Old Berliners in the media complained that twenty years ago even the Wetter was better. In 1989, the stars apparently shone down on revelers dancing on the Brandenburger Tor as they tore the wall to pieces. And the next day, when the East Berliners chugged onto the Kurfürstendamm—then the main drag in West Berlin—in their gas-guzzling Trabbies, the sky was blue. 

Of course, when I flip through photos from the famous day, the newly reunited Berlin of twenty years ago looks as grey as grey can be. Helmut Kohl (the then Chancellor) and Willy Brandt (the Social Democratic Party hero who partially reconciled East and West through his Ostpolitik) stood on a balcony above the Schöneberger Rathaus, in the midst of mist and rain, in front of thousands of people. Read More

Last Friday morning, the world turned its gaze toward Norway, the narrow, fjord-fringed country that Americans associate with all things un-American: a comprehensive cradle-to-grave welfare program; a devotion to universalistic foreign policy and international philanthropy; a taste for rotten fish and bitter aquavit. At ten o'clock, I walked out of my news agency office and across Oslo's leafy Palace Park to the Nobel Institute. It's there that the Nobel committee's chairman announces the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. 

Built in 1867, the canary-yellow gilded-age mansion that houses the Institute has a warm, tranquil air. Its interior—three stories of lightwood parquet floors, soft colors, and high casement windows—does too. The American embassy, a jaggedly angular, obsidian structure, cater-corner to the Institute, with a high fence and cadre of machine gun wielding guards, throws its neighbor's tranquility into sharp relief. As I walked past the embassy, it struck me that even on this beautiful October day—sunny and warm yet decidedly autumnal, the leaves on downtown Oslo's many lime and maple trees just beginning to turn—the place still managed to look severe and foreboding. If I were superstitious, I might have seen this observation as some kind of portent. Read More

Gays are our utopian heroes. Many things changed in the twentieth century. No change was more momentous and utopian than that men could choose men for love objects, and women choose women, to remake the sexual household. If the household organization of three thousand years of recorded history could be altered simply in the interest of what people wanted, in the interest of desire, then anything could be changed.

Traditional society choked this down—some more progressive parts of it did, anyway—by attributing same-sex love to brain chemistry, or a gay gene, and an eternal sexual identity that must be rigid and ineluctable. It hypothesized three millennia of men and women who must have been closeted, before they had such wonderfully enlightened friends and neighbors as we are. Only in this restricted way could society understand homosexuality without gayness threatening to reveal more new choices. Read More

The America our new president inherits bears an uncanny resemblance to our old enemy, the Soviet Union—right before it went under. Our country's paranoia and stubbornness have secured us indifferent allies and intractable commitments. Not only is there Afghanistan—still Afghanistan—where we fight the same enemy we once created to bleed the Russians, but just to show that we can do everything twice as much, twice as well, as anybody else, we've added Iraq. And as we export our defective version of democracy to the Middle East, in Latin America, our own "near abroad," our efforts have raised resistance to American influence to new levels. The Chileans, the Argentines, the Bolivians—they were pioneers, they privatized everything, and look at them now. Our satellites are dropping from their orbits! But what is to be done? As Colin Powell once said: "We do deserts, we don't do mountains." Read More

The first time I heard of the poet Elizabeth Alexander was in December 2008, when the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies announced that she had been chosen to compose and read a poem for Barack Obama's inauguration. National Public Radio reported the story on All Things Considered, and host Melissa Block invited Alexander onto the air to read a poem. So it was that, while listening to National Public Radio, which is my habit in the evenings, while lying prostrate on the floor of my office, which is my habit while I listen to National Public Radio, I tried to decide what to make of Elizabeth Alexander.

She seemed to me a master of the American poetic singsong.

Dear Senator Clinton,

I know that it is still weeks before your confirmation hearings, but I write you in the hope that you might redress a grievance that I have with Condoleezza Rice.

Last April I sent the State Department a check for $75 along with an application to renew my passport. Now, I don't know whether it was in conjunction with the national security overhaul that began in September of 2001, or whether it was a red-meat concession to a demographic bloc on which the Republican Party depends for votes, but when I received my renewal last May, I realized that sometime between 1998 and 2008 the State Department had redesigned the familiar U.S. passport. It is my hope that your department can swiftly revert to the old, Madeleine Albright-era design, and can issue me a fresh passport before I have to show this appalling Condoleezza Rice-era edition to any foreigners.

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Of the myriad people, things, and ideas that have come under assault during the last eight years we should not forget about privacy, which took a consistently harsh beating at the hands of the Bush administration. Remember finding out that back in 2002—in secret, ironically enough—the President authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on communication originating within the United States. With cooperation from giants of the industry, the NSA monitored the phone calls of hundreds and probably thousands of citizens, without ever having had to show due cause for doing so.

Early on Saturday morning, the weekend before Election Day, I drove down to Philadelphia with my old college buddy James to put in some get-out-the-vote work for the Obama campaign. James, a staff member for a union of service workers, was obligated to work long hours in a variety of grassroots campaign work. I had never done this before.

We showed up at party headquarters for the 33rd Ward around 9:30. This was in a vacant storefront in a downtrodden strip mall on a hill (a vantage point appropriate to the military tenor of campaign work). James hailed fellow veteran union men and women from around the northeast, all in loud Obama t-shirts with union insignia. I studied the ward map. Here in Kensington--an impoverished, post-industrial majority-minority neighborhood in the northeastern part of Philly--most of the campaign’s efforts were directed to registering and mobilizing new voters. So far there had been a groundswell. Neighbors persuaded neighbors, parents petitioned children and vice versa, spouses and lovers had nagged and pleaded with one another. There were a lot of older people at the campaign office, but a lot of younger people, black, white, Asian, Hispanic, were showing up too: grabbing coffee out of Philadelphia Eagles-branded Dunkin' Donuts boxes, stepping up as Spanish-speakers, holding doors open and giving pragmatic advice to one another. “Tryin’ to make it happen,” said one of the old ladies manning the bottled-water buckets outside.

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Here are some things I remember, from being an old person.

I remember the turnstiles in the Willie Horton ad, representative of Michael Dukakis’s commitment to releasing black rapists and murderers.

I remember the 1991 SNL skit, a fake ad against the Brady Amendment (requiring a seven-day waiting period for hand-guns), where Chris Rock and a masked accomplice rob a nice white family as they sit at home waiting for permission to buy a handgun to protect themselves. The masked accomplice ends up shooting Chris Farley, who collapses dramatically into the coffee table, and then Chris Rock says: “Nice shot WILLIE HORTON! Why’d you have to go and do that, WILLIE HORTON?”

I remember the New Yorker Talk of the Town when the first rumors of the Lewinsky scandal came out. One of Clinton’s aides was interviewed, not knowing whether the rumors were true or not, convinced (as was the case) that the Republicans, looking for one thing (Whitewater), had found something else (Lewinsky), but adding: “If you want to know who I blame, I blame Clinton. I blame him.” Read More

If I had to play for one side or the other, and I had no other thoughts or feelings but the will to side with genius, I’d play for the Republicans. The GOP convention trumped the Democratic—because some intelligence there is, in their control room, who can conceive of mastery on the grandest scale; a moral monster, to be sure; a jinni of evil; a trafficker in political eschatology, unafraid to trespass on myths of the gravest consequence. Someone behind the scenes held the key and boldly turned it: someone foresaw that the means of hatching a McCain triumphant was to make of him a risen God. This was the burden of the Vice Presidential and Presidential addresses, and the galvanism of the last few days.
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