Peggy Noonan

There are two predominant journalistic memes since the Arab spring began. The first, from the left: What if Bush was right? This was most famously and appropriately grappled with on Comedy Central, when Democratic foreign-policy thinker Nancy Soderberg consoled Jon Stewart with the hopefully facetious, but either way revealing, advice to hang on, things can still turn bad with North Korea or Iran. The other, from the middle and the right: As I wrote in this space two years ago, the invasion of Iraq will likely give rise to a surge of democratic feeling that will inspire the entire Mideast. This is known as making it clear to one’s fans and foes that you were on the right side of history.

It’s also known as bragging. But so what? All who supported the Iraqi invasion took lumps for it; all who defended it in what seemed its dark days, and argued for its potential to transform the air of defeat that lingered over Arab politics, deserve the right to say, “I was right.” So go here and here for a sampling of what things looked like to me back then.

I continue to think the president’s inaugural address, suggesting as it did that he was on a mission to expunge all political tyranny from the globe, and asserting that our nation’s survival depended on this utopian project, was a rather crazy speech, weirdly Wilsonian and at odds with conservatism’s ancestral knowledge of the imperfectability of this world and the inability of politics to heal all that wounds us. (Take it away, FreeRepublic.) Samuel Johnson was a genius of literature, but he knew his politics: “How small of all that human hearts endure / That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!”

But some things can be healed, and precisely because the endeavor is not utopian but practical. The Iraq project was not utopian: it was a high-risk gut call, a gamble that was also an investment, and it was motivated in part by a belief that progress is possible when right action is boldly taken. By continuing a laser-like focus on the area in which so much of our nation’s energies had been so deeply invested, by staying the course, by sticking to his timetable for elections, President Bush, with his grit, has produced an outcome that is deeply impressive, moving, and cause for world-wide joy.

No one knows what comes next. No one knows what Hezbollah will do, no one knows what will emerge from what is still a cauldron. But no one can say that a new hopefulness has not been infused, and infused by America.

*   *   *

Which leaves the world right now in an interesting place. For America a moment of unaccustomed satisfaction; for the West a moment of unaccustomed admiration for the American president; for the world’s left a moment of unaccustomed doubt; and for many, of all persuasions, a sense of wonderment.

For America, the international plan would be keep on keeping on. Keep solidifying and undergirding the progress in Iraq and Afghanistan, encourage events in Lebanon, Syria and Israel.

But domestically, it’s high time for a pivot.

The drama of the past 3 1/2 years has left us persistently looking outward. America’s thinkers look at Europe and wondering if they appreciate or even understand our leadership. They look at the Mideast and wonder if the rise of people power promises improved stability or signals the possibility of some newer kinds of chaos.

Our outward-looking stance is understandable. 9/11 tripped a series of events. We were attacked from without. And then we were at war. But 9/11 also presented us with a pressing domestic challenge: civil defense. Keeping people alive, or as safe as possible, or with options with which they’re familiar, in case of attack. Not enough is being done in this area, not enough attention is being paid, not enough support is being marshaled, not enough emphasis put.

And who can say the day will not come when we bitterly rue our dreamy lack of preparation? We live in the age of weapons of mass destruction. We live in an age of freelance actors and nuts with nukes. We all know this. We know the word “nuclear” is followed by the phrase “or chemical or biological weapons.” Because of these weapons, as again we all know, we could lose a million people in some American city tomorrow. More than taxes, more than Social Security, more than the financial arrangements by which we live, civil defense is the great domestic issue.

*   *   *

Man has never devised a weapon he hasn’t eventually used. When you live in the age of WMDs you have to assume they’ll eventually be used. And if you assume that, then you have to take steps to keep people as safe as possible as long as possible, and you have to be thinking about how to help them if the next big bad thing happens. Right now, a wise man recently complained, we’re essentially waiting to be attacked. Waiting does not seem prudent.

I am not saying nothing is being done. We are searching out the wicked in foreign lands; we are attempting to break terror cells; we are attempting to get imprisoned terrorists to talk. We have a Homeland Security Department but it is in a continual gearing-up stage, as new bureaucracies, as bureaucracies in general, tend to be.

But we are not doing enough. And I know this because no one is talking about it. Not our political class in Washington, not our local leaders and not, God knows, the media. They should have been all over this issue in the ‘90s, and were not. They should have been all over Osama and were not.

As citizens I think we should ask questions every day. What is the status of vaccine production? Most of our children have never been vaccinated against smallpox. But we know smallpox is one biological weapon that terrorists may use against us.

Is the average U.S. citizen less defended from cataclysm than senators and representatives? They have shelters in the Capitol, and they have gas masks too. Why don’t we? Do people on Capitol Hill have access to medicines and serums that might be needed in a terror event? If not, why not; and if so, why not the rest of us? Do Senators and Congressmen have CBN suits? Again, if not, why not; and if so, why not us?

To this day I don’t think there is a politician in America willing to sound the gong consistently on civil defense, because to build up support for toughening our civil defense you have to tell people the facts, again and again. Politicians don’t want to sound like fear mongers. They don’t want to look eccentric or obsessed. And they don’t want to be tuned out. I think the general feeling among political leaders on civil defense is they’re afraid America will look at them and say, “You are ruining my high. You are so bringing me down.” No one wants to hear again and again that you’re a target. But we are a target.

*   *   *

Let me tell you what I’m seeing in my beloved New York. We are building. You can’t go by a big street and not see the scaffolding and cranes. We are rebuilding downtown where the towers were. We are building a memorial 1,776 feet high. We are rebuilding the Brooklyn waterfront, that beautiful waterfront where I walk each day. They’re planning on putting in parks. We’re building stadiums. We’re rocking. Building is good. But we’re not doing it with enough of an eye to the next big bad thing. And this is a city that knows something about big bad things.

We are doing all this building at the same time that various insane and quite evil men are planning on doing away with our city. They won’t be happy until those skyscrapers are cinders. And when and if they move, the children playing so happily in our brand new Brooklyn waterfront park are going to get hurt. So maybe we could throw in a fallout shelter? Maybe we could be throwing in a few small health clinics, well stocked for a bad day?

But we’re not. That would be a downer too. I think New York and other American cities are on such a building-and-beautifying binge not only because politicians like to take money and build things you can see, and not only because the local economy is growing. I think in New York we build and plan and draw up new parks and new skyscrapers because it makes us feel safe. As if “If you build it, they won’t come.” And it makes us feel brave, insouciant. “We must be a hardy people, or we wouldn’t be building new sports stadiums.” But it’s one thing to be optimistic and burly, it’s another thing to be fooling yourself.

Nothing is bigger than civil defense. At the beginning of an actual and metaphoric spring it is something we should turn to with renewed commitment. We’ll regret it if we don’t.

“Salivating morons.” “Scalp hunters.” “Moon howlers.” “Trophy hunters.” “Sons of Sen. McCarthy.” “Rabid.” “Blogswarm.” “These pseudo-journalist lynch mob people.”

This is excellent invective. It must come from bloggers. But wait, it was the mainstream media and their maidservants in the elite journalism reviews, and they were talking about bloggers!

Those MSMers have gone wild, I tell you! The tendentious language, the low insults. It’s the Wild Wild West out there. We may have to consider legislation.

When you hear name-calling like what we’ve been hearing from the elite media this week, you know someone must be doing something right. The hysterical edge makes you wonder if writers for newspapers and magazines and professors in J-schools don’t have a serious case of freedom envy.

The bloggers have that freedom. They have the still pent-up energy of a liberated citizenry, too. The MSM doesn’t. It has lost its old monopoly on information. It is angry.

But MSM criticism of the blogosphere misses the point, or rather points.

Blogging changes how business is done in American journalism. The MSM isn’t over. It just can no longer pose as if it is The Guardian of Established Truth. The MSM is just another player now. A big one, but a player.

The blogosphere isn’t some mindless eruption of wild opinion. That isn’t their power. This is their power:

1. They use the tools of journalists (computer, keyboard, a spirit of inquiry, a willingness to ask the question) and of the Internet (Google, LexisNexis) to look for and find facts that have been overlooked, ignored or hidden. They look for the telling quote, the ignored statistic, the data that have been submerged. What they are looking for is information that is true. When they get it they post it and include it in the debate. This is a public service.

2. Bloggers, unlike reporters at elite newspapers and magazines, are independent operators. They are not, and do not have to be, governed by mainstream thinking. Nor do they have to accept the directives of an editor pushing an ideology or a publisher protecting his friends. Bloggers have the freedom to decide on their own when a story stops being a story. They get to decide when the search for facts is over. They also decide on their own when the search for facts begins. It was a blogger at the World Economic Forum, as we all know, who first reported the Eason Jordan story. It was bloggers, as we all know, who pursued it. Matt Drudge runs a news site and is not a blogger, but what was true of him at his beginning (the Monica Lewinsky story, he decided, is a story) is true of bloggers: It’s a story if they say it is. This is a public service.

3. Bloggers have an institutional advantage in terms of technology and form. They can post immediately. The items they post can be as long or short as they judge to be necessary. Breaking news can be one sentence long: “Malkin gets Barney Frank earwitness report.” In newspapers you have to go to the editor, explain to him why the paper should have another piece on the Eason Jordan affair, spend a day reporting it, only to find that all that’s new today is that reporter Michelle Malkin got an interview with Barney Frank. That’s not enough to merit 10 inches of newspaper space, so the Times doesn’t carry what the blogosphere had 24 hours ago. In the old days a lot of interesting information fell off the editing desk in this way. Now it doesn’t. This is a public service.

4. Bloggers are also selling the smartest take on a story. They’re selling an original insight, a new area of inquiry. Mickey Kaus of Kausfiles has his bright take, Andrew Sullivan had his, InstaPundit has his. They’re all selling their shrewdness, experience, depth. This too is a public service.

5. And they’re doing it free. That is, the Times costs me a dollar and so does the Journal, but Kausfiles doesn’t cost a dime. This too is a public service. Some blogs get their money from yearly fund-raising, some from advertisers, some from a combination, some from a salary provided by Slate or National Review. Most are labors of love. Some bloggers–a lot, I think–are addicted to digging, posting, coming up with the bright phrase. OK with me. Some get burned out. But new ones are always coming up, so many that I can’t keep track of them and neither can anyone else.

But when I read blogs, when I wake up in the morning and go to About Last Night and Lucianne and Lileks, I remember what the late great Christopher Reeve said on “The Tonight Show” 20 years ago. He was the second guest, after Rodney Dangerfield. Dangerfield did his act and he was hot as a pistol. Then after Reeve sat down Dangerfield continued to be riotous. Reeve looked at him, gestured toward him, looked at the audience and said with grace and delight, “Do you believe this is free?” The audience cheered. That’s how I feel on their best days when I read blogs.

That you get it free doesn’t mean commerce isn’t involved, for it is. It is intellectual commerce. Bloggers give you information and point of view. In return you give them your attention and intellectual energy. They gain influence by drawing your eyes; you gain information by lending your eyes. They become well-known and influential; you become entertained or informed. They get something from it and so do you.

6. It is not true that there are no controls. It is not true that the blogosphere is the Wild West. What governs members of the blogosphere is what governs to some degree members of the MSM, and that is the desire for status and respect. In the blogosphere you lose both if you put forward as fact information that is incorrect, specious or cooked. You lose status and respect if your take on a story that is patently stupid. You lose status and respect if you are unprofessional or deliberately misleading. And once you’ve lost a sufficient amount of status and respect, none of the other bloggers link to you anymore or raise your name in their arguments. And you’re over. The great correcting mechanism for people on the Web is people on the Web.

There are blogs that carry political and ideological agendas. But everyone is on to them and it’s mostly not obnoxious because their agendas are mostly declared.

7. I don’t know if the blogosphere is rougher in the ferocity of its personal attacks than, say, Drew Pearson. Or the rough boys and girls of the great American editorial pages of the 1930s and ’40s. Bloggers are certainly not as rough as the splenetic pamphleteers of the 18th and 19th centuries, who amused themselves accusing Thomas Jefferson of sexual perfidy and Andrew Jackson of having married a whore. I don’t know how Walter Lippmann or Scotty Reston would have seen the blogosphere; it might have frightened them if they’d lived to see it. They might have been impressed by the sheer digging that goes on there. I have seen friends savaged by blogs and winced for them–but, well, too bad. I’ve been attacked. Too bad. If you can’t take it, you shouldn’t be thinking aloud for a living. The blogosphere is tough. But are personal attacks worth it if what we get in return is a whole new media form that can add to the true-information flow while correcting the biases and lapses of the mainstream media? Yes. Of course.

I conclude with a few predictions.

Some brilliant rising young reporter with a growing reputation at the Times or Newsweek or Post is going to quit, go into the blogging business, start The Daily Joe, get someone to give him a guaranteed ad for two years, and become a journalistic force. His motive will be influence, and the use of his gifts along the lines of excellence. His blog will further legitimize blogging.

Most of the blogstorms of the past few years have resulted in outcomes that left and right admit or bray were legitimate. Dan Rather fell because his big story was based on a fabrication, Trent Lott said things that it could be proved he said. But coming down the pike is a blogstorm in which the bloggers turn out to be wrong. Good news: They’ll probably be caught and exposed by bloggers. Bad news: It will show that blogging isn’t nirvana, and its stars aren’t foolproof. But then we already know that, don’t we?

Some publisher is going to decide that if you can’t fight blogs, you can join them. He’ll think like this: We’re already on the Internet. That’s how bloggers get and review our reporting. Why don’t we get our own bloggers to challenge our work? Why don’t we invite bloggers who already exist into the tent? Why not take the best things said on blogs each day and print them on a Daily Blog page? We’d be enhancing our rep as an honest news organization, and it will further our branding!

Someone is going to address the “bloggers are untrained journalists” question by looking at exactly what “training,” what education in the art/science/craft/profression of journalism, the reporters and editors of the MSM have had in the past 60 years or so. It has seemed to me the best of them never went to J-school but bumped into journalism along the way–walked into a radio station or newspaper one day and found their calling. Bloggers signify a welcome return to that old style. In journalism you learn by doing, which is what a lot of bloggers are doing.

Finally, someday in America the next big bad thing is going to happen, and lines are going to go down, and darkness is going to descend, and the instant communication we now enjoy is going to be compromised. People in one part of the country are going to wonder how people in another part are doing. Little by little lines are going to come up, and people are going to log on, and they’re going to get the best, most comprehensive, and ultimately, just because it’s there, most heartening information from . . . some lone blogger out there. And then another. They’re going to do some big work down the road.

I have been thinking about John Paul II. Everyone has, I suppose. The pope yesterday missed Ash Wednesday services at the Vatican. This after a recent hospitalization.

Ash Wednesday reminds Catholics that we will leave this world some day, that from dust we came and to dust we will return. We are asked to renew our spiritual lives, to give up some small pleasure and give that sacrifice to God, at least until the spring, and Easter.

The pope’s long physical decline is part of a long goodbye that carries within it meaning. I want to talk at some length about how some see that meaning, and about how I saw John Paul 18 months ago.

*   *   *

After seeing him I thought: I saw a saint at sunset. It was actually early morning, 7:30 a.m. according to my notes, on July 2, 2003. A brilliant morning in the middle of the worst Roman heat wave in a century. The city was quiet, the streets soft with the heat.
Hundreds of us had gathered in the Piazza Del Suffizo, in the shadow of Bernini’s colonnade, the marble columns that curve outward around St. Peter’s Square. The breeze was warm, the pounding heat gathering, and we fanned ourselves with thin green Papal Audience tickets. The crowd was happy—chirping nuns, clicking tourists.

We were about to see the pope at his weekly audience. Among us: A group of deaf Italian adults in white baseball caps, with silk Vatican flags—green, gold and white—tied around their necks. Members of a choir from the Archdiocese of St Louis. A group of nuns from the Little Mission for the Deaf in Bologna, Italy. There was a man from Monterrey, Mexico, with his wife and two children. As the crowd grew we were pressed close, and began talking as if we knew each other.

“Why are you here?” I asked.

“To see the pope,” said the man from Monterrey. “He is the most important Christian in the world. He is the follower of Christ.” When minutes later I read the quote back to him from my notebook he edited it. “He is the most important person in the whole world.”

I talked to a woman with a hat made of hay. Spiky yellow straw actually, the brim down to shade her face. She was wearing a big white clamshell suspended from a necklace. She was 45 or 50 and looked like pictures of the older, weathered Greta Garbo. She told me she was on a pilgrimage. She had walked hundreds of miles in a tour of Marian sites. She and her husband—bearish, gray-bearded—had departed upper Austria in May, and had arrived the preceding day, July 1. They had walked on highways and small roads. She showed me her diary of the pilgrimage; in neat, clear script she had documented every church they had seen along the way. Her husband had drawn pictures of cathedrals in blue ballpoint ink. He had taken snapshots of little chapels and pasted them in the diary. “Here,” she said to me. She pointed to a page on which she had drawn her feet after six weeks of walking. They are comic line drawings of angular feet bruised by exaggerated calluses. Next to them she drew the lotions and bandages she had put upon the wounds. They had gone to mass every day of their journey, she said. And why had they come here?

“Why? To see il Papa!” She gestured as if to say: This is the culmination.

*   *   *

We filed through metal detectors that did not seem to work—no beeping or bopping, no one watching things closely—and were directed through a paved area just off St Peter’s square. (Later, when I would return to it, a young priest would tell me, “We think he may have been crucified just under here.” I shook my head. “St. Peter. It may have been just about here, down there.” And he pointed at the pavement.)

We entered the Paul VI Audience Hall, an enormous concrete structure, cavernous and modern, like a big suburban evangelical church. Rows of fixed seats were pointed toward the stage. People were filing in single file and in groups, hundreds of them, then thousands. I walked among them and heard the language of France, England, Mexico, Austria, the Czech Republic. There were groups from West Africa, Germany, Poland, Scotland, Portugal and Brazil. A Romanian chorus of middle-aged women began to sing softly in their seats. When they finished, a choir from Bialystok, Poland, 30 young women and men, began to sing lustily.

Suddenly there was a rustling up front. Dozens of African women danced in, laughing and clapping in floor-length white cotton dresses. On the hems were sewn the words “Archdiocese of Freetown,” Sierra Leone. They sat next to Catholic school children from Rwanda, who were clapping and shaking tambourines.

I thought: The whole church is here.

The room rocked. Cheering here, drums there, an American spiritual crooned somewhere in the back. The choruses would pick up each other’s sound, so that a group from Santo Domingo would sing, and as they finished a young male choir from Poland, in white tie and tails, would take up the song, and then as they finished a group of American Indians—in native dress and full headdresses they looked like beautiful peacocks—would break into native drums. I thought the disparate but unified members of the audience, as they echoed and supported each other, were like a living symbol of the church every day in the world.

Something came alive on the stage. Two Swiss guards in their purple-and-orange uniforms, big red plumes on their black helmets, entered the stage and stood erect in the middle, with metal staffs. The audience began to applaud.

Then a flurry of cardinals and bishops in black, with red and purple sashes. Then two papal chamberlains in white tie and tails.

*   *   *

We looked to the left of the stage. There was movement.

It was him, the pope—20 minutes early. The woman next to me, a regular audience-goer, laughed. “When he’s ready, he’s ready these days,” she yelled to me over the noise.

The pope was rolled onto the stage. He was seated in a brown wooden chair that rested within some kind of wooden rig on little wheels. They pushed him forward slowly. It was like a wheel-throne; it was like the kind of big wooden roller they use to get something off the top shelf at Home Depot. It looked both practical and absurd.

He was dressed all in white, bent forward in his chair. White surplice, white beanie, white gold-fringed sash. As the wheel-throne reached the center of the stage a scrum of aides and cardinals surrounded his chair. They helped him to his feet, helped him gain balance, helped transfer him to a white upholstered high-backed chair. Then they turned it toward the audience.

He looked out at us. We looked back at him. His face was—oh, his face!

I thought of the little girl on John Paul’s last trip to Canada, two years before. She was a child, 6 or so, and she had it in her head that the pope was the best person in the world. So her parents brought her to a big outdoor mass, and she was chosen to give him flowers. She walked up to him with her little bouquet and held it toward him. He leaned his upper body toward her in his chair. Then she turned and ran sobbing from the stage with what seemed like panic. Because he was old and his head was big and his neck and back were curled and the effort to lift his head so you can see his face draws his features down, and the Parkinsonian mask that freezes his face makes him look angry, or ill-meaning, or sad. So the poor girl ran.

*   *   *

Now the crowd took to its feet and the applause was continuous. But it was muted somehow, not full of joy as the crowd had been before the audience had begun.
His cassock was too short—six inches off the floor. We could see his white cotton sport socks. We could see his worn brown shoes. This is a pontiff who wears old loafers, like a working man, like a regular man, and not the traditional silk slippers of a pope.

“We love you, Papa!” someone called out. “We love you, Holy Father.”

He lifted his head with effort. We took our seats. Suddenly I realized the purpose of a Vatican announcement that had been issued the week before, when I had just arrived in Rome. The Holy Father, the press office said, would not go hiking in the hills this summer as he had in the past, but instead would work through his vacation writing a memoir of his early years. Rome buzzed; how amazing that the old man would produce a book on his time off. What they didn’t notice, what had been cleverly obscured by the announcement, is that the pope’s legs don’t work anymore. Of course he isn’t hiking.

When I mentioned this later to a priest in Rome, he laughed. He told me John Paul has grown sensitive about speculation regarding his illnesses, and had recently groused, half comically, to an American cardinal, “Tell those American journalists the pope doesn’t run the church with his feet.”

*   *   *

The pope read to us from remarks typed on white letter-size paper. His voice was blurry and thick. The papers trembled in his hand. He spoke in Italian. The thin-necked microphone was sensitive; we could hear him breathe between the sentences.

People in the audience became distracted. Then the pope spoke in Polish and his voice became stronger, and even though most of the people in the audience didn’t understand what he was saying they quieted, and leaned forward.

He had a bad tremor in his left arm. During the translation he leaned his head and rested his chin on his left hand, in an attempt to control the tremor.

Then the pope cleared his throat and spoke in English. But the only words I could make out were, “the spirit of the Beatitudes.” Later I read the Associated Press report of the pope’s message. He had spoken of Psalm 145, which he called “a song of praise for the morning.” It ends, he said, “in a proclamation of the sovereignty of God over human history.” It reminds us, he said, that “the Lord shall reign forever.”

Schoolchildren from Santo Domingo cheered the old chant: Juan Pablo, Segundo, el padre de el mundo.

He raised his right hand to acknowledge the chants. The playfulness of the past—the way he used to wave with both hands, up and down, and say “Woo woo!” to the children who cheered him in New York and Chicago so long ago—is not possible to him any more.

And yet as I watched him I realized I did not see him as ill and frail. I saw him as encased—trapped in there, in an outer immobility. And yet inside he is still John Paul.

I thought: he is a victim soul. His suffering has meaning.

He is teaching us something through his pain.

*   *   *

He sang to us a little at the end, like an old man sitting in the sun. Most of us couldn’t tell the words or the tune but he was doing it for us, and there was something so beautiful and moving in it. I turned to a friend. “We are hearing a saint singing,” I said. I breathed it in, let the sound enter my ears. I wanted to put my hands over them and hold the sound in my head.

Then John Paul made the sign of the cross. The cardinals came and knelt before him and kissed his hand. A group of American Indians mounted the stage to kneel before him. Dozens of newly-wed couples in gowns and tuxedoes mounted the stage two by two to receive his blessing. Then the sick—children rolled out onto the stage in hospital beds, people in wheelchairs.

I always get the feeling with John Paul that if he could narrow down who he meets and blesses to those he likes best it would not be cardinals, princes or congressmen but nuns from obscure convents and Down syndrome children. Especially the latter. Because they have suffered, and because in some serious and amazing way they understand more than most people. Everyone else gets tied up in ambition and ideas and bustle, but the modest and limited are able to receive this message more deeply and openly: God loves us, his love is all around us, he made us to love him and play with him and serve him and be happy.

I know a woman who once worked with the retarded. The Down syndrome children would ask her to comb her long blond hair, and then they’d get lost in it, lost in the beauty of it. They touched it and patted it and walked through it like curtains. It takes a kind of spiritual genius to know a hunk of long blond hair is heaven. They knew. The pope knows they know.

*   *   *

And then the audience was over. The scrum of handlers and Cardinals descended again and surrounded the pope. They hauled him up, helped him transfer from the white chair back to the wheel throne. And then they began to push him off the stage.

He turned to us, raised his right hand and made a halting sign of the cross. And then the Poles in the audience broke into the song that went back to the beginning, the authentic sound of 25 years ago, when John Paul first walked onto the Vatican balcony and looked out at the world. They had sung it for him at every stop along the way of his long papacy, through good times and bad. “Stolat! Stolat! May you live a hundred years.”

I stayed until the very end, two hours. Then I turned to see all the people standing behind me, to see their faces so I could describe them someday. And I was taken aback.

Because they were gone. Most of them, two-thirds, had already left. They were gone before the pope had even left the stage. As if they’d had their ticket punched—I saw the old guy—and were on their way next to see the cats in the Coliseum.

His whole life is a goodbye tour now. He knows they come to see him in part because they want to be able to say, “I saw John Paul the Great.” And so there is around him a sense of inescapable twilight.

An explosion of joy and sadness will mark his passing. Joy because it is time now for a younger man to put his stamp upon the age. Sadness because he is a giant, the last pope of the old age. And something else. After him the real modern world begins, the new one, the post-9/11 one, and all will be in play. He was the last fruit of the old world. His presence was definite and dense as the Vatican itself.

*   *   *

His suffering is his witness. It has a purpose. It is telling us something. Yesterday, in thinking about this and remembering that audience, I called the great writer and thinker Michael Novak. He thought aloud for me. St. Therese of Lisieux, he reminded me, believed her suffering could help others. She would take her moments of pain or annoyance or sadness and offer them to God, believing that they became united with God’s love, united that is with something infinitely powerful which works always for the betterment of man. She would ask God to take her suffering and use it to help the missionaries of the world. She knew, Mr. Novak said, what Dostoevsky knew: there’s a kind of web around the world, an electric web in which we’re all united in suffering and in love. When you give to it what you have, you add to the communion of love all around the world. Therese was a Carmelite. Mr. Novak spoke of George Weigel’s observation that the pope has a Carmelite soul, a soul at home with the Carmelite tradition of everyday mysticism.

What should the pope’s suffering tell us? Several things, said Mr. Novak. He is telling us it is important in an age like ours to honor the suffering of the old and the infirm. He wants us to know they have a place in life and a purpose. He not only says this; he lives it. He was an actor as a youth; he teaches by doing and showing, by being. His suffering is a drama he is living out quite deliberately. John Paul stands for life, for all of life. He wants to honor what the world does not honor.

But why, I said, does God allow this man he must so love to be dragged through the world in pain? He could have taken him years ago. Maybe, said Mr. Novak, God wants to show us how much he loves us, and he is doing it right now by letting the pope show us how much he loves us. Christ couldn’t take it anymore during his passion, and yet he kept going.

Which reminded me of something the pope said to a friend when the subject of retirement came up a few years ago: “Christ didn’t come down from the cross.” Christ left when his work was done.

Mr. Novak noted that John Paul II has often spoken of the need to heal the thousand-year breach in the church between East and West. The pope believes his work did not end with the fall of the Berlin Wall, that it includes attempting to repair the great split between Rome and Constantinople and Moscow. Mr. Novak said he may well be using his suffering, giving it to God to heal it. “He will be a very unhappy man if he doesn’t get to Moscow before he dies,” said Mr. Novak. “St. Peter may have a lot to answer for.”

George Bush finally began his second term on Wednesday night with an address that marked the return of the Bush of the stump, the Bush who was re-elected president three months ago and whom the nation knows well. His State of the Union address underscored that he meant what he said when he ran: Efforts to move against junk lawsuits, protect marriage and reform Social Security are all on the table. America continues as a friend of liberty throughout the world. The speech was marked by an air not of insistence but of persuasion.

George Bush made it clear he does not intend to cooperate with the tradition whereby second terms are all anticlimax enlivened by scandal. He will not be at the mercy of history. He means to continue doing big things.

This was the plainspoken Bush of old. The state of our union is “confident and strong.” We must be “good stewards” of the economy, must “renew” and “update” “great institutions,” will try to make the tax code more coherent and just. Refreshingly, he called for “spending discipline”; he said he wants to “cut the deficit in half” by the time he leaves office.

In the much-anticipated section on Social Security reform the president was expected to aim his remarks at members of his own party who think it doesn’t make sense to risk stepping on the third rail unless you’re desperate to flee an oncoming train. Mr. Bush said the train is bearing down and coming fast: When Social Security began 16 workers supported one retiree, but soon it will be two for every one. He deftly raised and let fall ideas put forward in the past by various Democrats—limiting benefits, increasing the retirement age. He made a case for voluntary personal accounts in a way that seemed clear, simple and costless, although next-day news reports raised questions about how much of the accounts will be kept by each individual investor, which made it all sound complicated indeed. He told Congress everything is on the table, all ideas will be listened to, the process will be “open” and “candid,” any ultimate change must be “wise and effective.”

*   *   *

Here I raise a question about human nature that I cannot answer. Republicans tend to assume that everyone hungers for more investment accounts to handle. This is because Republicans like personal autonomy and authority, and are good at math. Others might reasonably wonder if life isn’t complicated enough. The beauty of the Social Security system is its almost idiotic simplicity: They take your money from your paycheck and then 40 years later when you’re old they start giving some back each month. Personal accounts are less simple.

Favoring the Bush plan is the fact that it is aimed primarily at the young. When you are just entering adulthood and beginning a career you tend not to find life too complicated because you haven’t already made a thousand big decisions and lived with their repercussions. But I sometimes think of Ayn Rand’s sister, who came from Russia to visit the celebrated author in New York. She walked into an American supermarket for the first time and was overwhelmed: too much choice, a thousand kinds of cereal, doesn’t it all give you a headache? Rand was impatient; her sister came from the land of No Choice, and wasn’t up to the battle. A young person of course would not be overwhelmed by options but revel in them. Still, if, as the president seemed to suggest throughout his speech, gray-haired baby boomers are calling all the shots in America, we’ll see if the gray-haired ones really hunger for more decisions to make.

But in a surprising way for the president the issue is win-win. If he loses in Congress, he lost on a great issue on which his large base will likely believe he was right, and on which history will not be able to prove him wrong. And if he wins, he allows the free market to energize and renew a huge creaky behemoth. My guess? Little Big Man is going to get reform.

In the foreign-policy section the president was markedly modest in tone. The difference between us and our enemies is that we know we have “no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else.” Freedom is advancing, subjugated peoples are voting, democracies are being born, we are “witnessing landmark events in the history of liberty.” America will work with “our friends” in the Mideast to “encourage a higher standard of freedom.” The government of Saudi Arabia should become more democratic; the “great and proud nation of Egypt” is capable of showing the way to greater democracy in the region. We “expect” the Syrian government to stop supporting terrorists. We are “working with our European allies” to convince Iran not to develop nukes. We “stand with” the people of Iran. This was gentle but pointed, more specific and less messianic, than the recent inaugural—and therefore less open to misinterpretation. It was more finely calibrated, which is to say it was calibrated.

*   *   *

The end of the speech offered an unforgettable moment. When the mother of Marine Sgt. Byron Norwood, who gave his life in Iraq, was honored in the balcony, and then leaned down to embrace the woman in front of her, an Iraqi who had lost her father to Saddam, and who had just voted—when that mother embraced that woman it said more than words could about what we are doing and why. Sacrifice brings progress; courage brings deliverance; love born in Pflugerville can liberate in Fallujah. It pierced the heart.

As for the Democratic response, Harry Reid looks and talks like a small-town undertaker whom you want to trust but wonder about, especially when he says the deceased would love the brass handles. Although Nancy Pelosi continues to look startled, even alarmed, her comments are predictable and pedestrian. Both seemed eager not to agree with Ted Kennedy’s recent “Iraq is Vietnam” statements, which more and more seem not just stupid but scandalously so. Absent endorsing radical defeatism, however, Mr. Reid and Ms. Pelosi had little to say. They made Important Sounds. Neither seemed sincere or serious. The president seemed both.

I have been called old, jaded, a sourpuss. Far worse, I have been called French. A response is in order.

You know the dispute. Last week I slammed the president’s inaugural address. I was not alone, but I came down hard, early and in one of the most highly read editorial pages in America. Bill Buckley and David Frum also had critical reactions. Bill Safire on the other hand called it one of the best second inaugurals ever, and commentators from right and left (Bill Kristol, E.J. Dionne) found much to praise and ponder. (To my mind the best response to the inaugural was the grave, passionate essay of Mark Helprin.) So herewith some questions and answers:

A week later, do I stand by my views?

Yes. If I wrote it today I wouldn’t be softer, but harder.

Am I heartened by White House clarifications that the speech did not intend to announce the unveiling of a new policy?

Yes. My reaction is the exact opposite of Bill Bennett’s and E.J. Dionne’s, who were both disappointed. I am relieved.

Why don’t I see the speech as so many others do, as a thematic and romantic statement of what we all hope for, world freedom? Don’t we all want that?

Yes. But words have meaning. To declare that it is now the policy of the United States to eradicate tyranny in the world, that we are embarking on the greatest crusade in the history of freedom, and that the survival of American liberty is dependent on the liberty of every other nation—seemed to me, and seems to me, rhetorical and emotional overreach of the most embarrassing sort.

What’s wrong with a little overweening ambition? Shouldn’t man’s reach exceed his grasp?

True. But history is quite big enough right now. We’ve already been given a lot to grasp. The president will have real juice for the next 2 1/2 years. If in the next 30 months he can stabilize and fortify Iraq, helping it to become a functioning democratic entity that doesn’t encourage terrorism; further gird and undergird Afghanistan; keep the U.S. safe from attack; make our alliances closer; make permanent his tax cuts; and break through on Social Security, that will be huge. It will be historic. It will yield a presidency that even its severest critics will have to admit was enormously consequential, and its supporters will rightly claim as leaving a lasting legacy of courage and inspiration. We don’t need more than that—it’s quite enough. And it will be quite astonishing. Beyond that, don’t overreach. Refrain from breast beating, and don’t clobber the world over the head with your moral fabulousness.

What was the biggest mistake of the speech?

They forgot context. All speeches take place within a historical context, a time and place. A good speech acknowledges context often without even mentioning it.

For a half century our country faced a terrible foe. Some feared conflagration. Many of us who did not were convinced it would not happen because the United States was not evil, and the Soviet Union was not crazy. The Soviets didn’t want war to achieve their ends, they wanted to achieve those ends without the expense and gamble of war. We rolled them back, bankrupted them, forced their collapse. And we did it in part through a change of policy in which Ronald Reagan declared: From here on in we tell the truth. He called the Soviet Union an evil empire because it was a) evil and b) an empire, and c) he judged a new and stark candor the way to begin progress. We’d already kissed Brezhnev; it didn’t work. And it wasn’t Reagan’s way in any case.

Today is quite different. The context is different. Now we are up against not an organized state monolith but dozens, hundreds and thousands of state and nonstate actors—nuts with nukes, freelance bioterrorists, Islamofascists, independent but allied terror groups. The temperature of our world is very high. We face trouble that is already here. We don’t have to summon more.

Healthy alliances are a coolant in this world. What this era demands is steely resolve, and actions that remove those who want things at a full boil. In this world we must speak, yes, but softly, and carry many sticks, using them, when we must, terribly and swiftly. We must gather around us as many friends, allies and well-wishers as possible. And we must do nothing that provides our foes with ammunition with which they can accuse us of conceit, immaturity or impetuousness.

Here is an unhappy fact: Certain authoritarians and tyrants whose leadership is illegitimate and unjust have functioned in history as—ugly imagery coming—garbage-can lids on their societies. They keep freedom from entering, it is true. But when they are removed, the garbage—the freelance terrorists, the grievance merchants, the ethnic nationalists—pops out all over. Yes, freedom is good and to be strived for. But cleaning up the garbage is not pretty. And it sometimes leaves the neighborhood in an even bigger mess than it had been.

Am I saying we shouldn’t support freedom then?

Hardly. But we should remember as we do it that history, while full of opportunity, is also a long tale of woe. And human vanity—not only that of others, but our own—only complicates our endeavors. Thomas Jefferson was a genius, a great man who loved liberty. But that love led him to headlong support of a French Revolution that proved more demonic than liberating. He was right to encourage the fire of liberty but wrong to lend his great name to Robespierre, Marat and the rest. So much of life is case-by-case, so many of our decisions must be discrete and particular and not “thematic.” It is hard to do the right thing. That is why grown-ups often get headaches and children mostly don’t.

Life is layered, complex, not always most needful of political action. For many people in the world the most important extrafamilial relationship is not with the state but with the God. Pope John Paul II helped free his beloved Poland from the Soviet yoke. But when he looked at Poland some years after its freedom was won, he wondered if many of his kinsman had not chosen a kind of existential enslavement to Western materialism. He wondered if his people were not in some ways less free. It wasn’t a stupid question. It was at the heart of life.

But isn’t hard criticism of such an important speech at such a serious moment disloyal? You’re a Bush supporter!

I am. I even took off from the Journal to work for his re-election. I did exciting and I hope helpful work at considerable financial loss. But loyalty consists of many things, including being truthful with our friends. As Reagan used to say, candor is a compliment. This White House can take it. Two years ago, after watching a series of rather too jocular and arguably too boastful news conferences from administration leaders on the coming war, I said that they seemed to be suffering from mission inebriation. I meant it. And meant it as a caution. The White House can be a hothouse. Emotions run high, tired minds run on adrenal fumes. When I said last week that they seemed again to be suffering from mission inebriation, I meant that too.

As for criticizing Mr. Bush on something so big, that’s why I did it: It’s big. And so important. When you really disagree, you have to say so. In the end I found the president’s thinking perplexing and disturbing. At any rate, in the end, as Jack Kennedy once said, “Sometimes party loyalty asks too much.”

What do you think of David Frum’s wondering if the fact that the system let this speech through doesn’t suggest the system needs work?

I had a similar thought. I wonder if this White House, with its understandable but not always helpful Band of Brothers aspect, isn’t different from previous White Houses in this. In other White Houses there were always too many people eager to show their worth by removing the meaning of the speech, or warning the president that such and such shouldn’t be said. I get the impression no one in this White House wants to be the person in the speechwriter’s memoir who tried to remove “Tear down this wall” or “evil empire.” So often such people are defensive, anxious, unhelpful. They often lost the battle in the Reagan White House, to the benefit of history. But for this speech there seemed no one who wanted to think defensively and wield the editing stick. Which is bad, because such people are actually needed. They’re like dead wood in a forest; they add to the ecology; they have their purpose.

Bill Buckley and David Gelertner suggest the speech was badly written. Isn’t that really the essential problem?

No. It was badly thought. In any case most inaugural addresses are rather badly written, and I would know. We haven’t had a truly great one since 1961, 44 years ago. In this case the document seems to me to bear hard the personal mark of the president, and not of writers. But it is not the plain-talking Bush we know so well. It is Bush trying to be fancy. It is a tough man who speaks the language of business, sports and politics trying to be high-toned and elegant.

You’re being patronizing.

That’s what jaded old French people are for.

We all have our different styles. The biggest style mistake you can make is to use someone else’s style, or the moment’s style if you will, and not your own.

Speaking of style, how did you like the headline on your piece last week?

I thought it was quite wicked and didn’t capture the meaning of the piece. When I pointed this out to the editor he promised in the future to be more nuanced. But it was my fault. Advice to self: don’t go to cover a story before you’ve OK’d the headline on the previous one.

What are you looking forward to now?

I am hoping for a State of the Union address that is tough, clear, tethered, and in which the speaker takes his program seriously but himself rather more lightly. I am hoping the headline will be, “Return to Planet Earth.”

*   *   *

Two departures this week deserve note. A respectful and affectionate goodbye-from-columnating to Bill Safire of the New York Times, a great presence on that op-ed page for 30 years. He was a gutsy, witty wader into the fray. He has taken shots at me in the past, and in the spirit of comradely columnary aggression I wish I could take a goodbye shot back. (If he were sitting next to me now he’d say, “Don’t be soft, I’m on top, start a pile-on!”) But I can’t. A classy and provocative pro from beginning to end. I’m going to miss his column a lot.

Johnny Carson’s gift was that he seemed startled by sophistication. This was so American. It’s why Americans loved him. When the starlet blurted the seamy detail, when someone said or did something too odd or too open to interpretation, Carson would give the audience the dry look. And east or west, north or south, we all got the joke. When we laughed together, in our separate houses, that was a kind of community. It was a good note on which to end the day. He was an American treasure. Rest in peace.

It was an interesting Inauguration Day. Washington had warmed up, the swift storm of the previous day had passed, the sky was overcast but the air wasn’t painful in a wind-chill way, and the capital was full of men in cowboy hats and women in long furs. In fact, the night of the inaugural balls became known this year as The Night of the Long Furs.

Laura Bush’s beauty has grown more obvious; she was chic in shades of white, and smiled warmly. The Bush daughters looked exactly as they are, beautiful and young. A well-behaved city was on its best behavior, everyone from cops to doormen to journalists eager to help visitors in any way.

For me there was some unexpected merriness. In my hotel the night before the inauguration, all the guests were evacuated at 1:45 in the morning. There were fire alarms and flashing lights on each floor, and a public address system instructed us to take the stairs, not the elevators. Hundreds of people wound up outside in the slush, eventually gathering inside the lobby, waiting to find out what next.

The staff—kindly, clucking—tried to figure out if the fire existed and, if so, where it was. Hundreds of inaugural revelers wound up observing each other. Over there on the couch was Warren Buffet in bright blue pajamas and a white hotel robe. James Baker was in trench coat and throat scarf. I remembered my keys and eyeglasses but walked out without my shoes. After a while the “all clear” came, and hundreds of us stood in line for elevators to return to our rooms. Later that morning, as I entered an elevator to go to an appointment, I said, “You all look happier than you did last night.” A man said, “That was just a dream,” and everyone laughed.

*   *   *

The inauguration itself was beautiful to see—pomp, panoply, parades, flags and cannonades. America does this well. And the most poignant moment was the manful William Rehnquist, unable to wear a tie and making his way down the long marble steps to swear in the president. The continuation of democracy is made possible by such personal gallantry.

There were some surprises, one of which was the thrill of a male voice singing “God Bless America,” instead of the hyper-coloratura divas who plague our American civic life. But whoever picked the music for the inaugural ceremony itself—modern megachurch hymns, music that sounds like what they’d use for the quiet middle section of a Pixar animated film—was . . . lame. The downbeat orchestral arrangement that followed the president’s speech was no doubt an attempt to avoid charges that the ceremony had a triumphalist air. But I wound up thinking: This is America. We have a lot of good songs. And we watch inaugurals in part to hear them.

Never be defensive in your choice of music.

*   *   *

The inaugural address itself was startling. It left me with a bad feeling, and reluctant dislike. Rhetorically, it veered from high-class boilerplate to strong and simple sentences, but it was not pedestrian. George W. Bush’s second inaugural will no doubt prove historic because it carried a punch, asserting an agenda so sweeping that an observer quipped that by the end he would not have been surprised if the president had announced we were going to colonize Mars.

A short and self-conscious preamble led quickly to the meat of the speech: the president’s evolving thoughts on freedom in the world. Those thoughts seemed marked by deep moral seriousness and no moral modesty.

No one will remember what the president said about domestic policy, which was the subject of the last third of the text. This may prove to have been a miscalculation.

It was a foreign-policy speech. To the extent our foreign policy is marked by a division that has been (crudely but serviceably) defined as a division between moralists and realists—the moralists taken with a romantic longing to carry democracy and justice to foreign fields, the realists motivated by what might be called cynicism and an acknowledgment of the limits of governmental power—President Bush sided strongly with the moralists, which was not a surprise. But he did it in a way that left this Bush supporter yearning for something she does not normally yearn for, and that is: nuance.

The administration’s approach to history is at odds with what has been described by a communications adviser to the president as the “reality-based community.” A dumb phrase, but not a dumb thought: He meant that the administration sees history as dynamic and changeable, not static and impervious to redirection or improvement. That is the Bush administration way, and it happens to be realistic: History is dynamic and changeable. On the other hand, some things are constant, such as human imperfection, injustice, misery and bad government.

This world is not heaven.

The president’s speech seemed rather heavenish. It was a God-drenched speech. This president, who has been accused of giving too much attention to religious imagery and religious thought, has not let the criticism enter him. God was invoked relentlessly. “The Author of Liberty.” “God moves and chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind . . . the longing of the soul.”

It seemed a document produced by a White House on a mission. The United States, the speech said, has put the world on notice: Good governments that are just to their people are our friends, and those that are not are, essentially, not. We know the way: democracy. The president told every nondemocratic government in the world to shape up. “Success in our relations [with other governments] will require the decent treatment of their own people.”

The speech did not deal with specifics—9/11, terrorism, particular alliances, Iraq. It was, instead, assertively abstract.

“We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.” “Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self government. . . . Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation’s security, and the calling of our time.” “It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in the world.”

Ending tyranny in the world? Well that’s an ambition, and if you’re going to have an ambition it might as well be a big one. But this declaration, which is not wrong by any means, seemed to me to land somewhere between dreamy and disturbing. Tyranny is a very bad thing and quite wicked, but one doesn’t expect we’re going to eradicate it any time soon. Again, this is not heaven, it’s earth.

*   *   *

There were moments of eloquence: “America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies.” “We do not accept the existence of permanent tyranny because we do not accept the possibility of permanent slavery.” And, to the young people of our country, “You have seen that life is fragile, and evil is real, and courage triumphs.” They have, since 9/11, seen exactly that.

And yet such promising moments were followed by this, the ending of the speech. “Renewed in our strength—tested, but not weary—we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom.”

This is—how else to put it?—over the top. It is the kind of sentence that makes you wonder if this White House did not, in the preparation period, have a case of what I have called in the past “mission inebriation.” A sense that there are few legitimate boundaries to the desires born in the goodness of their good hearts.

One wonders if they shouldn’t ease up, calm down, breathe deep, get more securely grounded. The most moving speeches summon us to the cause of what is actually possible. Perfection in the life of man on earth is not.

The Rathergate Report is a watershed event in American journalism not because it changes things on its own but because it makes unavoidably clear a change that has already occurred. And that is that the mainstream media’s monopoly on information is over. That is, the monopoly enjoyed by three big networks, a half dozen big newspapers and a handful of weekly magazines from roughly 1950 to 2000 is done and gone, and something else is taking its place. That would be a media cacophony. But a cacophony in which the truth has a greater chance of making itself clearly heard.

Is it annoying that the panel that issued the report did not find liberal bias in the preparation and airing of the Bush National Guard story? Yes, but only that. It’s not as if anyone has to be told. I hate to be cynical, and this is cynical, but the panel that produced the report was not being paid by CBS to find liberal bias. It was being paid to do the anatomy of a failure with emphasis on who did what wrong.

It found fault with the anchorman, the producer and their overseers, a conclusion CBS likely welcomed because CBS has wanted to remove Dan Rather for a long time because of low ratings. Rathergate weakened his position, and CBS moved. Firing the producers and overseers allows them to say We’ve turned the page, paid a price and put the story behind us. Also, if the report was to be taken seriously by the rest of the mainstream media it could not allege liberal bias. The MSM were not going to do headlines saying, “We’ve been busted!”

Finally, one somehow gets the impression the writers of the Report thought proof of bias would be found in memos saying, “Comrades, we move against the imperialistic Bush Regime at 0800.” Which is not exactly how it works. In any case those memos were not found. But maybe the writers of the report thought someone else would write about the whole sticky issue of bias. Like bloggers, who the report tells us have “a conservative agenda.” That will surprise Duncan “Atrios” Black and Josh Marshall, but let it go.

*   *   *

Of the commentary that followed the report, the most interesting so far has been Howard Fineman’s essay on MSNBC.com. Mr. Fineman, a fluid writer who is likely aware of his own biases—I have wondered if he doesn’t track them to make sure they are in line with the biases of Newsweek and MSNBC, which employ him—is a hardworking journalistic veteran who entered the MSM when it was at its zenith, in the 1970s. One might say he is the platonic ideal of MSMness. Mr. Fineman writes that the Rathergate report has left the MSM damaged and reeling, its hegemony a thing of the past. All true. In his roll call of responsibility he names first “George Bush’s Republican Party,” but that is the reflex of a certain mindset and not true. Mr. Bush and the GOP had nothing to do with what has happened to the MSM, which is not to say they are not happy it’s been deeply and deservedly wounded.

Mr. Fineman asserts that the MSM came into existence after World War II, which is essentially true, but goes on to claim that it came into existence as the result of the fact that “a temporary moderate consensus came to govern the country.” Please. America was a political battleground in those days, fighting over everything from McCarthyism to the true nature of communism to the proper role of government to Vietnam. The MSM didn’t come into existence because of a brief period of political comity. The MSM rose because it had a monopoly. And it fell because it lost that monopoly.

Let me repeat that: The MSM rose because it had a monopoly on information. The networks, newspapers and magazines were a Liberal Monolith. In one of his “Making of the President” books the liberal but ingenuous Teddy White famously said of 57th Street in Manhattan that when he stood there he was within a stone’s throw of all the offices in which all of American media was busily churning out its vision of The News. Churning it out were a relatively small group of a few hundred liberals who worked and mostly lived on an island off the continent; they told that continent not only what it should be thinking about but how it should be thinking of it. (I think the New York Times unconsciously echoes this old assumption in their television commercials in which an earnest, graying, upscale dunderhead says the New York Times surrounds a story and gives him new ways to think about it. Doesn’t it just?)

But in the past decade the liberals lost their monopoly. What broke it? We all know. Rush Limbaugh did, cable news did, the antimonolith journalists who rose with Reagan did, the internet did, technology did, talk radio did, Fox News did, the Washington Times did. When the people of America got options, they took them. Conservative arguments rose, and liberal hegemony fell.

All this has been said before but this can’t be said enough: The biggest improvement in the flow of information in America in our lifetimes is that no single group controls the news anymore.

*   *   *

You can complain now, and your complaints can both register and have an impact on the story, as happened with bloggers and Rathergate. You can be a part of the story if you find and uncover new information. You can create the story, as bloggers did in the Trent Lott scandal. American journalism is no longer a castle, and you are no longer the serf who cannot breach its walls. The castle doors have been forced open. Other voices have access. Bloggers for instance don’t just walk in and out, they have offices in the castle walls.

Is there a difference between the bloggers and the MSM journalists? Yes. But it is not that they are untrained eccentrics home in their pajamas. (Half the writers for the Sunday New York Times are eccentrics home in their pajamas.) It is that they are independent and allowed to think their own thoughts. It is that they have autonomy and can assign themselves stories, and determine on their own the length and placement of stories. And it is that they are by and large as individuals more interesting than most MSM reporters.

Remember the movie “Broadcast News”? The bland young reporter played by William Hurt who yearned to be a star and a member of the establishment would be a major network anchor or producer now, his hair gone a distinguished gray. The character played by Albert Brooks—the bright, mischievous and ultimately more talented journalist—would be a blogger now.

Now anyone can take to the parapet and announce the news. This will make for a certain amount of confusion. But better that than one-party rule and one-party thought. Only 20 years ago, when you were enraged at what you felt was the unfairness of a story, or a bias on the part of the storyteller, you could do this about it: nothing. You could write a letter.

When I worked at CBS a generation ago I used to receive those letters. Sometimes we read them, and sometimes we answered them, but not always. Now if you see such a report and are enraged you can do something about it: You can argue in public on a blog or on TV, you can put forth information that counters the information in the report. You can have a voice. You can change the story. You can bring down a news division. Is this improvement? Oh yes it is.

*   *   *

Some think bloggers and internet writers of all sorts are like the 19th century pamphleteers who made American politics livelier and more vigorous by lambasting the other team in full-throated broadsides. Actually, I’ve said that. And there are similarities. But it should be noted that the pamphleteers were heavy on screeds and colorfully damning the foe. The most successful bloggers aren’t bringing bluster to the debate, they’re bringing facts—font sizes, full quotes, etc. They’re bringing facts and points of view on those facts that the MSM before this could ignore, and did ignore. They’re bringing a lot to the debate, and changing the debate by what they bring. They’re doing what excellent reporters would do.

They will no doubt continue to be the force in 2005 that they have been the past few years. Meantime the MSM will not disappear. But it will evolve. Some media organs—Newsweek, Time, the New York Times—will likely use the changing environment as license to be what they are: liberal, only more so. Interestingly they have begun to use Fox News Channel as their rationale. We used to be unbiased but then Fox came along with its conservative propaganda so now just to be fair and compete we’re going liberal.

I don’t see why anyone should mind this. A world where National Review is defined as conservative and Newsweek defined as liberal would be a better world, for it would be a more truthful one. Everyone gets labeled, tagged and defined, no one hides an agenda, the audience gets to listen, consider, weigh and allow for biases. A journalistic world where people declare where they stand is a better one.

Networks, on the other hand, may try harder to play it down the middle, and that would be wise. The days when they could sell a one-party point of view is over. No one is buying now because no one is forced to buy. But everyone will buy the networks when they sell what they’re really good at, which is covering real news as it happens. Tsunamis, speeches, trials—events. Real and actual news. They are really good at that. And there is a market for it. And that market isn’t over.

The 109th Congress has been sworn in and convened, and now the new post-election reality begins. If I were a Democrat right now I would think big and get serious. Second terms are tough for incumbents; history has not handed George W. Bush an easy ride, and there’s no reason to think that will change now; and Mr. Bush is a gambler who’s not afraid to throw the dice, which means he will likely have not only stunning gains but stunning losses ahead. The Democrats are still competitive. “In every defeat lies the seed of future victory, in every victory lies the seed of future defeat.” Every morning I’d put my game face on knowing my party will stand a good chance of making a big presidential comeback in four years. Look confident; this will encourage victory. Or at least leave people saying you look confident, which for you will be a victory.

No one wants to be head of the Democratic National Committee. This is bad but understandable. A fractious party has been further fractured by a hard year. What you need for DNC chairman is a man or woman of some stature who can make the case for your party day in and day out in big media. Fund-raising expertise is secondary—hire someone to do it. So is organizational skill—hire organizers. You need someone who makes the Democratic Party look nonsleazy, nonmanipulative and nonweak on TV. He doesn’t have to be nationally known, but he must be—how to put this?—good-natured, moderate in manner, and normal-seeming. That would mean not Howard Dean.

There is much to build on. You hold 44 Senate seats, 202 House seats and 22 governorships. You have been on a losing strain for a while, but you can turn that into opportunity. Now, in the depths—or what you frankly hope are the depths—you can move for change within the party. Nothing sobers like defeat. Use the new sobriety to shake off the mad left. This is the best chance you’ve had all century! Seriously, this is the best chance you’ve had in a long time. You couldn’t rethink the party when you had Bill Clinton, because he kept winning. But he was a special case, a once-every-quarter-century natural. He had the gift; he brought his own winnerness with him every bit as much as he brought his own mess.

The Groups—all the left-wing outfits from the abortion people to the enviros—didn’t deliver in the last election, and not because they didn’t try. They worked their hearts out. But they had no one to deliver. They had only money. The secret: Nobody likes them. Nobody! No matter how you feel about abortion, no one likes pro-abortion fanatics; no one likes mad scientists who cook environmental data. Or rather only rich and creepy people like them. Stand up to the Groups—make your policies more moderate, more nuanced, less knee-jerk.

Don’t reflexively oppose President Bush on Social Security reform. Talk and listen and consider; ask open-minded questions at hearings. If he’s wrong—if his prescriptions don’t promise to make the system stronger and more just down the road—then make a persuasive case, one a grown-up could listen to and understand. Don’t do “sound bites for blue heads in Dade County,” be serious. People can tell when you’re not. They just punished you at the polls again because you weren’t. You have nothing to gain but stature.

*   *   *

Hold a big public party meeting on taxes and spending. I am serious. Everyone knows where the Republican Party stands on both: they’re against the former, and—in theory if not practice—against the latter. Where are you? Thrash it out, and in public. The next big election is two years away. You have the time. The attitude here should be: When the people talk, we listen. They just spoke. We are listening to what was said, pondering it, and will respond earnestly and in good faith. You don’t have to be doctrinaire anymore, because your doctrines failed you. Reinvent.

A Sister Souljah moment? Why not? Keep your eyes sharp for a constituency that has proved itself spectacularly unhelpful in the past few decades, and go at it hammer and tong. I think not an individual, though Jesse Jackson and all he stands for is tempting. Go at a group. How about junk scientists? With Michael Crichton’s manifesto doing well and getting praise, and with the natural disaster of the tsunami having left everyone brushing up on their wave trains and tectonic-plate knowledge, the time is right.

Or—and this would be splendid—there’s this. In states like the Democratic bastion (though in some ways a vulnerable one) of New Jersey, people are starting to fear they’re going to be forced from their homes by rising property taxes. New Jersey used to be a safe haven. Now its citizens are clobbered with taxes and spending. This leaves those on fixed incomes in a precarious state. Who is more sympathetic, a widow in Lodi or a Democratic Party that stands for the status quo? Come to her aid. Say “Enough is enough.” Say “We can’t support endless spending. Stupid and corrupt spending is the enemy of wise spending, and wise spending is what the Democratic party is about.” Tax relief is an issue almost everywhere, and it is not going away any time soon.

John Kerry was almost shrewd to try to get to the right of Bush on issues like homeland security and immigration. I say almost because he didn’t do it long enough or deeply enough, and by the time he made his move no one believed much of what he said. That’s what the Swift Boat ads did to him; they didn’t make him look like a coward but a liar. That he could never speak of his 20 years in the Senate didn’t help. But he’s over, and you’re here. Homeland security can always be improved, and immigration will only grow as a fact and an issue. Get serious.

And don’t forget to confuse categories. Be counterintuitive. Republican Mike Bloomberg of New York won’t let workingmen and -women smoke at the local bar. Democrats always wind up in support of such measures. Don’t! Distance yourself from the smoke Nazis, from all Nazis. Be sane; take the side of normal humans with normal imperfections. Let the Republicans look stupid on these issues if they choose to. Don’t fall for it. The Sierra Club will love you anyway. (Politicians in New York tell me the tide has turned, that even people shuddering outside buildings grabbing a smoke say it’s only right. I’m not shuddering outside a building, but I talk to smokers all the time and let me tell you how they feel about the banners. They hate them.)

*   *   *

The Bush administration has stood for cutting taxes, allowing high spending, and being tough in the world. The Democrats stand for raising taxes, high spending, and being weak in the world. Should the Democrats become more like Republicans? Yes, they should. Then, in the next big contest, they can agree on the big points with the Republicans and win on three other things. First, on small points, as Mr. Clinton did with such key issues as The Campaign for the Right Child-Carrying Seatbelts. Second, on campaign expertise. Third, on the personality and character of the candidate.

On all of these points they can be truly competitive. If they choose to get serious.

The biggest story of the year happened just as big-thinking journalists went on vacation after filing their “Ten Biggest Stories of 2004” pieces. Life has a way of surprising us.

I thought the other day of Harrison Salisbury, and his response when asked what he’d learned after a lifetime as a reporter. “Expect the unexpected,” he said. And of course we do, in the abstract, but when a story like this comes along in the particular, with maybe 80,000 dead, maybe more, we are aghast. And should be. Call it the force of nature or the hand of God or both; call it geological inevitability or the oldest story in the world (life is tragic) reasserting itself on a broader-than-usual level—however you see the earthquake and the tsunami, it reminds you that man is not in charge.

Of all the things I’ve heard said of the great horror, nothing seemed to me to sum it up as well as a woman chatting with a man as he cut her hair in New York. The TV was on, CNN. They stopped and watched the latest video of surging waves crashing through a hotel. The man sighed and shook his head. “Life is terrible,” he said. The woman said, “Oh it’s beautiful, beautiful, but full of pain.”

*   *   *

“Did you hear about the baby they found floating on a mattress?” “Did you hear about the 2-year-old Swedish kid they found wandering down a street?” “Did you hear about the guys who floated on a refrigerator?” Did you hear about the model, the surfer, the snorkelers?

People are fascinated by these stories, and so am I. It’s a little like the first days after 9/11 in New York: “Did you hear about the guy in the wheelchair on the 91st floor?” Soon we will be hearing about massive relief efforts and individual acts of heroism and sacrifice, and those stories will be a relief, and maybe even in some cases an inspiration.

Not everyone distinguished himself. What to say of those who’ve latched on to the tragedy to promote their political agendas, from the U.N. official who raced to call the U.S. “stingy,” to the global-warming crowd, to administration critics who jumped at the chance to call the president insensitive because he was vacationing in Texas and didn’t voice his sympathy quickly enough? Such people are slyly asserting their own, higher sensitivity and getting credit for it, which is odd because what they’re actually doing is using dead people to make cheap points.

On the other hand, there were moments of true excellence in those who reported on, witnessed, and responded to the tragedy, from the groups sending food and medicine to those rushing to the disaster scene to help. The cable news networks distinguished themselves, and CNN in particular has been fabulous, wall to wall. News ennobles them. When there’s no news CNN is endless chatter, tacky as cheap sets. Then news comes and they are reminded of why they exist: to tell us what’s happening, to get the newest and latest. It’s as if the anchors sit straighter, knowing they do have a purpose beyond being the aural screen saver on our TV.

*   *   *

The other night at dinner a friend wondered aloud if this almost-world-wide tragedy would have an impact on peace. Would it remind us of all we have in common, and how precious life is? This reminded me of something Ronald Reagan used to say of all the conflicts in the world. He’d say that if the world were attacked by Martians tomorrow, we’d all come together, and it’s too bad we couldn’t manage to cut to the chase. This used to be taken as an example of his idiocy, but of course it’s true. We would all drop our local and ancestral hatreds to fight shoulder to shoulder against the common foe. Years later, in true Reaganesque style, Hollywood produced the blockbuster “Independence Day,” in which extraterrestrials attacked the earth and the world united in resistance.

(In a similar spirit, let me say that if Steven Spielberg went to the Mideast tomorrow, announced he was making a movie, and sent out a casting call for males age 12 to 30 he would immediately establish a new Mideast peace, at least for the length of the shoot. Because the only thing the young men there would rather do than kill each other is be a movie star. Hmmmm, a suicide bombing that raises my family’s status in the neighborhood or a possible date with Cameron Diaz, let’s see . . . Mr. Spielberg would also get a Nobel Peace Prize. I am actually not kidding.)

The biggest story of 2004 has come, has not yet gone, and will be with us for some time. Two thousand five begins on Saturday. For the new year, two thoughts. Remember it can all be swept away in a moment, so hold it close and love it while you’ve got it. And may we begin 2005 pondering how much we have in common, how down-to-the-bone the same we are, and how the enemy is not the guy across the fence but the tragedy of life. We should try to make it better. We should cut to the chase.

And it came to pass, that in those days there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that the whole world should be enrolled.
This enrolling was first made by Cyrinus, the governor of Syria.

And all went to be enrolled, every one into his own city.

And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth into Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem: because he was of the house and family of David,

To be enrolled with Mary his espoused wife, who was with child.

And it came to pass, that when they were there, her days were accomplished, that she should be delivered.

And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him up in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.

— Chapter Two, verses 1 through 7, The Gospel According to St. Luke, Douay-Rheims Version

I was 7 years old and what I wanted for Christmas was a desk. I don’t know why. I think I had it in my head that grown-up women who were glamorous had desks, and I would have gotten that impression through the movies—Rosalind Russell in the newsroom bossing Cary Grant around, Katharine Hepburn on the phone. This was the 1950s, and that’s the kind of movie they always played on “Million Dollar Movie” on Channel 9 in New York. They had no money for programming on Channel 9 so they repeated the same movie over and over for a week at a time. To this day I can recite whole sections of dialogue from “They Drive by Night” but that’s not important now.

Anyway, all I wanted was the desk. But I didn’t expect to get it because desks were huge and expensive and shiny and . . . well, it was unlikely. And yet that Christmas morning I ran to the tree with my sisters and over on the side was a desk. I want you to know what it looked like. It was small, maybe two feet high, and beige, and made of plywood. It had a drawer for pencils. The plywood wasn’t finished and if you rubbed against it the wrong way you’d get a splinter, but it was the most beautiful desk in human history. I was overwhelmed. I got a kitchen chair and sat at it. It was fabulous. It is my favorite Christmas moment. What followed was better.

I sat there, closed my eyes, put my hands over them, and tried to imagine the first Christmas. And I saw it. I saw it like a movie. It was a blue black night and there were people on the road and I saw the man and the woman, I saw them going from house to house and being told there was no room. Then they went to a rocky place on a little hill just beyond the houses. There were some trees and bushes and a sort of wooden shanty with hay on the floor. Then there was the cry of a child. Animals came and stared and their breath warmed the air. It was starry. Mary’s blanket was Joseph’s cloak. And I thought: It’s all true. It’s not just a story, it’s true, it really happened. This struck me like a thunderbolt.

When I wondered in later years why I had that moment—why I saw it in my mind and suddenly knew it was true—I thought it was connected to the desk. The fact that it was there seemed a miracle. The joy of receiving a happy gift and being grateful for it and excited by it opened up my mind. It cracked open my imagination and let a truth that seemed like magic in.

*   *   *

Is there a moral to this memory? What it taught me, what I remember all these years later, is that everyone likes gifts but no one is more affected by their power than children. They are susceptible to wonder. A child can look at a red toy car in the red-green glow of Christmas tree lights and imagine an entire lifetime. A child can play with a new doll and smell good things being cooked and hear sweet music and it can make that child imagine that life is good, which gives her a template for good, a category for good; it helps her know good exists. This knowledge comes in handy in life; those who do not receive it, one way or another, are sadder than those who do.

We have two more days before Christmas. Remember the soldiers and sailors, remember ma and pa, remember your friends but especially remember the kids. For some people this is difficult because they don’t really know what kids want or need or will be moved by. So here is my idea. I invite readers of this space to tell of their favorite childhood Christmas gift, and what effect it had on them. This might offer inspiration. And anyway they’re always nice stories.