When the second tower was hit, a loved one called and said, “Turn on the TV.” Still holding the phone, I did and said without thinking, “This is the worst day of my life.” It was only much later that I understood that reflexive reaction. Over more than seven decades, there had been other times of being jolted out of the smooth hum of daily life into awareness that the ground under our feet was not as solid as it seemed. Pearl Harbor. The Cuban Missile Crisis. The weekend JFK was killed…...

On this anniversary weekend, an old question I used to ask editors and writers who were pitching a story during my working lifetime arises, “Why are you telling me all this?” Starting right after the President’s jobs speech Thursday night, TV and cable news have been saturated with running accounts of two or three possible terrorists planning a U.S. attack on 9/11, with most of the information coming from government sources. In New York, Hillary Clinton announces there was “a specific,...

For anyone coming out of a two-year coma, Barack Obama’s jobs speech to Congress may have looked like the familiar sight of an American President exhorting lawmakers to legislate solutions to a crisis. For the rest of who have had the misfortune to be wide awake, what was striking was Obama’s discovery of the imperative mood in his address. “Pass this jobs bill,” he kept repeating like the mantra of a hypnotist trying to impose his will on assembled Tea Party naysayers. Whatever happens to...

His debut on the debate scene elicited audience cheers for capital punishment, introducing a potential president more comfortable than any in memory with death as a solution to social problems. Asked if he has “struggled to sleep” over execution of “234 death row inmates, more than any other governor in modern times,” Rick Perry says no, affirming his faith in “ultimate justice” despite a national trend away from capital punishment. But the Texas Governor has to be given points for consistency....

Prime-time TV tonight will feature, instead of a Barack Obama speech on the economy, a scramble of Republicans eager to replace him. This President will propose emergency legislation on job creation at 7 P.M. tomorrow to accommodate the scheduling convenience of John Boehner and a network football game. Is this any way to run a recession? While voters are eating dinner on the East Coast and those still employed elsewhere are at work or driving home in rush-hour traffic, the Leader of the Free World...

Lawmakers return to Washington to deal with deficits and unemployment, bringing with them little personal experience of either with House Tea Party freshmen making up one-fifth of this year’s list of Congress’ 50 Richest Members. Among those considering the President’s proposals for job creation will be multi-millionaire car dealers and other entrepreneurs swept into office last year by voters angry over how government bureaucrats were spending their tax money. As each party “desperately...

At 16, I have a summer job as a shipping clerk, standing at a table, wrapping cartons. More and more keep appearing, and soon I am swimming against a cardboard tide that threatens to swamp me if I stop pulling brown paper off a huge roll and wrestling it around packages. By noon, I am getting the hang of it and I eat a sandwich in a kind of dreamy stupor. But when I start working again, time has slowed. My hands and arms keep moving, but my mind is in blank panic. All I can think about is the clock...

Last week’s storm postponed the Martin Luther King Memorial dedication in Washington, and Labor Day brings a sobering commentary on his life and work in a nation with 16.8 percent unemployment for African-Americans, 11.3 for Latinos and 8.2 for whites. Half a century after the “I have a dream speech” with a bi-racial President in the White House, median household net worth is now under $6500 for minorities and over $113,000 for whites, with the percentage of families with no wealth at all twice...

As Nature calms down, Americans face a weekend of man- and woman-made devastation as Rick Perry and Sarah Palin cloud up on the political landscape. The “Going Rogue” short-term governor will be pouring “a full-throated defense of the Tea Party” over Iowa today while critics start to take a closer look at the Texas cyclone’s proposal to dismantle government before his first GOP debate appearance next week. In a book last year titled “Fed Up,” Perry sounded his manifesto: “It is not...

Last evening, I left behind almost three million Americans in the Northeast still cut off from the 21st century by the high winds of Hurricane Irene-—without electrical power, TV or Internet access, many depending on iffy private generators that could conk out at any moment to remain unserviced by overwhelmed repair people and deprive them of fresh water and unspoiled food. For five days and nights, it was like living in the opening lines of a famous 20th century novel: “The past is a foreign...

In this era of human folly, the natural world conspires to offer a contrast between what can happen to individuals after “All men are created equal.” As Hurricane Irene postpones a tribute to a great figure of the last century, the dedication of the Martin Luther King Memorial in Washington, the aftermath of this week’s earthquake brings forward one of this century’s puniest, Eric Cantor. The rain and high winds will prevent Barack Obama’s eulogy on the anniversary of the “I have a dream”...

Dick Cheney is back with snarling memoirs. Libyan rebels find a Qaddafi picture trove of “my darling African woman,” Condoleeza Rice. And Karl Rove, desperate to head off the hated Rick Perry, in his scramble to find a candidate to stop him, should be turning to Jeb Bush any day now. What the patriarch of the clan, George H. W., called “Bush fatigue” only three years ago may be dissipating sooner than expected, although Cheney may bring some of it back as he prepares to flog his book. “There...

It’s all over but finding Qaddafi, yet freeing Libya leaves not only all kinds of questions about its future but a dizzying dissatisfaction over exactly how a ragtag rebellion morphed into a fighting machine that stormed into Tripoli and brought down a heavily armed regime with such apparent ease. The superficial answer is air power, with NATO and particularly France leading the way, but there must be more to it than that. Why is there a lingering sense of “Wizard of Oz” revelations to come...

If Nature abhors a vacuum, it finally sent a message to empty-suit Eric Cantor by touching off an earthquake in the district of the House Majority Leader who last spring tried to defund the U. S. Geological Survey, which sends out early warnings about tremors. Cantor is unlikely to be any more impressed by this 5.9 example of his own stupidity than he was in pushing the government toward default in the debt-ceiling debate. In Congress’ stampede toward invincible ignorance, Cantor is the undisputed...

As he prepares to dedicate a Washington Memorial to the spiritual leader on the 48th anniversary of his “I have a dream” speech this weekend, Barack Obama should be drawing inspiration as much from Martin Luther King’s dedication to fighting poverty as racial inequality. At this historic moment, the nation’s first African-American president is a profile in irony. The candidate who campaigned against “dumb wars” is achieving yet another victory over tyranny in the Middle East but remains...

A hard-boiled campaign is being run for the GOP’s most soft-headed aspirant by a group of political scientists. We learn this from a reporter’s electronic book about them, “Rick Perry and his Eggheads: Inside the Brainiest Political Operation in America.” For his 2006 Texas campaign, they ran experiments testing the effectiveness of campaign tools: candidate appearances, TV ads, robocalls, direct mail—-the equivalent of applying randomized drug trials to politics. “No candidate,”...

Half a century ago, there was a jokey bumper sticker: “Support Mental Health or I’ll Kill You.” Now British researchers into Chronic Fatigue Syndrome are under physical attack and death threats for suggesting the disorder has psychological origins. Aside from the question of where victims find the energy for such violence, this fatigue-afflicted terrorism reflects nagging questions about where psychiatry ends and psychobabble begins. With all respect for those who practice a profession that...

Take it from Eric Cantor, no less: It’s time for the Congressional wrecking crew that damaged the nation’s credit to cool it. The House Majority Leader, who helped derail his Speaker’s Grand Bargain on the debt limit, is now urging Tea Party followers not to sabotage next year’s spending bill “I have heard some assert that certain sectors would be better off under the sequester,” he writes to members about the use of a device to force automatic spending cuts. “I believe this is false...

In a week of campaigning, Rick Perry has made Michele Bachmann look positively professorial. The previous frontrunner specializes in little gaffes–like mistaking serial killer John Wayne Gacy for the cowboy star, starting the Revolutionary War in Concord, N. H. instead of Lexington, Mass., mistaking the anniversary of Elvis’ death for his birthday and worrying about the Soviet Union, now 20 years gone. But Perry has not troubled himself with such trivia, choosing instead to go for Texas-sized...

Freud’s perplexity comes back in a bizarre juxtaposition between a GOP debate question about Michele Bachmann’s vow of wifely “submission” and a new HBO profile of Feminist icon Gloria Steinem, my colleague and friend half a century ago. Bachmann fudges her religious stance into mutual respect, but it recalls those “Mad Men” days when wives kept house and shopped in the suburbs, while husbands coped with the “real world” of business and politics. Now, with three women on the Supreme...

If there were a color-coded warning system for the national mood, it would be turning deep grey, verging on black. Approval ratings for Congress and the President hit long-time lows. Karl Rove publicly prays for new GOP candidates to emerge as Rick Perry revs up a hoof-in-mouth campaign that Bill Clinton calls “crazy” but nonetheless jumps ahead in a poll of Republican preferences. And a respected economist, predicting a double-dip recession, asks, “Is capitalism doomed?” For those of us...

The overthrow of despotic Middle East governments is followed by an insurrection in the U.S., not against decades of tyranny but to destroy centuries of democracy that have served the national well. Today’s “hyper-connected world” cuts both ways, empowering both the oppressed in the Arab world and the over-entitled and ignorant here. As Barack Obama’s approval ratings fall to a new low, the GOP gives us potential replacements who would put the nation into default (Michele Bachmann), gut government...

At first glance, the Texas governor looks most likely to rain on Michele Bachmann’s parade by out-evangelizing her with the Religious Right and setting a high bar, as he did in her Iowa hometown, for practicing local politics as a contact sport. But Perry’s well-financed campaign is going after Mitt Romney, too with a jab at him, “Take a look at his record when he was governor…Running a state is different than running a business.” In Waterloo the other day, Politico reports, Perry...

A member of Congress who voted to send the U. S. into default is Iowa’s choice for the country’s next president as Michele Bachmann narrowly wins the state’s straw poll over Ron Paul, who would take the government out of everything, with Tim Pawlenty running a distant third. The non-binding nonsensical balloting will nonetheless be parsed for political meaning in the coming days as lesser candidates like Rick Santorum, Herman Cain and even Pawlenty have to wonder about their fund-raising and...

In a popular 1960s movie, an aged President recalls the good old days when “we poured God over everything like ketchup.” That line elicited a laugh after John F. Kennedy moved a new generation into the White House and promised to send a man to the moon. Today, ketchup will be back on the American political menu as Texas Governor Rick Perry declares his presidential candidacy in South Carolina and heads for Iowa and New Hampshire two weeks after holding a Christian prayer rally in a stadium back...