Sherry Chandler

From John Meacham’s review, in the NYTimes, of American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic by Joseph J. Ellis.

…America was constructed to foster arguments, not to settle them. The observation is especially relevant at the moment, I think, because of the country’s evident desperation to move beyond the Bush years into — well, into just about anything else.

Modern political campaigns talk of revolution when in fact the founding gave us a nation that prefers evolution. Despite the hurly-burly of presidential bids, with their evocations of hope (Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, John Kennedy’s New Frontier, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, Ronald Reagan’s Morning in America, Bill Clinton’s Bridge to the 21st Century), no single election will lead us through the wilderness to the Promised Land. Short of what William Faulkner called “the last red and dying evening,” nothing will ever be finally, fully finished. The poor shall be with us always, and the world will defy our best and most conscientious efforts to eliminate evil, or even to master it for very long.

How to live in a tragic milieu and yet strive toward triumph — for while perfection may not be possible, progress is — was a consuming concern for the founders, who, led by James Madison, made a virtue of creating competing centers of power within the constitutional structure. For the new American Republic, Ellis writes, “government was not about providing answers, but rather about providing a framework in which the salient questions could continue to be debated.” To transform disagreement from a natural source of strife into a source of stability was a crucial insight, and is arguably the great achievement of the Constitution. What frustrates the passionate about America — its creaky checks and balances, diffuse sovereignties and general aversion to sudden change — is, Ellis argues, what makes possible the triumphs we do manage to pull off.

…

“Unlike mathematics, in politics there was no agreed-upon solution reached by sheer brainpower and logic,” Ellis writes, “but rather an ongoing and never-ending struggle between contested versions of the truth.”

John Lundberg on George Bush’s Poetic Strategery:

Is America’s newest weapon in the war on terror the… acrostic poem? In December 2005, a Pakistani youth discovered that the first letter of each line of a poem in his English primer spelled out the name of “P-R-E-S-I-D-E-N-T G-E-O-R-G-E B-U-S-H.” The anonymous poem — called “The Leader” — listed the qualities of a great statesman in a series of painfully stiff rhyming couplets. Here’s the beginning (I’ll spare you the rest):

Patient and steady with all he must bear,
Ready to meet every challenge with care,
Easy in manner, yet solid as steel,
Strong in his faith, refreshingly real

It’s unclear how “The Leader” found its way past Pakistan’s educational authorities. An Education Ministry official claimed it had been downloaded off the Internet and unknowingly included, but skeptics pointed to the large sums of money the U.S. has reportedly donated to bring Pakistan’s national curriculum more in line with Western ideals. Local media outlets accused the government of using the poem to build support for Bush’s “war on terror.” The outcry was serious enough that after a high-level meeting, the Ministry removed the poem from the textbook and disciplined those responsible for including it.

Easy enough to see why this poem is anonymous.

Perhaps as bad as the crime of aggrandizing GWB—an assignment doomed to fail in the current world atmosphere—is the crime of passing this junk off as an example of American poetry.

You should read the whole of this entertaining if maddening post, if only to find out why Lundberg says:

They say on cold, quiet nights in the White House you can hear Gore’s Nobel Prize clink against his Academy Award.