Ex-Lax.” Oh, thank you for sharing. How much less my life would be if I didn’t know.

BlackBerrys empower the obsessed. We wouldn’t have them if the economy weren’t high and we weren’t pretty well off. Once, a political figure in New York invited me to a private dinner. I was seated next to him, and as the table conversation took off he leaned back, quietly took out his BlackBerry, and began to scroll. It occurred to me that if I said something live in person, it would not be as interesting to him as if I’d BlackBerryed him. It occurred to me that if I wanted to talk to him I’d have to BlackBerry him and say, “Please talk to me.” And then he would get the message.

It is possible that we are on the cellphone because we are lonely and hunger for connection, even of the shallowest kind; that we BlackBerry because we hope for a sense of control in a chaotic world; that we are frightened of stillness and must interrupt conversations; that we are desperate to make the sale in the highly competitive environment of the Banana Republic on 86th Street and must aggressively pursue customers.

It’s also possible we have grown more boorish. I think it’s that one. Many things thrive in the age of everything, including bad manners.

Robert Novak’s new memoir of 50 years in journalism, “The Prince of Darkness,” is 638 pages of storytelling and score settling by a Washington institution who paints himself, convincingly, as churlish, brave, resilient, petty and indefatigable. I got it as soon as it came out and found it entertaining and, in spite of the usual pitfalls of such books—a rote “When Clinton came in second in New Hampshire I was not surprised” unspooling of year-by-year events—human, and frank. It’s not a big book, but it tells you, or reminds you of, a few things, and those new to Washington might learn things from it. As in:

Washington in the 1950s was a pretty wonderful place to be. It seems in almost everyone’s memoirs, certainly this one, to have been the last time Washington was fun. It was “shabbier and less pretentious” than today, but it was also an easier place, a more human one, in part, apparently, because everyone in the White House, on the Hill, and in the newspaper bureaus was drunk. (In fact, that would explain the ‘50s, wouldn’t it?) In the Washington young Mr. Novak enters, senators plot over whiskey and cigars; reporters knock back scotches while trading tidbits at the press-club bar; lunches with sources begin with doubles; the Senate majority leader is soused in the lobby, singing to himself. Beehived women chain-smoke with the boys and listen to their tales of woe.

Members of Congress had real accents and actually varied backgrounds. These were the last days when it mattered if you came from California as opposed to North Carolina. It meant you had different experiences growing up, you brought those differences to the Capitol, and they made it richer in human terms.

The ‘50s have gotten a bad rap. For all the decade’s flaws, it was a human time, and freer than ours of a certain Perrier- sipping, blog-surfing, post-workout puritanism. Mr. Novak makes you miss the era even if you never knew it.

*   *   *

What rules now in Washington is teamism. Not so much fierce partisanship, but a partisanship that is as belligerent as it is meaningless. “I am a Democrat and we’ll do anything to win.” “I am a Republican and we’ll smash the foe.”

In fact, the point is to be a conservative or a liberal or something else; parties are the vehicle by which your views are instituted. But conservatism and liberalism are philosophies. Parties are clubs. They are teams. They are needed, their very existence is clarifying, and they provide the troops without which a movement does not move. But they are not the meaning of the struggle. “Sometimes party loyalty asks too much,” says JFK. That seems in retrospect one of the most important things he ever said.

Political reporters don’t ponder why some people do not talk to them. In the book Mr. Novak shows no sign of understanding that people in government and business are often leery of reporters because they have reason to be. Say the wrong thing in a loose moment, and you can lose your job, your income, your standing. You can also wind up indulging a passing mood and hurting people. Mr. Novak belongs to the tough school. When H.R. Haldeman was unsettled by personal bad press, he didn’t invite Mr. Novak to lunch. Mr. Novak says he treated Haldeman “more harshly because he refused any connection with me. He made himself more of a target than he had to be by refusing to be a source.” This is honest, and unlovable.

What is a good source? Mr. Novak says it’s someone who doesn’t lie to him. This marks the first time I ever thought of him as naive, if that’s the word. Mr. Novak surely knows the most experienced leakers don’t have to lie and are careful not to. To say of a source, “He never that I know of lied” is to say, “He did me the favor of not passing on immediately provable lies, which allowed me to accept the information he gave with full credulity.”

Mr. Novak seems to have decided that if you spoke to him off the record or not for attribution, but in the ensuing years had the poor taste to die, your identity can be revealed. He outs Sen. Thomas Eagleton (D., Mo.) as the source of the putdown of George McGovern as standing for acid, amnesty and abortion. He fingers others. Is this fair?

Human nature trumps all. Reporters come to like people who are their sources. They become friends. This is a little like a banker befriending dollar bills. The source gives information that is turned into columns that are turned into a career that is turned into money. But it is not true only that the reporter is using the source. The source is also using the reporter, as Mr. Novak notes: These are “symbiotic relationships.” The source seeks to advance himself, his friends, his agenda, which will produce for him power and profit. In their mutual dependence, sympathies arise. They are concerned, or know to act out concern, when the other meets misfortune. What do they really feel? I thought of Samuel Johnson: He feels the same degree of pain as the cow feels when the mare miscarries.

*   *   *

Washington is a small town. New York is many small towns, but Washington is one small town. Everyone knows this, but Mr. Novak somehow makes it vivid. The first priest to impress Mr. Novak in his journey to religious conversion made him “comfortable.” Was it the depth of his theology? No. Earlier the priest had been a lawyer on the Hill and “a source for the Evans and Novak column.”

Workaholism is a good way to rise but not a good way to live. Mr. Novak’s book is full of people who work hard. They are in the office, they are working it, they’re in early and stay late. Woody Allen said 90% of life is just showing up, but that is not true, and if it was true of Mr. Allen, it was because he was so gifted. For the rest it’s show up and work. Mr. Novak castigates himself for not taking much note of his children until they were teenagers, and interesting. He suggests that if he had it to do over again, he’d shift emphasis. Reading this, I remembered the great line in the movie “Spanglish.” The merry, fatalistic grandmother says to the young mother: “I lived for myself. You live for your daughter. None of it works!”

Never spin your friends, it adds distance. Rowland Evans was Mr. Novak’s partner in their successful column for 30 years. They complemented each other, Evans the patrician Democrat and Mr. Novak the rougher-edged Republican. But Mr. Novak says Evans, who died in March 2001, misled him about the depth of his friendship with frequent column subject Robert F. Kennedy, and the frequency of their contacts. Mr. Novak found out while researching his book, and from Evans’s own mouth: the oral histories he left behind. Mr. Novak speaks of Evans in the book with a correct, careful and unmistakably cool affection.

It’s been a slow week in a hot era. I found myself Thursday watching President Bush’s news conference and thinking about what it is about him, real or perceived, that makes people who used to smile at the mention of his name now grit their teeth. I mean what it is apart from the huge and obvious issues on which they might disagree with him.

I’m not referring to what used to be called Bush Derangement Syndrome. That phrase suggested that to passionately dislike the president was to be somewhat unhinged. No one thinks that anymore. I received an email before the news conference from as rock-ribbed a Republican as you can find, a Georgia woman (middle-aged, entrepreneurial) who’d previously supported him. She said she’d had it. “I don’t believe a word that comes out of his mouth.” I was startled by her vehemence only because she is, as I said, rock-ribbed. Her email reminded me of another, one a friend received some months ago: “I took the W off my car today,” it said on the subject line. It sounded like a country western song, like a great lament.

As I watched the news conference, it occurred to me that one of the things that might leave people feeling somewhat disoriented is the president’s seemingly effortless high spirits. He’s in a good mood. There was the usual teasing, the partly aggressive, partly joshing humor, the certitude. He doesn’t seem to be suffering, which is jarring. Presidents in great enterprises that are going badly suffer: Lincoln, LBJ with his head in his hands. Why doesn’t Mr. Bush? Every major domestic initiative of his second term has been ill thought through and ended in failure. His Iraq leadership has failed. His standing is lower than any previous president’s since polling began. He’s in a good mood. Discuss.

Is it defiance? Denial? Is it that he’s right and you’re wrong, which is your problem? Is he faking a certain steely good cheer to show his foes from Washington to Baghdad that the American president is neither beaten nor bowed? Fair enough: Presidents can’t sit around and moan. But it doesn’t look like an act. People would feel better to know his lack of success sometimes gets to him. It gets to them.

His stock answer is that of course he feels the sadness of the families who’ve lost someone in Iraq. And of course he must. Beyond that his good humor seems to me disorienting, and strange.

*   *   *

In arguing for the right path as he sees it, the president more and more claims for himself virtues that the other side, by inference, lacks. He is “idealistic”; those who oppose him are, apparently, lacking in ideals. He makes his decisions “based on principle,” unlike his critics, who are ever watchful of the polls. He is steadfast, brave, he believes “freedom isn’t just for Americans” but has “universal . . . applications,” unlike those selfish, isolationist types who oppose him.

This is ungracious as a rhetorical approach, but not unprecedented. There’s something in the White House water system. Presidents all wind up being gallant in their own eyes. Thursday I was reminded of President Nixon, who often noted he was resisting those who were always advising him to “take the easy way.” Bill Safire used to joke that when he was a Nixon speechwriter, part of his job was to walk by the Oval Office and yell in, “Mr. President, take the easy way!”

I suspect people pick up with Mr. Bush the sense that part of his drama, part of the story of his presidency, is that he gets to be the romantic about history, and the American people get to be the realists. Of the two, the latter is not the more enjoyable role.

*   *   *

Americans have always been somewhat romantic about the meaning of our country, and the beacon it can be for the world, and what the Founders did. But they like the president to be the cool-eyed realist, the tough customer who understands harsh realities.

With Mr. Bush it is the people who are forced to be cool-eyed and realistic. He’s the one who goes off on the toots. This is extremely irritating, and also unnatural. Actually it’s weird.

Americans hire presidents and fire them. They’re not as sweet about it as they used to be. This is not because they have grown cynical, but because they are disappointed, by both teams and both sides. Some part of them thinks no matter who is president he will not protect them from forces at work in the world. Some part of them fears that when history looks back on this moment, on the past few presidents and the next few, it will say: Those men were not big enough for the era.

But this is a democracy. You vote, you do the best you can with the choices presented, and you show the appropriate opposition to the guy who seems most likely to bring trouble. (I think that is one reason for the polarity and division of politics now. No one knows in his gut that the guy he supports will do any good. But at least you can oppose with enthusiasm and passion the guy you feel in your gut will cause more trouble than is needed! This is what happens when the pickings are slim: The greatest passion gets funneled into opposition.)

We hire them and fire them. President Bush was hired to know more than the people, to be told all the deep inside intelligence, all the facts Americans are not told, and do the right and smart thing in response.

That’s the deal. It’s the real “grand bargain.” If you are a midlevel Verizon executive who lives in New Jersey, this is what you do: You hire a president and tell him to take care of everything you can’t take care of—the security of the nation, its well-being, its long-term interests. And you in turn do your part. You meet your part of the bargain. You work, pay your taxes, which are your financial contribution to making it all work, you become involved in local things—the boy’s ball team, the library, the homeless shelter. You handle what you can handle within your ken, and give the big things to the president.

And if he can’t do it, or if he can’t do it as well as you pay the mortgage and help the kid next door, you get mad. And you fire him.

Americans can’t fire the president right now, so they’re waiting it out. They can tell a pollster how they feel, and they do, and they can tell friends, and they do that too. They also watch the news conference, and grit their teeth a bit.

It is late afternoon in Manhattan on the Fourth of July, and I’m walking along on Lexington and 59th, in front of Bloomingdale’s. Suddenly in my sight there’s a young woman standing on a street grate. She is short, about 5 feet tall, and stocky, with a broad brown face. She is, I think, Latin American, maybe of Indian blood. She has a big pile of advertisements in her hand, and puts one toward me. “MENS SUITS NEW YORK—40% to 60% Off Sale!—Armani, Canali, Hugo Boss, DKNY, Zegna. TAILOR ON PREMISES. EXCELLENT SERVICE LARGE SELECTION.” Then the address and phone number.

You might have seen this person before. She’s one of a small army of advertisement giver-outers in New York. Which means her life right now consists of standing in whatever weather and trying to give passersby a thing most of them don’t want. If this is her regular job, she spends most of her time being rebuffed or ignored by busy people blurring by. You should always take an advertisement, or 10, from the advertisement giver-outers, just to give them a break, because once they give out all the ads, they can go back and get paid. So I took the ad and thanked her and walked on.

And then, half a block later, I turned around. I thought of a woman I’d met recently who had gone through various reverses in life and now had a new job, as a clerk in the back room of a store. She was happy to have it, a new beginning. But there was this thing: They didn’t want to pay for air conditioning, so she sweltered all day. This made her want to weep, just talking about it. Ever since that conversation, I have been so grateful for my air conditioning. I had forgotten long ago to be grateful for it.

Anyway, I look back at the woman on the street grate. It’s summer and she’s in heavy jeans and a black sweatshirt with a hood. On top of that, literally, she’s wearing a sandwich board—MENS SUITS NEW YORK. Her hair is long and heavy, her ponytail limp on her shoulders. She’s out here on a day when everybody else, as she well knows—the streets are not crowded—is at a ballgame or the beach. Everyone else is off.

So I turned around and went back. I wanted to say something—I don’t know what, find out where she was from, encourage her. I said hello, and she looked at me and I patted her arm and said, “Happy Fourth of July, my friend.” She was startled and then shy, and she smiled and made a sound, and I realized: She doesn’t speak English. “God bless you,” I said, because a little while in America and you know the word God just as 10 minutes in Mexico and you learn the word Dios. And we both smiled and nodded and I left.

I went into Bloomingdale’s and wrote these words: “We must speak the same language so we can hearten each other.”

*   *   *

The question of whether America should have an “official language,” of whether English should be formally declared our “national language,” is bubbling, and will be back, in Congress, the next few sessions.

When you look at papers outlining the facts of the debate, things break down into dryness very quickly. Should “issues of language diversity” be resolved by imposing “linguistic uniformity”? This is like asking if the robots should speak logarithmically or algorithmically. There are few things you can rely on in this turbulent world, but one is the tendency of academics to use language poorly, even when discussing language.

But there’s something odd about the English question. It feels old-fashioned. Because we all know America has an official language, and a national language, and that it is English. In France they speak French, and in China they speak Chinese. In Canada they have two national languages, but that’s one reason Canada often seems silly. They don’t even know what language they dream in.

The real question, ultimately, is whether America wants to go that route. Should we allow America devolve into a nation of two official languages—in this case, following recent demographic trends and realities, English and Spanish?

We’ve never done that in more than 200 years. It would be radical, and destructive, to do it now.

We speak English here. It’s a great language, luckily, a rich one. It’s how we do government and business. It’s the language of the official life, the outer life, in America. As for the inner life of America, the language of the family, it would be just as odd to change longtime tradition there, which has always been: Anything goes. You speak what you came over speaking, and you learn the new language. Italian immigrants knew two languages, English and Italian. They enriched the first with the second—this was a great gift to all of us—and wound up with greater opportunities for personal communication to boot. Talk about win-win. And so with every group, from every place.

But in a deeper sense, we should never consider devolving from one national language down into two, or three, because if we do we won’t understand each other. And we’re confused enough as it is.

In the future, with the terrible problems we face, we are going to need to understand each other more and more, better and better. We’re going to need to know how to say, “This way” and “Let me help” and “stop” and “here.” We’re going to have to negotiate our way through a lot of challenges, some dramatic, some immediate, and it will make it all the harder, all the more impossible-seeming, if we can’t even take each other’s meaning, and be understood.

*   *   *

The only other debate I suppose we should really be having on languages is how to help our future generations learn more of them. (Mexican immigrants who speak Spanish and English have a leg up here, and will benefit from it.) We live in the world, and we want that world to understand us better. We want to understand it better, too. Europe is lucky: All those different cultures and languages are bundled up all close to each other and next to each other. They learn each other’s languages with ease. We have oceans to the left and right, and vastness. For us, or at least the older of us, learning another language is still a leap. As a nation we probably should leap more.

But on English as the language in which we live our shared national life, and share our culture, and our dreams, we should stay where we are. Which hasn’t, for 231 years now and counting, been a bad place to be.

Happy Fourth of July. To mark this Wednesday’s holiday, I share a small moment that happened a year ago in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. I was at a wake for an old family friend named Anthony Coppola, a retired security guard who’d been my uncle Johnny’s best friend from childhood. All the old neighborhood people were there from Clinton Avenue and from other streets in Brooklyn, and Anthony’s sisters Tessie and Angie and Gloria invited a priest in to say some prayers. About a hundred of us sat in chairs in a little side chapel in the funeral home.

The priest, a jolly young man with a full face and thick black hair, said he was new in the parish, from South America. He made a humorous, offhand reference to the fact that he was talking to longtime Americans who’d been here for ages. This made the friends and family of Anthony Coppola look at each other and smile. We were Italian, Irish, everything else. Our parents had been the first Americans born here, or our grandparents had. We had all grown up with two things, a burly conviction that we were American and an inner knowledge that we were also something else. I think we experienced this as a plus, a double gift, though I don’t remember anyone saying that. When Anthony’s mother or her friend, my grandmother, talked about Italy or Ireland, they called it “the old country.” Which suggested there was a new one, and that we were new in it.

But this young priest, this new immigrant, he looked at us and thought we were from the Mayflower. As far as he was concerned—as far as he could tell—we were old Yankee stock. We were the establishment. As the pitcher in “Bang the Drum Slowly” says, “This handed me a laugh.”

This is the way it goes in America. You start as the Outsider and wind up the Insider, or at least being viewed as such by the newest Outsiders. We are a nation of still-startling social fluidity. Anyone can become “American,” but they have to want to first.

It has had me thinking a lot about how people become American.

*   *   *

I don’t know that when my grandfather Patrick Byrne and his sisters, Etta and Mary Jane, who had lived on a hardscrabble little farm in Donegal, on the west coast of Ireland, felt about America when they got here. I don’t know if they were “loyal to America.” I think they were loyal to their decision to come to America. In for a penny, in for a pound. They had made their decision. Now they had to prove to themselves it was the right one. I remember asking Etta what she’d heard about America before she got here. She said, “The streets were paved with gold.” All the immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th century used that phrase.

When I was in college in the 1970s, I got a semester abroad my junior year, and I took a boat from England to Ireland and made my way back to Donegal. This was approximately 55 years after my grandfather and his sisters had left. There I met an old man who’d been my grandfather’s boyhood friend. He lived by himself in a shack on a hill and was grateful the cousins I’d found had sent me to him. He told me he’d been there the day my grandfather, then a young man, left. He said the lorry came down the lane and stopped for my grandfather, and that his father said goodbye. He said, “Go now, and never come back to hungry Ireland again.”

My grandfather had his struggles here but never again went home. He’d cast his lot. That’s an important point in the immigrant experience, when you cast your lot, when you make your decision. It makes you let go of something. And it makes you hold on to something. The thing you hold on to is the new country. In succeeding generations of your family the holding on becomes a habit and then a patriotism, a love. You realize America is more than the place where the streets were paved with gold. It has history, meaning, tradition. Suddenly that’s what you treasure.

A problem with newer immigrants now is that for some it’s no longer necessary to make The Decision. They don’t always have to cast their lot. There are so many ways not to let go of the old country now, from choosing to believe that America is only about money, to technology that encourages you to stay in constant touch with the land you left, to TV stations that broadcast in the old language. If you’re an immigrant now, you don’t have to let go. Which means you don’t have to fully join, to enmesh. Your psychic investment in America doesn’t have to be full. It can be provisional, temporary. Or underdeveloped, or not developed at all.

And this may have implications down the road, and I suspect people whose families have been here a long time are concerned about it. It’s one of the reasons so many Americans want a pause, a stopping of the flow, a time for the new ones to settle down and settle in. It’s why they oppose the mischief of the Masters of the Universe, as they’re being called, in Washington, who make believe they cannot close our borders while they claim they can competently micromanage all other aspects of immigration.

*   *   *

It happens that I know how my grandfather’s sister Mary Jane became an American. She left a paper trail. She kept a common-place book, a sort of diary with clippings and mementos. She kept it throughout the 1920s, when she was still new here. I found it after she’d died. It’s a big brown book with cardboard covers and delicate pages. In the front, in the first half, there are newspaper clippings about events in Ireland, and sentimental poems. “I am going back to Glenties . . .”

But about halfway through, the content changes. There is a newspaper clipping about something called “Thanksgiving.” There are newspaper photos of parades down Fifth Avenue. And suddenly, near the end, there are patriotic poems. One had this refrain: “So it’s home again and home again, America for me./ My heart is turning home again, and there I long to be./ In the land of youth and freedom beyond the ocean bars/ Where the air is full of sunlight, and the flag is full of stars.”

Years later, when I worked for Ronald Reagan, those words found their way into one of his speeches, a nod from me to someone who’d made her decision, cast her lot, and changed my life.

I think I remember the last time I told that story. I think it was to a young Mexican-American woman who was a speechwriter for Bill Clinton. I think she completely understood.

God bless our beloved country on the 231st anniversary of its birth.

Hillary Clinton doesn’t have to prove she’s a man. She has to prove she’s a woman.

She doesn’t have to prove to people that she’s tough enough or aggressive enough to be commander in chief. She doesn’t have to show she could and would wage a war. She has to prove she has normal human warmth, a normal amount of give, of good nature, that she is not, at bottom, grimly combative and rather dark.

This is the woman credited with starting and naming the War Room. Her staff has nicknamed her “The Warrior.” Get in her way and she’d squish you like a bug. This has been her reputation for 20 years. And it is her big problem. People want a president to be strong but not hard.

A longtime supporter of Mrs. Clinton’s spoke with candor some months back of her friend’s predicament. “We’re back where we were in ‘92—likability. Nothing has changed.”

Back then, when the Clintons were newly famous, their consultants were alarmed to find the American people did not believe Hillary was a mother. They thought she was a person with breasts in a suit. She had a briefcase and a latte and was late for the meeting, but no way did she have a child.

So the Clintons began to include their daughter, Chelsea, then 12, in campaign appearances. Which helped.

Where is Chelsea now? She’s trying to parallel park.

*   *   *

The Sopranos video the Clintons made and released this week was smart and well done. It was witty and it was, quite literally, daring. It addressed yet again the likability problem, but from a new angle.

Mrs. Clinton’s most effective means of communication is not the debate stage, the sit-down interview or the podium, where her speeches are both tinny and hectoring. Her most effective area is in short campaign videos. You have seen them—Mrs. Clinton seated on a couch, with soft lighting. She is dressed in a soft pastel sweater or jacket, with a mellow strand of pearls, and flowers in the background. The videos are always artfully edited—she can do many takes—and that’s why they look so good.

In the short Soprano film, Mrs. Clinton was beautifully made up and quietly dressed in slacks and sweater like a handsome suburban lady waiting for her man at a booth in a diner. He looked great too. Of all modern presidents, Bill Clinton was most made for the camera. And he can really act. He actually looked disappointed at being served carrots and not onion rings.

The film jokingly acknowledges what the Clintons well know: that a certain portion of the voting population sees them as . . . well, as gangsterish. As dark, and dishonest to a degree more extreme than is usual even in political figures. By putting these perceptions so colorfully on the table, they make fun of them. And they invite their foes to go too far, at just the right moment, a year before the 2008 presidential race really begins. This is a good time for the Clinton campaign to face the charge that they’re Tony and Carmella. In a year such comments will be old hat, “a rehash,” or, as one of her campaign aides said when asked for reaction on the recent Hillary biographies—it was the best staff line of the year—“Is it possible for you to quote me yawning?”

So, the Sopranos spoof wasn’t bringing up That Which Must Not Be Said. It was saying it and getting rid of it. (A piquant aspect: The bad guy in the video who eyeballs Mrs. Clinton really “is” a mobster, the actor who played Johnny Sack in “The Sopranos.” The Clintons’ enemies are the real gangsters!)

As an added benefit, the spoof probably got some people actually paying attention, if only for a second, to the fact that Mrs. Clinton has chosen a campaign theme song. To hear it you must go to her site.

Why would Hillary pick a song distinguished only by its schmaltzy averageness? Because she thinks it’s the kind of music a likable, feminine middle class woman would like? Because her consultants researched the exact number and nature of fans who go to Celine Dion’s show in Vegas each years, and determined they are the exact middle of America? Because it focus-grouped well? All of the above?

*   *   *

As for her attempts to appeal to centrists, two items deserve note. One is that Mrs. Clinton has taken, on the stump, to referring to herself as “born . . . in the middle of America in the middle of the century.” This is interesting because it’s word for word what George H.W. Bush said in 1988 when he introduced his choice of Dan Quayle. She has also taken to referring to herself as famous but unknown, which is exactly what was said of Vice President Bush the same year. Mrs. Clinton seems to have been studying 1988, which was the last time anyone won the presidency in a landslide.

But there is another side of the Clinton campaign, and I found some of it this week. It is a new Web site called HillaryIs44.com. It is rather mysterious. It does not divulge who is running the site, or who staffs it. It is not interactive; it has one informative voice, and its target audience seems to be journalists and free-lance oppo artists.

And it reads like The Warrior’s Id. Hillary “took on” a journalist this week and “beat him into submission.” Bloomberg has “stripped himself of allies” in “New York’s cutthroat politics.” “Expect stormy days ahead for Bloomberg,” who will wind up “lonely.” Republicans “will attempt to rip him to shreds.” “A May surprise announcement will be met with mounds of research accumulated over the next 11 months.”

In tone the site is very Tokyo Rose.

Encouraging readers to send in “confidential tips,” its primary target and obvious obsession is Barack Obama. “Senator Barack Obama (D-Rezko) is busy lately lying about President Bill Clinton” and “attacking entire communities.” “We have written extensively on Obama, and his indicted slumlord friend Antoin ‘Tony’ Rezko. We have repeatedly warned David Axelrod, Michelle Obama and Barack Obama that this story is not going away.” The Obama campaign is “still posing as innocents incapable of doing anything unsavory even as evidence mounts that unsavory is their favorite dish.” “Dirty Obama Smear” and “Obama’s Dirty Mud Politics” are two recent headlines.

This appears to be the subterranean part of Hillary’s campaign, the part that quietly coexists with the warm, chuckling lady playing the jukebox with her husband. It coexists with the Maya Angelou part, the listening tour part, the filmed parts.

It is the war room part. I suspect the site is a back door to that war room.

*   *   *

Politics ain’t beanbag. It is not, generally, an ennobling profession.

But if Mrs. Clinton’s aides want to understand better her likability problem, they should look at this site. It’s dark in there.

Go deeper.

That’s what I keep thinking as Americans fight the Washington establishment (the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, their big contributors) on immigration. Go deeper. Look at the real emotions driving the struggle as opposed to what politicians and the media claim are “the high emotions surrounding this issue.”

You know what I think is the American mood right now on immigration? Anti-immigration and for the immigrant. Against the abstract and for the particular.

We’re against gushing borders and illegal immigration, which is at this point even souring the general mood on legal immigration, because we don’t trust our bureaucrats to let in the people America needs. We don’t trust our bureaucrats and leaders to care a lot about America. (We assume that when senators are together, if someone says, “But what about America?” everyone laughs, and then the top senator says, dryly, “Your concern is duly noted. Next.”)

But that’s the abstract, “immigration.” In the particular—the immigrants we see and work with and know—we’re for them.

We’re asking for closed borders and pulling for newcomers.

And this isn’t ambivalence, and it isn’t confusion. It’s common sense plus humanity.

The White House is exploiting American alarm at uncontrolled borders to get its way. This of course has added to the sense of national alarm. They believe the alarm works for them: If you don’t pass our bill we’ll never control your borders—yes, “your”—and you’ll suffer! In the general air of agitation, anger festers. People feel powerless. Rage follows, and in this case I believe deep fissures will follow that.

What gets lost in the alarm, and will get lost in the fissures, is the old affection the whole country felt, and still feels, for its newcomers. Not shallow sentiment or softness but something more constitutional, more civic.

As in: I’m in Mass, or in the deli down the street, or the bathroom of a restaurant, and I see a Hispanic woman, obviously hardworking, obviously so far not lucky, not yet. This is what I think: Hi, Grandma. My grandmother was a bathroom attendant on the fifth floor of the A&S department store in downtown Brooklyn. She was an immigrant from Ireland.

When I see new Americans, I think I’m seeing her. And I am not alone. And I know what we feel, and it is not antagonism. It is some kind of old civic love, some kind of connection that echoes back, that doesn’t quite have a name but is part of who we are.

*   *   *

In New York last weekend we had the Puerto Rican Day Parade. I walked from midtown to uptown in the throngs. Babies, strollers, mommies, people dressed in red, white and blue. Puerto Ricans are citizens of the United States, but some of the people around me were new arrivals. On 86th Street, at the end of the parade, I saw a teenage girl in a silver-white gown. She’d just gotten off a float and was sitting on the curb. She looked like a Miss Universe contestant—brown skin, big eyes, beautiful. She looked like she wants to be Jennifer Lopez. This is a very American thing to want to be. Near her there was another girl in a gown. She was shorter, thicker, and had a tattoo on her arm of the American flag. I thought: She’ll be a Marine some day.

Some things were not good, not at all. A young man hurled an obscene epithet. He was that angry I wasn’t Latin, and he felt I should know. Another young man deliberately frightened a shopkeeper on Madison Avenue. When he walked by the store, he put out his arm as if he had a gun in his hand, aiming it at her. I was behind him. I looked at the woman as she flinched, and our eyes locked: This is bad.

We’re going to have to work on that young man, on both of them.

But we always have to work on young men, don’t we?

*   *   *

Lately in the immigration debate we have been discussing and debating statistics on such things as family breakdown, education levels, and criminality among Hispanic newcomers. This reminds me of a number of things, some of them perhaps to this day delicate. One is that among the immigrant Irish of the late 19th and early 20th centuries there were fairly high levels of dysfunction, family neglect, alcoholism. As for criminality, they didn’t call it the paddy wagon for nothing. My tribe was an obstreperous one. Many tribes are, at least the interesting ones. People are human and human is messy.

Another thought is that statistical breakdowns on our ethnic groups, Bell Curves and Reports on Out of Wedlock Birthrates, are not in themselves necessarily wrong, but there’s something rather rude about them. That is perhaps a sissy thing to say, but what I mean is this: If you have a mother and a father with a big family of kids it would be rude—and unhelpful, and not conducive to promoting peace—for the grown-ups to sit around the table at night and say to their children, “Joey, you’re the smart one,” and “Elizabeth is dumber and yet dogged,” and “Bobby here is our promiscuous one.” How exactly would that help? It’s not even “realistic”: Today’s reality can change. An academic might say, “I’m not their father.” Fair enough, but you’re a grown-up, and if you’re a grown-up, you’re in charge of America right now.

*   *   *

A little love would go a long way right now. We should stop putting newcomers in constant jeopardy by blithely importing ever-newer immigrants who’ll work for ever lower wages. The ones here will never get a sure foot on the next rung that way.

We should close the border, pause, absorb what we have, and set ourselves to “patriating” the newcomers who are here. The young of AmeriCorps might help teach them English. Those reaching retirement age, who happen to be the last people in America who were taught and know American history, could help them learn the story of our country. We could, as a nation, set our minds to this.

We shouldn’t be disheartened. So much good could be done once a Great Pause begins, once the alarm is abated.

What will we do about the 12 million here? Nothing radical. We’re not really a radical people, Americans.

Having no borders—that’s radical.

Saying, to the American people, in essence, Back my big bill or I will not close the borders, is radical.

Insisting on “all or nothing at all” is radical.

Leaving your country wide open in the age of terror is radical.

But America isn’t radical. If its leaders only knew! Our leaders are in need not only of wisdom but of faith. And, as always, love, as opposed to mere sentiment, and vanity, and pride.

“The Sopranos” wasn’t only a great show or even a classic. It was a masterpiece, and its end Sunday night is an epochal event. With it goes an era, a time.

You know the story, and if you don’t, you’ve absorbed enough along the way as you overheard people chat Monday morning around what we still call the water cooler and mean as the line at Starbucks. A New Jersey mobster with a family, a business and a therapist makes his way through life. It was a family drama that was a mob drama, but in some hard-to-put-your-finger-on way it was the great post-9/11 drama of our time.

“The Sopranos” first aired on HBO in 1999, but rewatching the first season, there’s an air of preamble to it, as if something were coming. Something was, and the show really got its shape and mood from what followed in September 2001. Sometimes this was subtle—Tony goes to his old uncle’s place upstate and suddenly thinks about going to live up there where it’s safe, where the birds fly on the lake. Sometimes it wasn’t—in the bar, he reads from a newspaper story about how unprotected the Port of Newark is. I remember this because at the time I’d begun to worry about the Port of Newark.

That kind of thing happened a lot with “The Sopranos.” It was real, Old Jersey real (Satriale’s butcher shop, not the mall) and primal. It was about big things, as all great drama is—the human hunger for dominance, for safety, for love; the desire to rise in the world; the need to belong to something, to be a Jet or a Shark, a Crip or a Blood, and have mates, homies, esteemed colleagues or paisans; how we process the hypocrisy all around us, in our families and among our friends, as we grow up; how we process hypocrisy in ourselves.

Because it was primal, its dialogue was pared to the bone and entered the language. You disrespecting the Bing? You wanna get whacked? And other famous phrases, many of them obscene.

*   *   *

The drama of Tony, the great post-9/11 drama of him, is that he is trying to hold on in a world he thinks is breaking to pieces. He has a sense, even though he’s only in his 40s, that the best times have passed, not only for the Italian mob but for everyone, for the country—that he’d missed out on something, and that even though he lives in a mansion, even though he is rich and comfortable and always has food in the refrigerator and Carm can go to Paris and the kids go to private school—for all of that, he fears he’s part of some long downhill slide, a slide that he can’t stop, that no one can, that no one will. Out there, he told his son and daughter, it is the year 2000, but in here it’s 1950. His bluster, his desperate desire to re-create order with the rough tools of his disordered heart and brain, are comic, poignant, ridiculous, human.

Tony became a new and instantly recognizable icon, and his character adds to American myth, to America’s understanding of itself. It’s a big thing to create such a character, and not only one but a whole family of them—Uncle Junior, Christopher, Carmella. This is David Chase’s great achievement, to have created characters that are instantly recognizable, utterly original, and that add to America’s understanding of itself. And to have created, too, some of the most horrifying moments in all of television history, and one that I think is a contender for Most Horrifying Moment Ever. That would be Adriana desperately crawling—crawling!—through the leaves in the woods as she tries to flee her lovable old friend Silvio, who is about to brutally put her down.

*   *   *

Here is a question that touches on the mystery of creativity, and I’ll probably put it badly because I can’t define it better than what I’m going to say. David Chase is the famous and justly celebrated creator of “The Sopranos,” the shaper of its stories. The psychological, spiritual and emotional energy needed to create a whole world, which is what he has done, is very great. It is a real expenditure, a kind of investment in life, a giving of yourself. You can’t do what he does without something like love. Not sentimentality or softness or sweetness, but love. And yet in a way, if you go by “The Sopranos,” Mr. Chase loves nothing. Human beings are appetite machines, and each day is devoted to meeting and appeasing those appetites. No one is good, there are no heroes, he sees through it all. The mental-health facility is a shakedown operation where they medicate your child into zombiehood and tell him to watch TV. Politicians are the real whores. The FBI is populated by smug careerists. In the penultimate show, a table full of psychotherapists top each other with erudite-seeming comments that show a ruthlessness as great as any gangster’s. I guess I’m asking where the energy for creativity comes when you see with such cold eyes.

Not that they’re unrealistic. They’re not. One of the reasons the show was so popular—one of the reasons it resonated—is that it captured a widespread feeling that our institutions are failing, all of them, the church, the media, the law, the government, that there’s no one to trust, that Mighty Mouse will not save the day.

In Mr. Chase’s world, everyone’s a gangster as long as he can find a gang. Those who don’t are freelancers.

And what he seems to be telling us, as the final season ends, is that all your pity for Tony, all your regard for the fact that he too is caught, all your sympathy for him as a father, as a man trying to be a man, as a man whose mother literally tried to have him killed, is a mistake. Because he is a bad man. He has passing discomfort but not conscience, he has passing sympathies but no compassion. When he kills the character who is, essentially, his son, Christopher, he does it spontaneously, coolly, and with no passion. It’s all pragmatism. He’s all appetite. Tony is a stone cold gangster.

*   *   *

There have been shows on television that have been, simply, sublime. In drama there was “I Claudius,” a masterpiece of mood and menace—“Trust no one!”— from which writers and producers continue to steal (see HBO’s “Rome.”) And PBS’s “Upstairs Downstairs.” A few others. “The Sopranos” is their equal, but also their superior: It is hard to capture the past, but harder to capture the present, because everyone knows when you don’t get it right. It takes guts to do today.

David Chase did, and he made a masterpiece. I’ll be watching Sunday night, but I’ll wake up that morning with a blue moon in my eyes.