Half a century ago, Americans feared atomic weapons of a nation that long longer exists, the Soviet Union, and its potential to destroy us. Now, as devastation spreads in Japan, anxiety arises about the original Faustian bargain to unleash a power that can’t be fully controlled. If this sounds like the start of a Luddite tract, not so. Nuclear power will be not be disinvented but, as we now know, can not be taken for granted, either. When the horrendous losses in Japan are finally stopped,...

“Dying is easy, comedy is hard” goes the old saying. Even while Stewart, Colbert and SNL struggle, politics are making parody impossible. Standup routines at Washington’s Gridiron Dinner are tame as the weekend Oscar goes to a British think tank, which unveils (?) Jihad Cosmo magazine with beauty tips, mujahideen dating advice, complexion care and a guide for suicide-bomber child-rearing. My friend and fellow octogenarian Helen Gurley Brown may have something to say about that,...

What a difference 66 years makes! In 1945, the Japanese homeland was devastated, not by Nature, by my country dropping atomic bombs to save lives of soldiers like me in what surely would have been a bloody invasion. Now, an earthquake and tsunami have set off scrambling in that unwarlike nation to avert another nuclear catastrophe, and reports show the 8.9 magnitude seizure has shifted the Earth off its axis. The difference between now and then is a shattering reminder that nothing in the world stays...

The illusion of human control yields another metaphor as President Obama enters a press conference after learning about the disaster in Japan. “Today’s events remind us of just how fragile life can be,” he tells journalists before taking questions about budget battles and Libya, all framed in the certainty that there must be answers to everything. A day later, a faraway catastrophe is spreading with a nuclear meltdown in Japan and ripples of an earthquake that reach the U.S. to...

The overloaded mind reels to keep up with Scott Walker, Peter King and Muammar Qaddafi, the Three Stooges of this news cycle producing headline headaches that rattle our media teeth. Do we have to keep up with debates about no-fly zones over Wisconsin by disloyal Muslim-Americans? Today’s cacophony recalls days when you could go on an isolated vacation and come back to marvel at how little of importance you had missed by being cut off for weeks. Do we really need to know every twist and turn...

James Dean, Marilyn, Elvis… Fifty years ago, a classic book defined celebrities in the TV age as “well-known for their well-knowness,” and, it often turned out, as disposable as Kleenex when their fame burned out. Historian Daniel Boorstin wrote “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo Events in America,” a prophecy now having its umpteenth replay as a survey shows Charlie Sheen getting more Internet and social media attention than Barack Obama. Confusion about reality has gone...

If Justices were paid by the word, Clarence Thomas would be eligible for those government assistance programs he hates, if it weren’t for his family’s right-wing welfare income, which Thomas’ disclosure forms for 13 years “inadvertently omitted due to a misunderstanding of the filing instructions.” In the five years since the Justice spoke in oral arguments carried on by colleagues with lawyers, he and Mrs. Thomas have been loquacious in lucrative self-expression that...

The buzzword has reached its entertainment destination, a Saturday Night Live skit spoofing Charlie Sheen’s obsession, but in American politics, no end is in sight. The Wisconsin standoff goes on along with the budget game of chicken to avoid a Washington shutdown, prompting E.J. Dionne to recall Nixon’s “‘madman theory’…a negotiating approach that induces the other side to believe you are capable of dangerously irrational actions and leads it to back down to avoid...

This week the President marked the 150th anniversary of a predecessor’s words as the nation was falling into civil war. What Abraham Lincoln said then could well be a model for Barack Obama at his own second inaugural if and when he is reelected in a time of turmoil and division. In praising the Great Emancipator for charting “a course to transcend our discord and bind the wounds of a severed country,” Obama cited Lincoln’s “unceasing belief and our enduring faith that...

After a year of Tea Party rage over taxpayer money, Republicans are struggling to keep social conservatives in the tent with Mike Huckabee as the poster boy for the effort while those still in office try to focus on deficits and government spending. Huckabee, recently laid off by Fox News, revisits his ministerial roots by chastizing pregnant Natalie Portman for flaunting her unmarried status at the Oscars to “glorify and glamorize the idea of out-of-wedlock children.” After an uproar,...

No political or social infamy today but, as my odometer turns to 87, a memory about the sweetness of youthful longing. Seventy-four years ago, on my Bar Mitzvah day, I went to the movies to see the elegantly beautiful British actress Madeleine Carroll and, on the day the Jewish religion declared me a man, I fell hopelessly in love with the most golden shiksa of them all. A decade and a war later, at my alma mater, City College of New York, I was doing publicity for the Institute of Film Techniques,...

Behind the headlines, two swatches of news reflect a reality that tells us much about our moral lives today. In Afghanistan, boys under 15 are collecting firewood when a U.S. helicopter swoops down to kill nine of them. Gen. Petraeus says, “These deaths should have never happened.” Meanwhile, another high-ranking General talks about losing his son there and the bitterness he had expressed days later. “Their struggle is your struggle,” Gen. John Kelly had told an audience. “If...

Since William Howard Taft a century ago, no American president has come close to matching his portly presence at 300 pounds, but next year’s Republican field could change that. The subject comes up after a GOP split over Michelle Obama’s campaign against obesity, with conservatives mocking the First Lady as Mike Huckabee and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie applaud her efforts to slim down chubby children with healthy diets and exercise. In the TV era, from Eisenhower to Obama, White House...

In eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation, the President blinks by telling governors he will let states opt out of the individual mandate for medical insurance in 2014, three years earlier than the reform law allows. After a waste of two months with a House dog-and-pony show of repeal and Senate failure to go along, the bipartisan mess that politicians have made of American health care is now a post-disaster triage scene after last November’s electoral catastrophe. As the Obama White House starts...

As 94-year-old Kirk Douglas upstages the upstarts at the Oscars comes word that the oldest living veteran of World War I has died at 110. Kirk teases the supporting actresses by dawdling with the envelope, pinches winner Melissa Leo at her request and, after she drops an F-bomb, lets her grab his cane as they exit, she looking less steady than he. Meanwhile, Frank Buckles, who as a 16-year-old lied about his age to enlist in 1917 and survived World War II as a civilian Japanese prisoner, takes with...

This year’s Oscars are about something. One marvelous movie recalls a day in June, 1939 at the New York World’s Fair, a 15-year-old boy watching an open car with the King and Queen of England slowly driving by, less than fifty feet from his excited eyes. Until then, the outside world had been grainy newspaper pictures and black-and-white newsreels, but here was a flesh-and-blood couple, he in resplendent uniform, she in a pale blue dress doing a languid backhand wave as if strewing invisible...

The opposite of hero worship is negative self-definition that tells you who you are not and could never be. Such anti-role models can influence a life as much as those you admire and want to emulate. Hugh Hefner has always been at the top of the not-me list and, now that the geriatric Playboy founder is exposing himself to ridicule by marrying a 24-year-old Playmate (“It will be,” says Letterman, “an open-casket ceremony” with Leno adding that the bride is planning a June...

As decades-long dictatorships teeter and fall, is it unreasonable to ask whether anyone in or out of our government really knows what’s going on and why? TV screens fill up with talking heads of politicians, academics and think-tank denizens whose combined wisdom comes down to admitting they don’t know why this is happening now and can’t tell how and when it will end. A New York Times panel of experts ponders the question, “Why Didn’t the U.S. Foresee the Arab Revolts?”...

The Daily Show offers an inadvertent seminar on the falling quality of public liars by juxtaposing a prank phone call to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker with Jon Stewart’s interview of master obfuscator Donald Rumsfeld. Granted that Walker is only a novice, Rumsfeld never would have been taken in by a journalist posing as a powerful backer. Even as a Congressional factotum in the Eisenhower days, he was Mr. Smooth. Now, he is still lying with a straight face to an uncharacteristically flummoxed...

Tea-party politicians are accomplishing what Communists never could–dividing Americans by economic conflict–but in an upside-down way that Karl Marx never would have predicted. Instead of masses revolting against the rich, it’s the Far Right trying to turn back the clock by crushing organized labor. Even as a Gallup poll shows 61 percent of the public favor bargaining rights for workers, new Statehouse Zealots, as ideological as American Communists ever were but even less realistic,...

Schools and banks were closed, no mail was delivered but, aside from that, nobody seemed to notice Presidents Day. In a Gallup poll, Ronald Reagan is named “greatest,” followed by Abraham Lincoln, Bill Clinton, John F. Kennedy, George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt–and Barack Obama. (Name recognition seems to matter.) For someone who has lived through 13 of 44 White House occupants, “greatest” is meaningless. The important question is how much difference did the men...

These times echo the opening lines of Shakespeare’s “Richard III,” rage against the world by “deformed, unfinished” voices. In the Middle East and our own Midwest, discontent boils up into acting out of bone-deep beliefs, hatreds, tribal feuds and jealousies. The turmoil proceeds on separate but parallel tracks yet, in a grownup conversation about American reality, is there no room for an overview that encompasses our approach to both? What these crises share is that,...

At first glance, the Massachusetts Senator’s revelation of his childhood sexual abuse on 60 Minutes might be filed under the heading of “Things I Didn’t Need to Know,” but it’s far from that. From the still unfolding Catholic Church scandals, there is growing evidence of how badly victims are hurt and how long they carry the scars, particularly, as it so often happens, they are too frightened and ashamed to tell anyone, even their parents. A camp counselor, Sen. Brown...

Karl Rove has a new mission–to prove the President is a natural-born citizen. Alarmed by a survey showing 51 percent of Republican primary voters do not believe Barack Obama was born in the U.S. and another 21 percent “not sure,” Bush’s former Brain warns, “Within our party, we’ve got to be very careful about allowing these people who are the Birthers and the 9/11-deniers to get too high a profile and say too much without setting the record straight.” Translation: The...

What used to be unspeakable is now not only news but fodder for tweets, blog posts and myriad forms of comment. Freedom of information has advanced, hasn’t it? A 39-year-old woman, CBS correspondent Lara Logan, is “beaten and assaulted” by a crowd in Cairo. We know because her network issued a terse press release, which the Washington Post and New York Times respectfully reported, adding only such information as citing a report about previous sexual attacks on women journalists. The...