Water be a String to my Guitar

Water, be a string to my guitar. The new conquerors have arrived
and the old ones have gone. It’s difficult to remember my face
in mirrors. Be my memory that I may see what I lost…
Who am I after this exodus? I have a rock
that carries my name over hills that overlook what has come
and gone…seven hundred years guide my funeral behind the city walls…
and in vain time circles to save my past from a moment
that gives birth to the history of exile in me…and in others…
Water, be a string to my guitar, the new conquerors have arrived
and the old ones have gone south as nations who renovate their days
in the rubble of transformation: I know who I was yesterday, so what
will I become tomorrow under the Atlantic banners of Columbus? Be a string,
water, be a string to my guitar. There is no Egypt in Egypt, no
Fez in Fez, and Syria is distant. And no hawk
in my kin’s banner, no river east of the palm trees besieged
by quick Mongol horses. In which Andalus will I end? Right here
or over there? I will know that I perished here and left my best
behind me: my past. Nothing remains for me except my guitar,
O water, be a string to my guitar. The conquerors have gone
and the conquerors have come…

Mahmoud Darwish

translation: Fady Joudah
excerpted from If I Were Another;
Farrar, Straus, and Grioux, 2009

From The Washington Post:

Agassi was born in Las Vegas to a brutal Iranian immigrant, a former Olympic boxer, who forced his four children to play tennis. As a pre-schooler, Andre began hitting balls on the backyard court for hours every day. School, friends, social life and especially thinking were considered distractions by his father, who terrified the entire family. But while his sisters rebelled and his older brother, Philly, finally lacked the killer instinct, Andre became his father's obsession and whipping boy — one who was expected to whip other boys and unsuspecting men on court. His father pitted him at age 8 against suckers, including football great Jim Brown, who foolishly bet $500 that he could beat the kid. Before junior tournaments, Mr. Agassi fed his son caffeine-laced pills. Later, he tried to turn Andre on to speed.

At the age of 12, Andre traveled to Australia with a team of elite young players. For each tournament he won, he got a beer as a reward. Then in the seventh grade he was shipped off to the Bollettieri Academy in Florida, where his tennis flourished, but his life turned feral. Drinking hard liquor and smoking dope, he wore an earring, eyeliner and a Mohawk. Nobody objected as long as he won matches. The academy, in Agassi's words, was “Lord of the Flies with forehands.” Since the press and the tennis community still regard Nick Bollettieri as a seer and an innovator whose academy spawned dozens of similar training facilities, Agassi's critical opinion of him may shock the ill-informed. But in fact, Bollettieri is the paradigmatic tennis coach: that is, a man of no particular aptitude or experience and no training at all to deal with children.

More here.

James Crabtree in Prospect Magazine:

One year on from his election victory, how should we judge President Barack Obama? He has passed a $787bn (£500bn) stimulus package and a $3.4 trillion budget, bailed out America’s floundering car makers, and launched landmark legislation to reform healthcare, tighten regulation on a crippled financial sector, and cut greenhouse gases. Against a backdrop of economic chaos and partisan division, and especially if some form of health reform passes by the end of the year, Obama’s early record will look impressive. It’s been a good start.

That said, a president who promised unity has also brought discord. The saner wings of the American right (and some Democrats) worry that his moderate tone hides policies that dangerously expand the grip of the state, and the depth of its debt. The less sane gather in the streets and howl about the road to socialism. Critics on the left, meanwhile, already see a once-in-a-generation missed opportunity. Obama has a thumping electoral mandate, and control of congress. Yet he stimulated the economy too little, and fluffed a perfect moment to bring in radical measures to take on America’s banks and health insurers. Behind these worries, doubts lurk about what the president stands for, and whether the “Obama-ism” implicit in his campaign can translate into governance. Put more simply: has Obama begun to change Washington, or has Washington begun to change him?

More here.

Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker:

In southwest Israel, at the border of Egypt and the Gaza Strip, there is a small crossing station not far from a kibbutz named Kerem Shalom. A guard tower looms over the flat, scrubby buffer zone. Gaza never extends more than seven miles wide, and the guards in the tower can see the Mediterranean Sea, to the north. The main street in Gaza, Salah El-Deen Road, runs along the entire twenty-five-mile span of the territory, and on a clear night the guards can watch a car make the slow journey from the ruins of the Yasir Arafat International Airport, near the Egyptian border, toward the lights of Gaza City, on the Strip’s northeastern side. Observation balloons hover just outside Gaza, and pilotless drones freely cross its airspace. Israeli patrols tightly enforce a three-mile limit in the Mediterranean and fire on boats that approach the line. Between the sea and the security fence that surrounds the hundred and forty square miles of Gaza live a million and a half Palestinians.

Every opportunity for peace in the Middle East has been led to slaughter, and at this isolated desert crossing, on June 25, 2006, another moment of promise culminated in bloodshed. The year had begun with tumult. That January, Hamas, which the U.S. government considers a terrorist group, won Palestine’s parliamentary elections, defeating the more moderate Fatah Party. Both parties sent armed partisans into the streets, and Gaza verged on civil war. Then, on June 9th, a tentative truce between Hamas and Israel ended after an explosion on a beach near Gaza City, apparently caused by an Israeli artillery shell, killed seven members of a Palestinian family, who were picnicking. (The Israelis deny responsibility.) Hamas fired fifteen rockets into Israel the next day. The Israelis then launched air strikes into Gaza for several days, killing eight militants and fourteen civilians, including five children.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Who would not wish for a close relative like Aunt Jane? In early 1817, the year she died, suffering, perhaps, from lymphoma and beginning work on a novel she became too ill to finish, Jane Austen wrote a letter to her 8-year-old niece, Cassandra.

“Ym raed Yssac,” it begins, “I hsiw uoy a yppah wen raey.”

Every word in the letter is spelled backward, from that opening New Year’s wish to her dear Cassy to the signature, “Ruoy Etanoitceffa Tnua, Enaj Netsua.” The author, here as elsewhere, does not condescend to her readers, but she also knows who they are and how to give them pleasure. Imagine an 8-year-old girl, perhaps as precocious as her aunt, playfully deciphering these good wishes. The difficulty comes, though, in imagining Austen herself. She was such a subtle reader of her characters’ manners, so knowing about their flaws and virtues, yet herself so opaque and mysterious a presence that it is hard to imagine her in the flesh. You have to read her the way her most sentient characters read their companions, attending to subtle signs, mannerisms and language.

And for anyone who has even begun to take her measure, there may be no greater pleasure than to visit the new exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum, “A Woman’s Wit: Jane Austen’s Life and Legacy.” Like Austen’s own voice, the show is exquisitely informative while being almost laconic, displaying a wealth of material with careful explication, yet allowing the viewer to tease the writer’s sensibility out of the objects on display. The only thing out of character is a self-conscious, 16-minute documentary, “The Divine Jane,” created for the show, in which contemporary figures speak about Austen’s importance — though little that Cornel West, Fran Lebowitz or Colm Toibin have to say comes close to what the documents communicate on their own.

More here.

We make fun of Nostradamus and numerologists, but give editors an anniversary and the floodgates open. We’re anniversary-ologists, as USA Today might say. Unfortunately, trying to take the pulse of what happened in Eastern Europe in 1989 is more complex than counting back the years. Just as 1865 or 1945 can’t be explained without 1787 or 1933, so 1989 — the year communism either imploded or didn’t, the world either changed or didn’t and history either ended or kept going — poses challenges. One can take the “I was there” approach of Michael Meyer, Newsweek’s bureau chief for Germany, Central Europe and the Balkans between 1988 and 1992, in his book “The Year That Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall.” Meyer places the spotlight on what happened — Hungary’s opening of its borders, the Nov. 9 fall of the Berlin Wall, the domino decline of other Eastern European states — while lacing in accessibly deep, if not Hegelian, historical explanation. Another tack is the “if you knew what I know” analysis offered in Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin’s “Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment,” which frames the story as badly told rather than untold: a fantasy of people power sweeping Europe that’s better dissected nation-by-nation, with insight into doomed governments and failed systems.

more from Carlin Romano at the LA Times here.

Johnson loved literary biography and practiced it superbly in his wonderful “Lives of the Poets” (1779-81). It is appropriate that he continues to be the subject of valuable literary biographies, of which the masterwork will always be his friend James Boswell’s “Life of Samuel Johnson” (1791). Boswell’s “Life” is so strong a book that common readers may wonder why more biographies of Johnson proliferate, to which the answer is the spiritual complexity and intellectual splendor of the most eminent of all literary critics. “Reflection” was one of Johnson’s favorite terms, and we need as many accurate reflections of and upon him that we can get. Johnson’s personality was worthy of Shakespearean representation: sometimes I rub my eyes to dispel the illusion that Shakespeare wrote, not Johnson’s work, but the man himself into existence. It delighted Johnson to identify himself with Falstaff, whose deliberate merriment he loved, even as he expressed moral disapproval of Shakespeare’s “compound of sense and vice; of sense which may be admired but not esteemed, of vice which may be despised, but hardly detested.” Thinking of his own dangerous melancholy, Johnson observed that Falstaff made himself necessary to Prince Hal “by the most pleasing of all qualities, perpetual gaiety, by an unfailing power of exciting laughter.”

more from Harold Bloom at the NYT here.

Gift

I took everything from my mother, her liquor, her ghosts,
her sweetness, her heavy lips, her breath of sorrow.
I took her waist and her spools, her ears and her thimble,
I took her green thumb, and the purple cosmos blossoms
that trembled under her kitchen window.
I took her feet and her loneliness, the cities
she lived in, the small towns, their friendless dusks,
her quilts and perfumes and fingers.
I took the sound of her dresses at midnight,
and the goat she kept as a child,
I took the crickets beneath the boards of her first houses
and her lovers; I got lost in their shadows.
I took her hatred of her father,
I ate from her dishes in rooms that smelled of the sea.
I took the war and the horses that pulled the cart
that carried her mother away.
I took the odor of crushed thyme and sweat,
I took a handkerchief embroidered by my great aunt
and the iron in her shoulders and the road signs
of old villages.
I took my mother’s maiden name and her fear of oceans,
I took her bravery and her strangeness,
I took a blessing from her and
the lullabies she whispered, drunk,
and my terror of that dark music.
I took my love for a woman
who walked through a broken doorway
with her eyes closed
following no one.

by Rita Gabis

from The Wild Field; Alice James Books,
Cambridge, MA, 1994

George Monbiot in The Guardian:

There is no point in denying it: we're losing. Climate change denial is spreading like a contagious disease. It exists in a sphere that cannot be reached by evidence or reasoned argument; any attempt to draw attention to scientific findings is greeted with furious invective. This sphere is expanding with astonishing speed.

A survey last month by the Pew Research Centre suggests that the proportion of Americans who believe there is solid evidence that the world has been warming over the last few decades has fallen from 71% to 57% in just 18 months. Another survey, conducted in January by Rasmussen Reports, suggests that, due to a sharp rise since 2006, US voters who believe global warming has natural causes (44%) outnumber those who believe it is the result of human action (41%).

A study by the website Desmogblog shows that the number of internet pages proposing that man-made global warming is a hoax or a lie more than doubled last year. The Science Museum's Prove it! exhibition asks online readers to endorse or reject a statement that they've seen the evidence and want governments to take action. As of yesterday afternoon, 1,006 people had endorsed it and 6,110 had rejected it. On Amazon.co.uk, books championing climate change denial are currently ranked at 1, 2, 4, 5, 7 and 8 in the global warming category. Never mind that they've been torn to shreds by scientists and reviewers, they are beating the scientific books by miles. What is going on?

More here.

Manan Ahmed in The National:

The Taliban are indeed a murderous lot, intent on disrupting and destroying civil society and cowing helpless civilians to their particularly offensive version of piety. But their success in finding a foothold and destabilising Swat relied not on any appeal to a religious cause or tribal brotherhood but on exploiting existing political and judicial imbalances in the region. Pakistan’s federally administered areas have never been integrated into the state apparatus – after 62 years, they lack basic infrastructure, any accountable civil administration, working courts or police, and have very few rights in Islamabad. The inhabitants of these regions have long experienced corrosive resource exploitation at the hands of the centre without receiving any benefit to their own communities.

The 3.5 million or more inhabitants of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, of which Waziristan is a component, only received the adult franchise in 1997 – 50 years after the creation of Pakistan. This area, with the highest poverty and lowest literacy rates in Pakistan, is still governed according to the brutal British colonial legal code: a family or even a village can be punished for the crime of a single individual, there is no protection from multiple sentences for the same offence, and most damnably, the state has no obligation to show cause for imprisonment. Most damaging is the utter lack of a judicial system that can adjudicate civil disputes – one reason for the persistent calls to impose Sharia within the region. The Pakistani state has yet to resolve these issues and, in the meantime, segments of the discontented population have resorted to armed aggression against the centre – which has taken both secular and religious forms. Decades of frustration allowed the Taliban a foothold in Swat, and the same conditions exist in Baluchistan.

So when the Taliban flee south from Waziristan into Baluchistan, they will find another populace suffering, denied their share of the national resources and embroiled in a long conflict with the state. They are likely to find sympathetic ears to their message of chaos and hate – and the military is sure to take this opportunity to move in and crush the existing secularist Baluchi nationalist movement, which has been waging a guerrilla war against the state since 2005.

More here.

Sakhr al-Makhadi at Al Jazeera:

A series of controversial Israeli films are provoking outrage and plaudits in equal measure at the London Film Festival.

The best documentary award has gone to one of the year's most controversial films.

Defamation is a polemic by Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir. In his expose of America's Anti-Defamation League (ADL), he claims anti-Semitism is being exaggerated for political purposes. He argues that American Jewish leaders travel around the world exploiting the memory of the Holocaust to silence criticism of Israel.

He gets inside the ADL, which claims to be the most powerful lobby group of its type anywhere in the world. With unprecedented access, he travels with them as they meet foreign leaders, and use the memory of the Holocaust to further their pro-Israeli agenda.

At one point, an ADL leader admits to Shamir that “we need to play on that guilt”.

Shamir says his film, Defamation, started out as a study of “the political games being played behind the term anti-Semitism”.

“It became more a film about perceptions and the way Jews and Israelis choose to see themselves and define themselves – a lot of the time unfortunately choosing the role of eternal victims as a way of life.”

More here. [Thanks to Kris Kotarski.]

Robert Lawless in Counterpunch:

In the September 30, 2009, online edition of CounterPunch in an article titled “Country of Constant Sorrow: McChrystal's Afghan Desolation,” Vijay Prashad wrote,

“Enter a war zone with the expectation that the heavy armor will coerce the population into electing a favorable head of state; if this fails, then take refuge in your anthropologists, who will find a quick way to ‘nativize’ the war and help you clamber onto the helicopters. The country you have left behind is now more of a humanitarian disaster than when you self-righteously flew in on the wings of humanitarian interventionism.”

The notion of anthropologists being helpmates in the First World conquest of the Third World seems now to have become embedded in the day-to-day understanding of the Bush-initiated Iraq-Afghanistan cultural-military fiasco. Whether political scientists, philosophers, area specialists, or whoever actually fills the “societal” expert position on the Human Terrain Systems (HTS) teams, anthropologists apparently are to take the blame. And anthropologists themselves are not exempt from furthering this notion.

Perhaps the most notorious anthropologist associated with the U.S. military’s HTS is Montgomery McFate, who writes primarily for military publications and whose pivotal article “Anthropology and Counterinsurgency” appeared in the April 2005 issue of Military Review. A hapless mix of shoddy history and misdirected anthropology, her article was, nevertheless, reprinted in the 2007 edition of Annual Editions Anthropology — along with articles by Conrad Kottak, Richard Lee, and Ralph Linton, and in the 2009 second edition of Classic Readings in Cultural Anthropology, edited by Gary Ferraro — along with brand-name anthropologists such as Horace Miner, Clyde Kluckhohn, Edward T. Hall, Richard Lee, and E. E. Evans-Pritchard. Why McFate deserves to be in this company is unclear; there are many other articles by respectable anthropologists that clearly explained the HTS affair. [Among them have been David Price’s path-breaking contributions on this site and in our CounterPunch newsletter. Editors.] Making McFate’s piece widely available only further sullies anthropology.

From Harvard Magazine:

Near the University of Bologna—the world’s oldest, founded in 1088—is a medieval museum displaying carved memorial plaques that honor great professors of the past. “They all show the professor on the podium, with the students below,” says Thomas Forrest Kelly, Knafel professor of music. “Often the students are asleep, playing dice or cards, or fornicating.” Much has changed since the Middle Ages, but one thing that persists is the lecture. The medieval university invented lecturing—the word comes from the Latin verb legere, to read—to cope with the scarcity of books: a lecturer would read the only available copy of a book to the gathering of students. “That was high technology in the thirteenth century,” says Kelly, “but not high technology for the twenty-first century!”

Now sit in one of Kelly’s lectures in his undergraduate course Literature and the Arts B-51, “First Nights: Five Performance Premieres” (see “First Nights,” January-February 2000, page 52). This morning in Sanders Theatre, he is describing the 1913 Paris premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring. He does not read from books. Instead, Kelly punches up audio recordings of Stravinsky reflecting on the tumultuous performance, and projects color slides of oil paintings and photographs of the composer, plus photographs of the dancers and conductor Pierre Monteux. Next come pictures of the ballet’s score and the original costumes, plus paintings by Nicholas Roerich, the set designer. There’s another audio track of Stravinsky, this time disparaging the work of the choreographer, Vaslav Nijinsky, and a modern video of the opening dance performed by the Joffrey Ballet. Next, as the Rite’s primal rhythms and fierce dissonances thump and cascade through the loudspeakers, Kelly breaks down the piece into its musical units, walking the class through the score with a flashlight pointer.

More here.

Janet Maslin in The New York Times:

“I always say that electricity is a fantastic invention,” the British economist Michael Lipton once told Michael Specter, whose bristling new book, “Denialism,” explores the dangerous ways in which scientific progress can be misunderstood. “But if the first two products had been the electric chair and the cattle prod,” Mr. Lipton continued, “I doubt that most consumers would have seen the point.” Here is what they would have done instead, if Mr. Specter, a staff writer for The New Yorker and former foreign correspondent for The New York Times, correctly captures the motifs that shape the stubbornly anti-scientific thinking for which his book is named: they would have denounced electricity as a force for evil, blamed its prevalence on venal utility companies, universalized the relatively rare horrific experiences of people who have been injured by electrical currents and called for a ban on electricity use.

The term “denialism,” used by Mr. Specter as an all-purpose, pop-sci buzzword, is defined by him as what happens “when an entire segment of society, often struggling with the trauma of change, turns away from reality in favor of a more comfortable lie.” In this hotly argued yet data-filled diatribe, Mr. Specter skips past some of the easiest realms of science baiting (i.e., evolution) to address more current issues, from the ethical questions raised by genome research to the furiously fought debate over the safety of childhood vaccinations.

More here.

Urs Fischer specializes in making jaws drop. Cutting giant holes in gallery walls, digging a crater in Gavin Brown’s gallery floor in 2007, creating amazing hyperrealist wallpaper for a group show at Tony Shafrazi: It all percolates with uncanny destructiveness, operatic uncontrollability, and barbaric sculptural power. It’s set expectations for his full-building retrospective at the New Museum incredibly high, and he’s working hard to meet them. Fischer has lowered ceilings, added lights, and closed off doors, trying to get the effects he wants in this cold, almost soulless exhibition space. So much so that the curator Massimiliano Gioni mused to one writer, “I have thought a couple of times of killing him.” Thrill seekers, be forewarned: There’s bravura work but no drop-dead moment here. Each of Fischer’s three floors is beautiful, and each has an elfin elusiveness and deep material intelligence. They also have dead spots and duds. Fischer is weakest at smaller discrete sculptures and best when he’s taking over entire spaces or reacting to other artworks nearby. (Also, at a rumored $330,000 to stage, the show is another example of an art world that doesn’t know when to say no.) Had Fischer made a swashbuckling statement by (let’s say) demolishing the museum’s second and third floors, he would have wowed everyone. Instead, thankfully, he took the hard way, putting together multiple ideas: exploring the sculptural-philosophical-experiential qualities of fullness on the fourth floor, emptiness on the third, and a mixture of both on the second floor.

more from Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine here.

What kind of people love the paintings and drawings of Antoine Watteau? I think of them listening to Nick Drake and knowing every Alan Rudolph film. In fact, they are the present-day counterparts of the characters inhabiting Watteau’s paintings: young but already scuffed-up by life, dreamers of the exquisite woebegone. I don’t know how one can love Watteau without somehow making him one’s contemporary. For example, this premier painter of women’s necks seemed ever-present in the East Village of yore, with its hordes of women in nape-revealing punk haircuts. Watteau’s complex formula has a strong element of verité as it revels in artifice and seeps wistfulness. His sentiments, freshened by some readings on him, can seem eternally present. From what has been handed down through scraps of half-reliable information, Watteau, the son of a rather disagreeable roofer, escaped from the Flemish hinterlands, and the gritty, striving narrowness that appeared to be his inheritance, to Paris as an apprentice decorative painter. After several masters, including the theatre painter, Gillot, he made his mark among the rich intelligentsia who were ultimately only of use to him as a springboard towards creating the imaginative concoction that established him, the fête galante, a discontinuous tableau of love, flirtation and posturing. In most works, playfully-costumed aristocrats pose as actors, musicians, or themselves in the foregrounds of private parks. An elusive, complicated character himself, Watteau moved from one friend’s house to the next, often pursued by avid collectors, and died at 36 of tuberculosis.

more from Joe Fyfe at artcritical here.

Claude Lévi-Strauss—the man who has created anthropology as a total occupation, involving a spiritual commitment like that of the creative artist or the adventurer or the psychoanalyst—is no man of letters. Most of his writings are scholarly, and he has always been associated with the academic world. Since 1960 he has held a very grand academic post, the newly created chair of social anthropology at the Collège de France, and heads a large and richly endowed research institute. But his academic eminence and ability to dispense patronage are scarcely adequate measures of the formidable position he occupies in French intellectual life today. In France, where there is more awareness of the adventure, the risk involved in intelligence, a man can be both a specialist and the subject of general and intelligent interest and controversy. Hardly a month passes in France without a major article in some serious literary journal, or an important public lecture, extolling or damning the ideas and influence of Lévi-Strauss. Apart from the tireless Sartre and the virtually silent Malraux, he must be the most interesting intellectual figure in France today.

more from Sontag’s 1963 essay in the NYRB here.

George Soros and James D. Wolfensohn in Project Syndicate:

Hated, alienated, and shunned as thieves and worse, the Roma have for too long been easy and defenseless targets for disgruntled racists in Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and other European countries.

The Roma, as a people, reaped next to nothing from the prosperity that the former East Bloc countries have enjoyed since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Nevertheless, even before the current economic downturn, right-wing political leaders in Eastern Europe resorted to Roma-bashing in order to win support on the cheap. The message of hate continues to appeal to many people, including a few who are ready to resort to violence.

In the past 14 months, nine Roma have been murdered during a killing spree in Hungary. In August, gunmen invaded the home of an impoverished Roma widow, Maria Balogh, shot her to death, and wounded her 13-year-old daughter. In April, killers gunned down a Roma factory worker as he was walking to his job. In February, a Roma father and his five-year-old son were killed in front of their home near Budapest. The house was burned to the ground.

Last November, a Roma couple was killed in northeastern Hungary. To their credit, Hungary’s police mounted an unprecedented manhunt and, in late August, arrested four suspects, including some who wore swastika tattoos. In the same month, two medical students in Romania killed and dismembered a 65-year-old Roma man and left his body in the trunk of a car.

Perhaps the rash of killings will dampen the racist rhetoric. Perhaps people will see that the underlying message being spun is one of criminal hatred, and perhaps the violence will subside. But it is safe to assume, however, that as long as the Roma are mired at the bottom of Europe’s socio-economic pecking order, it is only a matter of time before racist attacks on them begin again.

Dave Eggers reviews a posthumous collection of stories by Kurt Vonnegut, in the New York Times Book Review:

It’s been two years since Kurt Vonnegut departed this world, and it’s hard not to feel a bit rudderless without him. Late in his life, Vonnegut issued a series of wonderfully exasperated columns for the magazine In These Times. During the darkest years of the Bush administration, these essays, later collected in “A Man Without a Country,” were guide and serum to anyone with a feeling that pretty much everyone had lost their minds. In a 2003 interview, when asked the softball question “How are you?” he answered: “I’m mad about being old, and I’m mad about being American. Apart from that, O.K.”

Vonnegut left the planet just about the time we, as a nation, were crawling toward the light again, so it’s tempting to wonder what he would have made of where we are now. Would he have been pleased by the election of Barack Obama? Most likely he’d have been momentarily heartened, then exasperated once again witnessing the lunatic-­strewn town halls, the Afghanistan quagmire, the triumph of volume over reason, of machinery over humanity.

For the last many decades of his life, Vonnegut was our sage and chain-­smoking truth-teller, but before that, before his trademark black humor and the cosmic scope of “Cat’s Cradle” and “Slaughterhouse-­Five,” he was a journeyman writer of tidy short fictions.

More here.