I suppose if there were many American readers who were interested in the harrowing and haunting recollections of Haifa Zangana, an exiled Iraqi patriot and lifelong (since the ’70s) resistance fighter, the tone and palette of U.S. involvement in Iraq and the Middle East might have taken a different form. Nonetheless, some enlightened and fortunate souls will find Zangana’s Dreaming of Baghdad (The Feminist Press) and learn what should have been known well ahead of the mess the U.S. created.

And in case you are deluded enough to think that the 200-day-old 44th presidency is coming to grips with the mess that our nation created, consider this. The continuities in American foreign and military policy are striking no matter who is in the White House. The first-term Obama foreign policy now looks increasingly like the second-term Bush foreign policy. Even where change can be spotted, it regularly seems to follow in the same vein…

But so it goes. —Robert Birnbaum, Sep. 11, 2009

I first became aware of Uruguayan writer, activist, and dog lover Eduardo Galeano about 20 years ago through Lawrence Weschler’s investigations of the amnesty movements in Brazil and Argentina during their post-military dictatorship years (Weschler’s work culminated in his book, A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts With Torturers; Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America briefly put him in the news cycle when Hugo Chávez presented a copy to President Obama). Since then Galeano has gained international recognition, and in this country was awarded the (prestigious) Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom. He also published his splendid Memory of Fire, the three-volume history of the Americas, and a number of other well-regarded tomes. Since Memory of Fire, Galeano has employed a kind of digressive anecdotal style which includes a variety of textual fragments, some fact-based, some invented. Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone (Nation Books) covers 5,000 years of human history with fragments, questions, vignettes, poems, dreamscapes, and more. Here is the book’s last entry, entitled “Lost and Found”:

The twentieth century, which was born proclaiming peace and justice, died bathed in blood. It passed on a world much more unjust than the one it inherited.
The twenty-first century, which also arrived heralding peace and justice, is following in its predecessor’s footsteps.
In my childhood, I was convinced that everything that went astray on earth ended up on the moon.
But the astronauts found no sign of dangerous dreams or broken promises or hopes betrayed.
If not on the moon, where might they be?
Perhaps they were never misplaced.
Perhaps they are in hiding here on earth. Waiting.

 —Robert Birnbaum, Jun. 30, 2009

When Barack Obama mentioned 106-year-old Ann Nixon Cooper in his inspiring victory speech, he utilized a device (if I can call it that) suggesting the immediacy of history through the narrative lens of a very old person/survivor—which has been employed to excellent use in a number of outstanding fictions, Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man (also an amusing film starring Dustin Hoffman), Allan Gurganus’s Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, Peter Schafer’s Amadeus, and Stéphane Audeguy’s The Only Son. Certainly one of the greatest examples of this approach to storytelling is The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (The Dial Press), in which great American novelist Ernest J. Gaines lets centenarian (actually 110-year-old) Jane Pittman tell her story—from slavery on a Louisiana plantation to the so-called Civil Rights era of the mid-20th century. Perhaps Obama’s election valedictory was the reason but whatever: The Dial Press has chosen this time to reissue a softcover edition. —Robert Birnbaum, Jan. 23, 2009

Afghanistan, frequently referred to as the burial ground of empires or somesuch, may well turn out to be Barack Obama’s pivot point to a second term—and the United States’s long downward spiral into oblivion. Based on his campaign assertions, he would seem be continuing the naïve view that has characterized our ongoing failures in that hard, heartless place. Bob Herbert reminds us of this folly, and Dexter Filkins adds some on-the-ground reality to this disaster-in-progress. Of course, if you and I and others were paying attention to the above citations we might already have preemptive demonstrations in the streets instead of all this short-sighted post-election self-congratulation. There have been recent literary pathways to insights into the Afghan, uh, problem: Afghan-British journalist Saira Shah’s The Storyteller’s Daughter; In Between Places, Rory Peterson’s account of his walk across Afghanistan; Tom Bissell’s story “Death Defier.”

Now comes The Wasted Vigil (Knopf), Pakistani novelist Nadeem Aslam’s (Maps for Lost Lovers) new opus set in the present-day pressure cooker of Afghanistan with a cast that includes an American ex-spy doing some form of penance, a Russian woman looking for closure on her soldier brother’s story, and an expatriated British doctor whose Afghan wife was hideously murdered by the Taliban. Without off-putting didacticism, The Wasted Vigil is rife with the cruel facts that should viewed as billboard warnings against further foreign involvement in what I see as the Asian Balkans; no doubt these warnings will not be heeded. Which thankfully is not Aslam’s responsibility—all he did was create a hypnotic narrative with a palette of prose that illuminates people in trouble against the chiaroscuro of another benighted nation’s history.

Related to the above-mentioned work by Saira Shah, here is a clip from her illuminating television documentary Beneath the Veil. —Robert Birnbaum, Jan. 9, 2009

I was searching for video of one of my last visits to Chicago’s Grant Park; that trip took place in August 1968, when Sen. Eugene McCarthy walked across the street from the Conrad Hilton Hotel and addressed the gathered crowd as “the United States government-in-exile.” Though I couldn’t find any footage, but I did come across this fine moment, when Gore Vidal calls William F. Buckley a “crypto-Nazi” and Buckley threatens to punch him in the face. But I digress.

I was struck, as I watched President-elect Obama declaim in Grant Park last week, not only by his eloquence…

It’s the answer that led those who have been told for so long by so many to be cynical, and fearful, and doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.

…but also by the idea that there are so few great public orators and memorable speeches—and that, arguably, Obama has already made a handful of such speeches, from his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention to, more recently, speeches in Berlin and in Philadelphia.

The New Yorker’s James Wood has already provided an astute commentary on the election campaign speechifying, and now he has published a clear-eyed and succinct exegesis of Obama’s Nov. 4 oration, which, by the way, prompts me to offer that that speech is also impressive on the page, as an inspiring read.

Should you choose to pursue this notion, here are a few worthy compendia of speeches: former presidential speechwriter William Safire’s Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History, which collects over 200 speeches from Ancient Greece to the present (you will, as I was, be surprised to see George W. Bush amongst these worthies) and the Library of America’s American Speeches: Political Oratory From the Revolution to the Civil War and American Speeches: Political Oratory From Abraham Lincoln to Bill Clinton. —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 17, 2008

As an almost lifelong observer of presidential politics—which I have come to view as the American quadrennial carnival of democracy—I sadly assert that the once energizing and redemptive spectacle of Americans choosing their president has become a pallid, limpid specter of democracy. This observation began with the Adlai Stevenson-Dwight Eisenhower campaign of 1956 and was ramped up by Theodore H. White’s The Making of The President 1960 (he went on to write three more volumes) and Sen. Eugene McCarthy’s nomination speech for Stevenson in Los Angeles at the 1960 Democratic Convention.

The clip does McCarthy’s eloquence and Stevenson’s stature scant justice.

I have in other places claimed and, hopefully, argued well that that scoundrel of mid-century politics and disgraced president, Richard Nixon, had much to do with the degradation of American democracy—though it was inevitable that advertising and marketing would become the lingua franca of our political process. And elsewere I have bemoaned the virtual disappearance of those singular journalists and reportorial voices with original points of view—the journalism of the pack (which often includes feeble references to the existence of such a thing) having become the current rising tide. Mailer, Izzy Stone, Jules Feiffer, Murray Kempton, Hunter S. Thompson, Tim Cruise, Michael Thomas, Michael Ventura—where are they?

But that’s grist for another grinding.

Thankfully there are now easily accessed alternatives to the gibberish and blather of the television world. (Can someone explain to me what CNN’s claim of being the number one election center means and why Wolf Blather needs to repeat such claims endlessly?) Anyway, I came away from the last (so-called) presidential debate (less candidates Bob Barr and Ralph Nader) dismayed. John McCain continued to expose his lack of impulse control and made his desperation frighteningly prominent. Really, does he believe that Barack Obama (a United States senator, like himself) is a terrorist? Either way one answers that, does it put McCain in a favorable light? And, as Obama succinctly pointed out (at 37 minutes and 20 seconds in), this line of attack says more about McCain than about Obama.

The point (finally) is that there has been so little commentary, rhetoric, or declamation that rises to a level of inspiration or revelation—what we are bombarded with is the odiferous detritus of big money media.

A few exceptions to note:

• Donna Brazile, Al Gore’s 2000 campaign manager and Democratic party operative
• Comedian Sara Silverman’s savvy and very amusing political strategy
• And an interesting follow-up to the Great Schlep

And if you need a refresher in political tightrope-walking, here is Colin Powell offering a solemn and careful appraisal of Barack Obama and a reminder that the manic popinjay version of McCain we are seeing—rather than the well-regarded war hero and political independent Sen. McCain—is a disabling dose of late-onset entitlement and ambition.

You tell me. —Robert Birnbaum, Oct. 21, 2008

Apparently we are heading to an important election and many citizens and various aliens of all stripes, eyes, and ears are being besieged by the various soothsayers, talking heads, and comedians who make their living mediating American and world politics for the rest of us. Personally, I find our leap-year elections fascinating, though I am disconsolate that we no longer have commentators up to the task of vividly narrating these quadrennial jousts. Forget the workmanlike compendium of Theodore White (The Making of the President 1960, 1964, 1968, 1972), we have no Hunter Thompson (Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72) or Timothy Crouse (The Boys on the Bus) or Norman Mailer (Miami and the Siege of Chicago)—at the least, someone needs to attend to the infelicitous gibberish coming out of the senator from Arizona’s mouth.

If you remember last week’s Obama/McCain tête-à-tête, much—all right, some—was made of who correctly quoted Herr Doktor Kissinger on whether the next president should have preconditions for meeting with leaders of nations we don’t like. Christopher Hitchens who, thankfully, pays attention to such things, was prepared to set the record straight (Obama accurately quoted Kissinger). And, of course, as one would accurately surmise from Hitchens’s The Trial of Henry Kissinger, continued hectoring the unindicted war criminal:

Finally, of course, there is Kissinger’s habitual fondness for any form of dictatorship. To have been the friend of Pinochet, Videla, and Suharto, while almost simultaneously fawning on Brezhnev and especially on Mao, is to have been a secretary of state who was soft on fascism—and soft on communism, too! Unconditional talks with Ahmadinejad and Assad? Why not? They are the sort of people with whom he (and Kissinger Associates, the firm that introduces despots to corporations) prefers to do business.

Hitchens, I might add, may be one of the few American writers whose grasp of the sectarian politics of, for instance, France—of which Bernard-Henri Lévy (known as B.H.L. and apparently possessed of film-star-type celebrity in his home country) fulminates in Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism—allows for some Yankee understanding (B.H.L.’s American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville is more relevant and accessible for Americans). Hitchens sums up:

This blending of a relatively modern prejudice with the oldest prejudice of them all [anti-semitism] is what sickens Lévy enough to give it the appellation “Red-Brown.” It is the “new barbarism” of his subtitle. Against it, he counterposes the values of the Enlightenment, the France of the Dreyfusards, of Camus rather than Sartre, of Jean Moulin and Pierre Mendès-France rather than Maurice Thorez or—B.H.L.’s true bête noire—that debased Jacobin of today’s French Socialism, Jean-Pierre Chevènement. The left, he insists, must renounce any version of ultimate or apocalyptic history, along with any mad schemes to create heaven on earth. A secular, pragmatic humanism will be quite demanding enough, thank you.

And though it is not his normal beat, writer/bibliophile Paul Collins (The Trouble With Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine) had some smart things leavened with dazzling erudition to say about John McCain’s verbal tic, his ceaseless use of “my friends”:

McCain’s meeting with parishioners at Rick Warren’s Saddleback presidential forum certainly was a friendly one: He referred to “my friends” another 11 times. In the week leading up to Saddleback, the senator also friended, among others, a crowd in York, Pa., (“Two years ago, I traveled to South Ossetia, my friends”); workers at a locomotive factory in Erie, Pa., (“…my friends, look at the events that are transpiring in Georgia”); and Iowa state fairgoers (“My friends, I’m all in favor of inflating our tires, don’t get me wrong…”).

…But as a crowd bludgeon in modern political speechmaking, “my friends” can be laid at the feet of one man: William Jennings Bryan. His famed 1896 “Cross of Gold” speech at the Democratic National Convention invoked the phrase a mind-crushing 10 times. Inveighing against “those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below,” Bryan declared, “My friends, the question we are to decide is: Upon which side will the Democratic party fight; upon the side of the idle holders of idle capital or upon the side of the struggling masses?” Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” is historically considered to be among the most viscerally powerful speeches ever made by an American politician, with one New York World journalist reporting the crowd’s reaction as “tumult—hills and valleys of shrieking men and women.” The temptation to bottle that kind of lightning again is alluring.

And if you need to test my assertion of the degraded state of political journalism (Frank Rich and Gail Collins excepted), have a look at the recent New York Review of Books reissue of Mailer’s classic 1968 convention coverage, Miami and the Siege of Chicago (with an introduction by Rich). His description and assessment of Chicago’s stature and his asides on Brooklyn are just part of the pleasure of this vital book. —Robert Birnbaum, Oct. 8, 2008