Vanity Fair has the inside story, coming soon.  Katrina was the last nail, they say.

Hurricane Katrina not only pulverized the Gulf Coast in 2005, it knocked the bully pulpit out from under President George W. Bush, according to two former advisers who spoke candidly about the political impact of the government’s poor handling of the natural disaster.

“Katrina to me was the tipping point,” said Matthew Dowd, Bush’s pollster and chief strategist for the 2004 presidential campaign. “The president broke his bond with the public. Once that bond was broken, he no longer had the capacity to talk to the American public. State of the Union addresses? It didn’t matter. Legislative initiatives? It didn’t matter. P.R.? It didn’t matter. Travel? It didn’t matter.”

Dan Bartlett, former White House communications director and later counselor to the president, said: “Politically, it was the final nail in the coffin.”

They don’t tend to work, studies show.  But other things do work.  Read more about this here, and find out more about what does work here:

1. A greater level of religious beliefs and involvement with religious activities by both teens and their families

2. Greater participation in weekly youth groups

3. Less sexual experience by age 15

4. Old-country values, in that sexually restrained adolescents tended to be foreign born, with a high percentage of Asian births

5. Fewer friends who drank or used illegal drugs

6. More negative feelings about having sex or using birth control

7. Strong sense of guilt about having sex, with a bit of worry about upsetting mom.

I really love this book.  It’s the first novel in the history of the world, and it’s 1000 years old.  It’s beautiful and massively long and, while I only read the first two thirds, I loved it.

The book’s 1,000th anniversary is being celebrated in Japan with lectures, symposia, plays, conferences and concerts. A line of Genji tea and Genji sweets is already on the market and the CD of a newly composed Genji symphony goes on sale this month.

Ruthlessly summarised, the book’s storyline goes like this. The “dazzlingly lovely” Genji, son of the emperor and one of his lower-grade consorts, is irresistible to women. He enjoys a string of affairs as a young man, even abducting a ten-year-old girl so he can mould her into the perfect life-companion. But sleeping with the daughter of the leader of the opposing political faction is one indiscretion too many and Genji is forced into exile. Recalled eventually to the capital, he builds himself a mansion with a different woman in each of its four wings. Honours are heaped upon him and he is offered the retired emperor’s daughter as a wife. But Genji’s royal bride betrays him with another man and when his beloved mistress dies after a long illness, our heartbroken hero follows her swiftly to the grave.

At this point the reader is only two-thirds of the way through the book, which runs to 1,200 pages in its most recent English translation and boasts a cast of more than 400. The story resumes with new heroes. Two young men (the purported son and grandson of Genji) are wooing a trio of sisters. One of them succumbs to marriage, but of the other two sisters, one starves herself to death and the other chooses to become a nun rather than fall into male hands. Love, it turns out, is not innocent hanky-panky, but something noxious, corrosive—even deadly.

Or so many Americans believe.  This reminds me of a joke: Protestants think they’re going to heaven and everyone else is going to hell.  Catholics think everyone else has a decent shot at heaven but they’re definintely going to hell.  This is how my Catholic guilt has been explained to me.  Anyways, the article:

o in August, Pew asked the question again. (They released the results last week.) Sixty-five percent of respondents said — again — that other religions could lead to eternal life. But this time, to clear up any confusion, Pew asked them to specify which religions. The respondents essentially said all of them. And they didn’t stop there. Nearly half also thought that atheists could go to heaven — dragged there kicking and screaming, no doubt — and most thought that people with no religious faith also could go.

Not really.  They’re actually just looking for the God particle, which might well be the source of all mass in the universe.  Still, if God did make the universe, you gotta figure he’s involved:

In fact, the goal of the LHC is at once simple and grandiose: It was created to discover new particles. One of the most sought of these is the Higgs boson, also known as the God particle because, according to current theory, it endowed all other particles with mass. Or perhaps the LHC will find “supersymmetric” particles, exotic partners to known particles like electrons and quarks. Such a discovery would be a big step toward developing a unified description of the four fundamental forces—the “theory of everything” that would explain all the basic interactions in the universe. As a bonus, some of those supersymmetric particles might turn out to be dark matter, the unseen stuff that seems to hold galaxies together.

The man was absolutely brilliant, and even if I disagree completely with his Clash of Civilizations idea, I think he was pointing to something important: that culture–and not simply economics or politics–can affect with whom we identify and for what.  The problem with the thesis, or, well, at least the punching bag it has become, is that it provides little room for dissent or disagreement within these clashing civilizations.  Nonetheless, a worthy academic, and not nearly the conservative blow-hard people want to make him out to be.   This obituary is from the Boston Globe:

He was a man of enormous influence,” said his longtime friend and colleague, Henry Rosovsky. “I think he was one of the really great figures in the field.”

A specialist in many areas, particularly national security and military-civilian affairs, Dr. Huntington worked in the Carter White House as coordinator of security planning for the National Security Council from 1977-1978. Later, he was a member of the Presidential Commission on Long-Term Integrated Strategy in the 1980s.

He was also active in Democratic politics, and met his wife, Nancy, during the presidential campaign of Adlai Stevenson in 1956. He was a speechwriter for Stevenson, and they met while working on a speech together that the candidate later used during the campaign.

…

Despite the brickbats that accompanied his first book, it was an article toward the end of his career that became his most cited, and most controversial, work. “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order” centered on how differences between cultures throughout the world would be the cause of most post-Cold War conflicts. It was this premise, said former student Todd Fine, that inspired Dr. Huntington’s argument against the war in Iraq.

“Even though he didn’t make a big to-do about it ahead of time, he was against the Iraq war. [It was] his belief that it was unnecessary to antagonize other cultures and civilizations,” Fine said.

Nathan J. Diament, who directs public policy at the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, has an article in the New Republic about ways that Obama can be moderate on religious issues, including abortion, gay marriage, and religious discrimination.  I think the article is sensible and wise, and as a liberal who’s pretty moderate on all this stuff, I think it makes a lot of sense.  But I also think it misreads two things: (a) the vitriol with which some conservatives will use to fight any changes to what-is-clearly-morally-right and (b) the easy sense of justice liberals can have that is much easier to hold when one is out of power or one manipulates the law via judicial rather than legislative means.  None of this is to say that that Diament is wrong or that I (or, for that matter, the majority of Americans) don’t support a moderate middle-way.  The problem is with the extremes on both sides.

This is wise and funny and likeable:

Kwanzaa was conjured up in 1966 by Dr. Maulana Karenga, former chair of the black studies department at California State University, Long Beach, to “reaffirm and restore our rootedness in African culture.” For my mother, a black child of the cause-oriented 1960s and ’70s raising three black children of the Cosby-fied ’80s and ’90s, that seemed perfect. Since the untimely departure of my father from the family (oh, he’s still alive, mind you), my little brother had been in need of male guidance. He attended a mentorship program in which black men organized camping trips and kumbaya-ing for boys in need of a male role model. The program was Pan-African in its ideology—black role models, institutions, language, and, apparently, holidays for black people. This led us to Kwanzaa.

We also had a toe rooted in the Southern Baptist church. And going to the homes of my extended family on Christmas—with their pinned-up stockings and glinting trees—showed me the importance of the holiday to black Christians. But my mom, sister, brother, and I celebrated Christmas on a contingency basis, depending on the amount of extra cash lying around. We kids could count on a toy from Santa Claus from our grandmother or from an aunt, but never Mom. She was a realist and naturalist who had spent years falling away from the church.

So, in addition to our half-assed attempts at Christmas, here we were doing the Kwanzaa thing, manual in hand. If we missed a night lighting a candle and reciting a principle, no big deal, we’d just torch two candles and translate a couple of Swahili words the next night. We weren’t strict because the ritual was not a tradition.

This is such an important issue:

As part of a national round of soul-searching, French leaders are recognizing with unusual frankness that the country needs to do more to promote integration of Muslims and other children of immigrants. President Nicolas Sarkozy last week named Yazid Sabeg, a successful businessman born to Algerian immigrants, to head a government department assigned to get more minority candidates into politics and more minority students into the elite academies that turn out France’s leadership class.

This is beautiful:

Still, it strains belief

How an instant can dilate,

Or long years be brief.