Queen Elizabeth II, May 14 2007

Helen Mirren may have scooped an Oscar for her portrayal of the Queen, head of state of Britain and 15 Commonwealth countries, but it is Elizabeth Windsor who continues to define the role. It was thrust upon her in 1952 by the premature death of her father, and she has not left the stage since. Yet unlike the celebrities and politicians with whom she regularly exchanges pleasantries, the most famous woman in the world has never given an interview.....
Once, on a walk, she encountered one of her subjects, who exclaimed, "You look just like the Queen!" "How very reassuring," Her Majesty replied. Many Britons feel the same way

- By Catherine Mayer, TIME Magazine May 14, 2007 Edition, Most Influential People in the World, The Time 100.


1. What! All this for a song? [To Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603), when ordered to pay Spenser £ 100 .

Quoted in Birch. Life of Spenser] – William Cecil., Lord of Burleigh (1520-1598)

2. The King to Oxford sent a troop of horse. / For Tories own no argument but force: / With equal skill to Cambridge books he sent, / For Whigs admit no force but argument.

[Reply to epigram by Joseph Trapp]- Sir William Browne (1692-1774)

3. In my childhood it was said by all: ‘A child of ten can go on the road of a town playing with a golden ball in perfect safety under British rule.’

[Quoted in The Times]

Brown’s vision of Europe by Martin Kettle, The Guardian, 12/12/2008
Gordon Brown would prefer Europe not to exist. If he had his way, politics would be played out in Britain, the transatlantic relationship and - his current unfortunate conceit - the world. These are the chosen stages, real or delusional, on which our prime minister moves with assurance and a politically dangerous degree of hubris.
Europe, for him, is a sideshow by comparison, a distraction and worse, because in his mind it brings only penalties, not rewards. Not only would Brown prefer not to think about Europe; he would also prefer us to pretend that he does not think about it.
Yet think about it he must. The events of the week remind both us and him of the extent to which this Europe-free vision is a piece of political escapism. As the economic crisis begins to settle into a way of life rather than an adrenalin rush, Europe is emerging through the fog as the international forum in which Britain's economic fate - and Brown's political fate - will be most decisively shaped in 2009.... This is the far-from-ideal context in which events such as this week's serious divisions with Germany, and the prospective second Irish referendum, should be understood. We live in the Europe we have made for ourselves, not in the Europe that we would like (or, in Brown's case, would not like) to inhabit....Midway through his life-enhancing West End stand-up show about the history of everything, Eddie Izzard says something that illuminates why this matters. He tells his audience that human beings never really needed the Ten Commandments in the first place. Actually, we only needed one commandment - to do as you would be done by; and perhaps a second - to remember that what goes around comes around.
The controversial Newsweek interview with the German finance minister Peer Steinbrück exemplifies how, in politics, what goes around always comes around. In the interview, Steinbrück laments the "breathtaking" policy switch that some governments, including Brown's, have made "from decades of supply-side politics all the way to a crass Keynesianism"..... Not surprisingly, it is to German taxpayers that Europe's more feckless governments, like Italy, are now turning to bail them out of their difficulties.
And when Brown and the other critics point to Germany's much higher level of structural unemployment than ours, with the implication that Britain has been more dynamic in getting its citizens off welfare and into work, let them also remember that only Germany has had to absorb an economically shattered country - the old East Germany - into its borders. If Britain had been faced with 16 million new East British citizens over the past 20 years, the Brown boom might not have been as large as it was, or have lasted as long as it did.
Steinbrück is even right to suggest that some of the apocalyptic talk may be exaggerated and to imply that politicians like Brown are pandering to a yearning for a "Great Rescue Plan". His social democrat colleague Gesine Schwan is also right, in a fascinating piece on Comment is Free this week, that balanced budgets matter and that the state can easily stifle as well as protect. Yet Steinbrück and Schwan must also accept both that fiscal expansion is the crucial, perhaps the only, weapon in governments' hands right now and that, on the European level, fiscal expansion that is not coordinated is likely to fail.
It must be hard for Germans to take lectures from Brown. For more than 11 years he has descended on continental Europe for brief visits - always luridly well-trailed in the Daily Mail and the Sun - in which he has lost no opportunity to lecture Germany from the free-market right about the shortcomings of its social market economic model. Now, with no word of apology, he is lecturing them again, this time from the diametrically opposite statist left.... Nothing in European politics is ever ideal, but both in this crisis and in the development of whatever EU emerges from it, it would be far better for Britain and Germany to learn to work together, not against each other.


4. Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: / God said ‘Let Newton be!” and all was light [Epitaph intended for Sir Isaac Newton]

- Alexander Pope (1688-1744)


King Abdullah------May 14, 2007
On weekends King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud likes to retire to his Thoroughbred farm outside Riyadh and perhaps catch a horse race on satellite TV. The rest of the week, the 83-year-old Saudi ruler can scarcely catch his breath. Inside the kingdom, he's been busy crushing an internal revolt by al-Qaeda while trying to open up Saudi Arabia's conservative society. Beyond his country's borders, Abdullah has enhanced Saudi influence in the Middle East….
But Abdullah has been insistent on staking his independence from Washington. Abdullah recently stunned the White House with his pronouncement that the U.S. presence in Iraq is an "illegal foreign occupation." In February he mediated the Mecca Accord, which established a Palestinian national-unity government, again against Washington's wishes. "America is a friend," he said in a 2002 TIME interview. "But America cannot be the sole policeman in the world." That view is catching on in America too.

- By Scott MacLeod, TIME Magazine May 14, 2007 Edition, Most Influential People in the World, The Time 100.



5. America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail it knocks over a chair [Broadcast radio news summary]

– Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975).

6. Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them

– John Updike (1932- )

7. What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar

[Said to Henry M. Rose. Quoted in New York tribune]– Vice President T.R. Marshall (1854-1925)


8. SPIEGEL Online Interview with Henry Kissinger 07/06/2009

SPIEGEL: Do you think it was helpful for Obama to deliver a speech to the Islamic world in Cairo? Or has he created a lot of illusions about what politics can deliver?
Kissinger: Obama is like a chess player who is playing simultaneous chess and has opened his game with an unusual opening. Now he's got to play his hand as he plays his various counterparts. We haven't gotten beyond the opening game move yet. I have no quarrel with the opening move.
SPIEGEL: But is what we have seen so far from him truly realpolitik?
Kissinger: It is also too early to say that. If what he wants to do is convey to the Islamic world that America has an open attitude to dialogue and is not determined on physical confrontation as its only strategy, then it can play a very useful role. If it were to be continued on the belief that every crisis can be managed by a philosophical speech, then he will run into Wilsonian problems.


8. If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe

- Carl Sagan (1934-1996)

9. But, Captain, I cannot change the laws of physics

–Lt. Cmdr. Montgomery Scott (Scotty), USS Enterprise.

10. If I had my life to live over again, I'd be a plumber or a peddler. The laws of Physics are too rigid

– Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

11. Einstein Physics is a field physics where matter as a solid substance does not exists but is instead an indication of denseness in the field. Einstein made this point very clearly in the following statement. “We may therefore regard matter as being constituted by the regions of space in which the field is extremely intense. There is no place in this kind of physics both for the field and matter, for the field is the only reality”.

– F.D. Wilson’s Book "Mind is Time".

12. I am now convinced that theoretical Physics is actual philosophy

– Max Born

13. ‘If I should die’, said I to myself , ‘ I have left no immortal work behind me – nothing to make my friends proud of my memory- but I have loved the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remembered.’

[Letter to Fanny Brawne] – John Keats (1795-1821).

14. The Congress makes no progress but it dances

[Remark on Congress of Vienna] – Prince De Ligne (1735-1814)

15. My solution to the problem [of North Vietnam] would be to tell them frankly that they’ve got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age

– General Curtis Lemay (1906-1990)

Ban Ki-Moon (1944-) ---- New York Times

Ban Ki-moon of South Korea was sworn in as the eighth secretary general of the United Nations in December 2006. He succeeded Kofi Annan of Ghana, who served two five-year terms as head of the 60-year-old international organization.
Mr. Ban took over the reins of the 192-member body that has been beset with problems of management lapses and scandals, and which finds itself at the center of many of the world's most intractable problems in places like Lebanon, Sudan, Iran, Kosovo and North Korea.
''You could say that I am a man on a mission, and my mission could be dubbed 'Operation Restore Trust': trust in the organization, and trust between member states and the Secretariat,'' Mr. Ban said when he took over the position. ''I hope this mission is not 'Mission: Impossible.' ''

- New York Times.


16. Part of our essential humanity is paying respect to what God gave us and what will be here a long time after we're gone.

– William J. Clinton (1946- )

17. The government I led gave ordinary people peace, security, dignity, and opportunity to progress.

– Benazir Bhutto (The first women Prime Minister in the Islamic world) (1953-2007)

18. All the lonely people, where do they all come from? / All the lonely people, where do they all belong

– John Lennon and Paul McCartney (1942-)

19. Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing; / Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness; / So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another, / Only a look and voice; then darkness again and a silence

– H.W. Longfellow (1807-1882)

All Quotations courtesy of "The New Penguin Dictionary of Quotations"

This is what they wrote:

1. It was said of Cicero that when people heard him, they turned to one another and said “Great Speech”; but when Demosthenes spoke, people turned to one another and said, “Let’s march”. All around the world the people are marching with Barack Obama. British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, writing about Barack Obama, published in Times magazine about 100 most influential people of the world.

2. [Mr. Gordon Brown] went on to become one of the longest-serving Chancellors of the Exchequer that Britain has ever seen…..he brought in and continually drove up the minimum wage, and 600,000 children and a million pensioners were raised out of poverty. Brown believed that wealthy would always be able to look after themselves; it was people at the other end of the economic scale that government ought to be helping….. when capitalism shuddered on its foundation last year, Brownite words like responsibility and morality started issuing from the unlikeliest politicians .... Now Prime Minister Brown took a lead amongst European leaders in setting a course for economic recovery. He hosted the most important meeting of the world's major economies in years. In doing so, the British press said, he had become "Chancellor to the world"...... These are strange and turbulent times, but issues of fairness, equality and protection of the poor have never been more important. I still want Gordon Brown in charge. Mrs. J. K .Rowling the author of the best-selling Harry Potter series, who wrote about Mr. Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister in special edition of Times magazine, world’s 100 most influential people.

3. I am the Roman Emperor, and am above grammar [reply to prelate who had criticized his Latin] – Emperor Sigismund (1361-1437)

4. Crito, we ought to offer a cock to Asclepius, See to it, and don’t forget. [Final words. Quoted in Plato, Phadeo, 118] – Socrates (469-399 BC)

5. When men heard thunder on the left the gods had somewhat of special advertisement to impart. [The Dangers of mortal life] – Sir Eustace Peachtree (17 Cent.)

6. "We of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations who participated in the decision on Vietnam and acted according to what we thought to be the principles and traditions of this nation. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong". - Robert S. McNamara (1916-2009) Secretary of Defense, Opening paragraph, In Retrospect: The tragedy and lessons of Vietnam, 1995

Washington (AFP) - Robert McNamara, the US secretary of defense who was one of the main architects of the US war in Vietnam, died Monday July 6 2009, The Washington Post reported. He was 93. Brilliant-arrogant, some would say-certain of himself and a whirlwind of energy, McNamara was a key member of president John F. Kennedy’s cabinet, a team famously described as “The Best and the Brightest” in author David Halberstam’s seminal book on the Vietnam war.

But in later years McNamara came to regret his Vietnam role, although he remained silent until the publication of his controversial 1995 memoirs “In Retrospect: The Tragedies and Lessons of Vietnam.”

Top US officials “who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation,” McNamara wrote.“We made our decisions in light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why.”

But his term as defense secretary did not start out that way, when Kennedy asked McNamara, then 44, to be his defense secretary soon after the young president was elected.“I don’t object to its being called McNamara’s war,” he wrote of Vietnam in 1964.
By the time the war ended in 1975 more than 58,000 US soldiers had been killed, as well as more than three million Vietnamese from the North and South and around 1.5 Laotians and Cambodians.

But McNamara had already left as defense secretary, increasingly at odds with the administration’s policies.“Although he loyally supported administration policy,” reads his official Pentagon biography, “McNamara gradually became skeptical about whether the war could be won” by sending in more troops and intensifying the bombing.

McNamara “became increasingly reluctant to approve the large force increments requested by the military commanders,” the biography reads.

After years of clashes with Johnson and the top military brass, and facing a growing anti-war movement at home, McNamara resigned in early 1968.

Robert Strange McNamara-the odd middle name was his mother’s maiden name-was born June 9, 1916 in San Francisco, California, the son of a wholesale shoe firm sales manager.

He studied economics and philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, then obtained a masters degree in business administration at Harvard.McNamara entered the Army Air Force in 1943. Weak eyesight prevented him from flying, so he worked at an office that analyzed the efficiency of US bombing raids.
After the war he was one of 10 ex-Air Force statisticians that Henry Ford II hired to turn around his automotive company. The team, dubbed the Whiz Kids, turned Ford into the second most popular US auto brand.

McNamara shot up the ranks and become company president-the first ever outside of the Ford family-in November 1960.

One month later he accepted the job as Kennedy’s secretary of defense.In 1968, when he left the Pentagon, McNamara went on to head the World Bank and “shaped the bank as no one before him,” according to the institution’s official biography.

During his tenure, which ended in 1981, McNamara focused the bank on representing the needs of its developing member countries and aggressively sought funding for development projects.

McNamara “came to the bank brimming with energy, forceful, active, pushing to get things done. He brought with him the firm belief that the problems of the developing world could be solved,” the biography reads.McNamara also wrote or co-authored 11 books on topics that mainly focused on issues of defense and development, the most recent one in 2001.

7. As long as he lived, he was the guiding-star of a whole brave nation, and when he died the little children cried in the streets – J. L. Motley (1814-1877) [(William the Silent) The Rise of the Dutch Republic]

8. “Cut off his head, if necessary.” – Then- U.S. president Richard Nixon, on newly released White House tapes from 1973, joking that he’d like to decapitate the South Vietnamese president who was reluctant to sign a peace treaty to end the war, published in Newsweek.

9. In an interview with Spiegel Online, former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger discusses the painful lessons of the treaty of Versailles, idealism in politics and Obama’s opportunity to forge a peaceful American foreign policy.
Following is an excerpt
SPIEGEL: Do concepts like "good" and "evil" make sense in the context of foreign policy?
Kissinger: Yes, but generally in gradations. Rarely in absolutes. I think there are kinds of evil that need to be condemned and destroyed, and one should not apologize for that. But one should not use the existence of evil as an excuse for those who think that they represent good to insist on an unlimited right to impose their definition of their values.

10. The business of a poet, said Imlac, is to examine, not the individual but the species; to remark general properties and large appearances. He does not number the streaks of the tulip. – Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

11. In Guardian newspaper there was an article about 17,000 young carers as per 2001 census in UK. These are children who are looking after their ailing parents with exemplary character in the most difficult conditions. In the same article it is written about Dickens introducing in “Bleak House”, Judi smallweed, a child who has “never owned a doll, never heard of Cinderella, never played at any game”.

12. Let’s put it this way. I could be finished tomorrow, but I think I’ll last longer than anyone else who’s governed Pakistan. First of all because I’m healthy and full of energy – I can work, as I do, even eighteen hours a day. Then because I’m young- I’m barely fourty-four, ten years younger than Mrs. Gandhi. Finally because I know what I want. I’m the only leader in the third world who has gone back into politics despite the opposition of two great powers-in 1966 the United States and the Soviet Union were both very happy to see me in trouble. And the reason I’ve been able to overcome that trouble is that I know the fundamental rule of this profession. What is the rule? Well, in politics you sometimes have to -----------

Mr. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto the then Prime Minister of Pakistan was answering Orian Fallaci, an Italian journalist question “One last question, Mr. President, and excuse the brutality of it. Do you think you can last?” The interview finalized in Karachi on April 1972, was published in Fallaci’s book “Interview with history”. About this book Washington Post commented “Fallaci infiltrates, goes behind the lines and sketches from life… [The book] is a splendid example of that most self-effacing of all arts – the art of the interview.”
Mr. Ali Bhutto's elected government was toppled on 5th July 1977. Billions of people across the world were stunned and saddened when on 4th April 1979 within hours they came to know about Ali Bhutto had been mercilessly martyred.

13. Makarios III (August 13, 1913 – August 3, 1977), was the archbishop and primate of the Cypriot Orthodox Church (1950–1977) and first and fourth President of the Republic of Cyprus (1960–1974) and (1974–1977). Makarios III died unexpectedly, of a heart attack, on August 3, 1977.

At his funeral, held at St. John's Cathedral outside the Archbishopric in Nicosia, 182 dignitaries from 52 countries attended whilst an estimated 250,000 (or about half the Greek Cypriot population of the island) mourners filed past the coffin.

In international circles, Makarios is regarded as one of the most notable politicians of his time. In the The Times editorial on the day following his death Makarios is described as "one of the most instantly recognisable figures of international politics".In his obituary The Times wrote of him as "a familiar and respected figure of the councils of the United Nations, the Commonwealth and of the Third World" and of "a statesman too big for his small island". He was a very important leader of the Non-Aligned Movement.

O.F.: We'll see. But now let's forget about Cyprus and talk about you. First of all, why did you become a priest?

M.; I always wanted to be a priest. Ever since I was a child. I was barely thirteen when I entered the monastery. But the reason is hard for me to explain. Maybe I'd been impressed by my visits to the monasteries around my village. I liked the monasteries so much. Life there was so different from the kind we led in the village, and I sometimes wonder if for me the monastary wasn't a way of escaping the sheep, the poverty. My father was a shepherd. And he always wanted me to help him look after the sheep, and I didn't like looking after the sheep. In fact, he used to complain and say, "I can't expect anything from my elder son! If I need help when I'm an old man, I'll have to turn to my younger son!" He said it so often that in the last years of his life, when I was already archbishop, I liked to tease him: "Do you remember when you used to grumble and say you couldn't expect anything from me?" He was very religious, like everyone in the family, but he couldn't understand why on Sunday morning I left the sheep to run to the monastery and help the priest say Mass. I was twelve years old when I told him I wanted to take that path, and he got angry. But I wasn't scared, I was so sure that nothing would be able to stop me.

O.F.: And your mother?
M.: I don't remember my mother very well. She died when I was very small; I don't even have a picture of her. In those days, the poor didn't get their pictures taken, especially in the mountains of Cyprus. About my mother, I only remember the day she got ill. There was only one doctor in the whole district, and my father set out on foot to look for him. He had no idea in what village he might find him, and went wandering around for hours, and finally he came back dragging the doctor like a sheep. The doctor used the same pill for all illnesses. Aspirin, I guess. He gave my mother the pill, and she died soon after. I remember the funeral. I remember the nights I slept with my father, because with him I could cry better. And I remember the night when he too started crying, and I said, "If you'll stop crying, I'll stop too." And then I remember my grandmother taking me away, and the relatives saying to my father, "You're young, you should get married again. Also for the children." Besides myself, there was my little brother, and my little sister who had just been born. And one day they brought me home to meet my new mother. Father had got married again. My new mother was a woman in the middle of the room, and she kept whispering, "Come in, come in!" I didn't want to go in because I didn't know her. But then I went in and soon I loved her. She was nice. She's still alive, and still nice, and I still love her. Very much. Oh, it's so difficult, and also so easy, to tell you where I come from. My father couldn't read or write. Neither could my mother, nor my grandmother, nor my stepmother. I think my father resigned himself to the idea of letting me go into the monastery because there I would learn to read and write. When he took me there, he kept urging me: "Be obedient, study . . .

This interview of Makarios III at New York on November 1974 was published in Oriana Fallaci book “Interview with History”.

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This is what they wrote:

1. [The French encyclopedist] Diderot paid a visit to the Russian Court at the invitation of the Empress. He conversed very freely, and gave the younger members of the Court circle a good deal of lively atheism. The Empress was much amused, but some of her councillors suggested that it might be desirable to check these expositions of doctrine. The Empress did not like to put a direct muzzle on her guest's tongue, so the following plot was contrived. Diderot was informed that a learned mathematician was in possession of an algebraical demonstration of the existence of God, and would give it him before all the Court, if he desired to hear it. Diderot gladly consented: though the name of the mathematician is not given, it was Euler. He advanced towards Diderot, and said gravely, and in a tone of perfect conviction:
Monsieur, (a+bⁿ)/n=x, Dieu existe; repondez! [Sir, (a+bⁿ)/n=x. Therefore God exists;reply!] Diderot to whom algebra was Hebrew, was embarrassed and disconcerted; while peals of laughter rose on all sides. He asked permission to return to France at once, which was granted.

Augustus De Morgan, A Budget of Paradoxes (1872)

2. You’ve forgotten the greatest moral attribute of a Scotsman, Maggie, that he’ll do nothing which might damage his career- Sir James Barrie (1860-1937)

3. He [Coleridge] talked on forever; and you wished him to talk on forever- [Lecture on the English Poets, 8] William Hazlitt (1778-1830)

4. Genius is nothing but a great aptitude for patience – George-Louis De Buffon (1707-1788)

5. For when the One Great Scorer comes / To write against your name, / He marks-not that you won or lost - /But how you played the game – [Alumnus Football] Grantland Rice (1880-1954)

6. God is not Dead but Alive and Well and working on a Much Less Ambitious Project- [Noted in a Greenwich pub. Quoted in the Guardian ’London Letter’, 27 Nov. 1975, Graffiti]

7. How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930)

8. When a person dies who does any one thing better than anyone else in the world, which so many others are trying to do well, it leaves a gap in the society – [On the death of John Cavanagh, the fives-player, The Indian Jugglers] William Hazlitt (1778-1830)

9. Who will rid me of this turbulent priest? – [(Archbishop Thomas Becket) Attr.] Henry II (1133-1189)

10. If I had been present at the creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better arrangement of the universe – [Attr. In W.R. Inge, The End of an Age, Ch.6 ] Alfonso The Wise, King Of Castile (1221-1284)

Quotable Quotes and Poems

1. You must wake and call me early, call me early, mother dear; / To-morrow ‘ill be the happiest time of all the glad New-year, / Of all the glad New-year, mother, the maddest merriest day; / For I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother. I’m to be Queen o’ the May [The May Queen] – Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

2. Fain would I climb, yet fear I to fall. [Line written on a window-pane. Queen Elizabeth is said to have written under it. ‘If the heart fails thee, climb not at all’] – Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618)

3. The King, observing with judicious eyes / The state of both his universities, / To Oxford sent a troop of horse, and why? / That learned body wanted loyalty; / To Cambridge books, as very well discerning / How much that loyal body wanted learning. [On George I’s donation of a library to Cambridge.] – Rev. Joseph Trapp (1679-1747)

4. “Begin at the beginning” the King said, gravely, “and go till you come to the end; then stop.”- Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 12, 1865.

5. Mr William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898, British statesman: prime minister four times between 1868 and 1894) was in his shirt-sleeves at Hawarden, cutting down a tree, when the royal message was brought to him. ‘Very significant,’ he remarked, when he had read the letter, and went on cutting his tree – Lytton Strachey (1880-1932)

6. Learn to think Imperially – Joseph Chamberlain (1836-1914)

7. There was a naughty boy, / And a naughty boy was he, / He ran away to Scotland / The people for to see - / Then he found / That the ground / Was as hard, / That a yard/ Was as long,/ That a song / Was as merry, / That a cherry / Was as red - / That lead / Was as weighty , / That fourscore / Was as eighty, / That a door / Was as wooden / As in England- / So he stood in his shoes / And he wondered. [A song about Myself] - John Keats (1795-1821)

8. He said he considered £40,000 a year a moderate income- such a one as a man might jog on with. [Quoted in the Creevey Papers 13 Sept. 1821]- John Lambton, Earl of Durham 1792-1840.

9. Campbell is a good man, a pious man. I am afraid he has not been in the inside of a church for many years; but he never passes a church without pulling of his hat. This shows that he has good principles [1 July] – Doctor Samuel Johnson (1709-1784).

10. Shall gods be said to thump the clouds / When clouds are cursed by thunder? [Shall gods be said to thump the clouds?]- Dylan Thomas (1914-1953).

11. In any other profession I will be like fish out of water ( Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the charismatic leader from Pakistan, when asked what he would be doing if he would not have been in politics).

12. Our playwright may show / in some fifth Act what this wild dram means. [The Play]- Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892).

13. There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full. – Henry A. Kissinger (1923-) Tongue-in-cheek remark. In Patrick Anderson, “The Only Power Kissinger Has is the confidence of the President,” New York Times Magazine, 1 June 1960.

The Obama story
From Kenya village to the White House: one incredible journey.

'Who is Barack Obama?" In the last, desperate weeks, that question became the rallying cry of John McCain and Sarah Palin, as they sought to persuade Americans that they knew too little about the man who, in the early hours of yesterday morning, was elected the 44th president of the United States. It was a rhetorical question, but it sometimes brought swift and harsh answers. "Who is the real Barack Obama?" McCain asked at a rally in Albuquerque last month. "A terrorist!" shouted at least one man in the crowd.

But that was only the crudest response. In the 21 months after Obama first launched what he always called his "improbable" bid for the White House, his opponents had sought to fill in the blank of his identity with a series of bogeymen. Obama was a Muslim and a Marxist. He was a conviction liberal and a believe-in-nothing celebrity. He was an ivory-tower professor and a crooked Chicago pol. He was an elite Ivy Leaguer and the product of a madrasa. He was an East Coast snob and an exotic quasi-foreigner. By the end, the McCain campaign and its allies, seeking to hurl every pot and pan in the kitchen sink at Obama, claimed all those things about the Democrat — often at the same time.

The notion that there was something mysterious or alien about Obama had been running all year. Mark Penn, one-time chief strategist to Hillary Clinton in her presidential bid, suggested his boss pose as the "American" candidate: "All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light. Save it for 2050. It also exposes a strong weakness for him — his roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his centre fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values."

That advice was later taken up with zeal by the Republicans. Last month Palin told a rally in Clearwater, Florida: "This is not a man who sees America the way you and I see America."

On one level this was simply a form of racial code, a way of nudging white voters to see that the first African-American nominee of a major party was not "one of us". But that is not the whole picture.

For the truth is that America's next president does indeed have a biography that is worlds apart — and, yes, more exotic — than the rest of his fellow citizens. It is rooted in the mud-hutted villages of Kenya and the flat cornfields of Kansas. It jumps from the endless summers of Hawaii to the ferment of 1960s Indonesia, from the gilded seminar rooms of Harvard to the broken streets of Chicago's South Side — and all that before Obama had turned 22 years old.

It is a strange and confusing enough tale that Obama himself had to work hard to untangle it, eventually shaping it into a coherent narrative in the lyrical, moving memoir authored when he was just 33 and now an international bestseller: Dreams from My Father. That book, and its successor, The Audacity of Hope, mean that Obama's story is hardly a mystery. He has laid its details bare. What's more, the narrative of his own life has lain at the heart of his political message.

He has offered his "improbable journey" as testament to the enduring power of the American dream: the belief that, in the United States, truly anyone can make it. As he put it in the speech that launched him into the political stratosphere, the keynote address to the Democratic convention of 2004, "in no other country on earth is my story even possible".

But he has also suggested that his own hybridity — the child of a white mother and a black father — embodies the mixed nation that America is destined to become, that somehow his own reconciliation of the black and white within him is a harbinger of a wider reconciliation in America itself. That his roots across several continents make him the right man for a new and globalised age. That somehow his own past equips him for the future.

"I think that in a sense Barack is the personification of his own message for the country," David Axelrod, chief strategist for the Obama campaign, told the New York Times last year. "He is his own vision."

But the Obama biography translates into more than a campaign theme. Its details provide crucial clues as to how the new president thinks, what drives him and how he is likely to operate. To understand the man whose decisions will shape the world for at least the next four years, you need to know where he came from and the path he has travelled. It's long, taking the unlikeliest turns, but now we know where perhaps it was always leading — to the White House.

America's next president is the son of a man who once herded goats in a remote village in Africa. He is the grandson of a man who grew up among people who wore animal skins, in a village where no white man had ever set foot. That grandfather went on to become a cook for the British army and later a domestic servant, while his son finished secondary school by correspondence course, had four wives and eight children and died an early death, caused by drink and depression.

The grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, is the source of the new president's middle name — the one that gave him so much trouble in the campaign. Though he is said to have been born in 1870, one of his three wives still lives. They call her "Mama Sarah" and she is now, aged 86, the step-grandmother of the most powerful man in the world.

You find her by taking the 90-minute drive north of Lake Victoria to the remote Kenyan village of Kogelo. At the end of the tarmac, a sign for the Senator Obama Secondary School points the way along a red dirt road. You find a small house, three rooms under a pale-blue corrugated iron roof. There is a water pump in the front garden and a huge mango tree, and it's here you stop and chat to Mama Sarah.

She's happy to talk, over the noise of the chickens that come running when she calls. She still works, rising at dawn on a typical day and heading barefoot into her vegetable garden, where she grows maize, sweet potatoes, beans and cassava. At nine, she makes breakfast, returning to the fields until noon.

She has a TV set now, a gift from a local airline executive, but she always used to follow the news on the radio in Swahili or Luo. And she has met her step-grandson only a few times. The first encounter came when he visited Kenya in the 1980s: they had no language in common but she can't forget his voice. So much like his father's, she says: "It made me think that his father had come back from the dead."

Her living room is decorated with family pictures, including a shot of Barack on one visit, carrying a sack of vegetables. She is proud of Barack, though she doesn't consider what he has achieved anything too special. When asked about the prospect of him becoming president, she described it as "just a job". But she plans to keep her promise to fly to Washington in January, to see her boy inaugurated. It won't be her first trip to the US. She saw Barack sworn in as a senator. She said that the US was "very interesting" — but "very cold".

Obama's father — also called Barack Hussein Obama — had once caused her pride too, but just as much consternation. He was bright, yet easily bored. He won a place in secondary school, but was expelled for behaving badly. He eventually finished his schooling by correspondence course , but not before he had a married a young woman called Kezia and had a son and daughter.

Once the course was complete, he met two American women in Nairobi who told him he should apply for a scholarship to study in the US. He wrote to dozens of US universities and one eventually replied: the University of Hawaii.

He had no idea where Hawaii was — but snapped up the offer of a place. Leaving his son and pregnant wife with Mama Sarah, he flew to Honolulu. And it was there he would meet a woman who was the product of the same urge he himself had felt — the urge to move westward and start over.

Stanley Ann Dunham was named after a father who had yearned for his first child to be a boy — and for much else. Dunham — the new president's other grandfather — had been born into small-town Depression-era Kansas, but he dreamed bigger. Wild in his youth, "dabbling in moonshine, cards and women", according to Obama's memoir, Dunham would not be contained by Wichita. He eloped with his sweetheart, Madelyn, enlisted after Pearl Harbour and fought in General Patton's army in France before hopping westward, always hoping for something better, from Texas to California and finally, when offered a job as a furniture salesman in America's newest state, to Hawaii.

These, then, were the backstories of the young African man and the 18-year-old girl who would meet on a Russian language course in Honolulu. They could not have been more different. He was a son of the Luo tribe who, when not in school, had herded his father's goats; she was the daughter of white Protestant prairie folk from the American heartland. And yet they fell in love. They married and in 1961 they had a child, who would also be called Barack Hussein Obama.

The marriage did not last. Obama Sr took up a scholarship in Harvard — alone — and eventually went back to Africa. He would go on to marry two other women, one of them American, and have a total of seven other children. He would return to Hawaii, to see his son and namesake, only once — a month-long visit when Obama Jr was 10 years old.

In Kenya, Obama Sr landed a senior post in the ministry of economic planning in Jomo Kenyatta's government. Tribalism hindered his progress: the Obamas are Luos, while Kikuyus had a tight grip on political power. But that was not the whole of it. According to those who knew him at the time, Obama Sr grew too fond of Scotch, loudly boasting of his brains and talent, before going home drunk every night.

Towards the end of his life Obama Sr had spent most of his savings. He became depressed, pushing most of his children away. But alcohol was to be his undoing. In 1982 the elder Barack Hussein Obama died in the last of a series of serious car accidents. He had not lived to see the remarkable fruit of his own improbable journey westward.

The second Barack Hussein Obama came into the world on August 4 1961 at the Kapi'olani Medical Center for Women and Children in Honolulu, Hawaii. By the time he was two years old his father had gone, his place in Ann Dunham's affections soon replaced by another foreign student at the University of Hawaii, an Indonesian named Lolo. Always restless, she decided to leave Honolulu so that she and her son, now barely six, could be with her new husband and start a new life in the east.

She arrived in Indonesia in a spirit of blissful "innocence" that her son would later marvel at with something less than admiration. Ann seemed only vaguely aware that the country was in turmoil, that just a few months earlier a coup attempt had been thwarted after which hundreds of thousands of people had been killed. Ever wide-eyed and hopeful, she believed individuals could shape their own future, regardless of whatever barriers history and geography might put in the way.

By all accounts the young Obama — Barry Soetoro as he was then, taking the name of his new stepfather — embraced his new surroundings with enthusiasm. When his mother wanted him to take a nap after school, he would sneak out to play in the muddy lanes of Jakarta, stopping for a swim with the local boys in the dirty pond known as the "empang".

Former classmates and teachers describe "Berry" — Barry with an Indonesian lilt — as inquisitive and fun-loving, even then displaying a precocious talent for leadership.

At St Franciskus Assisi Catholic school, the first he attended, his teacher Israella Pereira Darmawalla, 64, spotted it immediately. "He was a natural leader," she told the Guardian. "Before the children would come into class they would line up. Berry would inspect them and make sure they were straight, giving orders in Indonesian. No one told him to do it."

Those who remember him talk of a boy full of energy, building up a sweat as he hared around the playground, teasing the girls, attracting attention not only because of his dark skin and curly hair but because he was also left-handed — regarded as an extreme oddity in the ultra-conservative Indonesia of the 1960s.

"Berry really stood out," said Ati Kisyanto, 46, a classmate at the Basuki government elementary school. "He was much bigger than us. All the Indonesian kids were skinny and small. Berry was very chubby and had long, curly eyelashes. But from the start he fitted right in."

Sword fights with bamboo sticks and football were favourite pastimes in the lanes outside Obama's first home. There he and Lolo kept turtles, a monkey and even a baby crocodile — once deployed by the young Berry to scare off some local boys who were causing trouble. "They never came back," recalls neighbour, Ronny Amir, now 47.

Instruction came from his stepfather. Berry once sustained an egg-sized lump on his head, thanks to a stone hurled at him after he'd chased a boy who ran off with his ball. Lolo promptly produced a pair of boxing gloves, as he prepared to teach Berry that he had to be strong to survive in a tough world.

"Men take advantage of weakness in other men," Lolo told Berry, according to Dreams from My Father. "They're just like countries in that way. Better to be strong."

By the third year, Obama, now registered as a Muslim after his stepfather's religion — but educated in a non-religious school, not the madrasa that would later be claimed — gave another glimpse of his embryonic ambition. Darmawalla asked her pupils each to write a poem entitled My Dreams.

"The others said they wanted to be doctors, nurses or soldiers," the former teacher says now. "Berry wrote that he wanted to be a president one day."

By the time he was 10, Barack Obama was back in Hawaii. His mother had decided he needed to go to an American school, and she sent him back to live with his grandparents. She would follow the next year. These days, Michelle Obama says that the adolescence her husband experienced in Honolulu holds the key to his personality.

"You can't really understand Barack until you understand Hawaii," she told biographer David Mendell.

Some speculate that it's Hawaii that explains the languid cool that is so striking in Obama.

Visit what was his favourite eating spot, the beachside Hau Tree Lanai, where diners sit on a terrace beneath a canopy of low trees soaking up the evening sun — and where surfers and canoeists paddle past, the bright lights of Waikiki flickering a mile away — and it's easy to see how anyone raised in such a holiday paradise would grow up permanently laid-back.

Others have read much into the young Obama's talent for bodysurfing. Surely it was on the beaches of Hawaii that he learned to anticipate, judge and eventually ride the wave, giving him the knack for seeing early the shifts in the political tide that have now taken him to the presidency.

Yet his own account describes an upbringing that was not all placid serenity. His grandfather, outwardly easygoing, was frustrated with a luckless career as an insurance salesman: the young Obama would hear him making cold calls that hit a dead end. His mother was absent, eventually returning to Indonesia — even though her second marriage was now falling apart — to do field work on her doctoral dissertation in anthropology: a 1,045-page tome entitled "Peasant blacksmithing in Indonesia".

It fell to Obama's grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, to provide some constancy. The woman he called Toot and who died on Monday — on the eve of her grandson's triumph — was a model of Kansas solidity. While Stanley's career sputtered, she held down a senior job in banking, then all but unknown for a woman, which paid for Obama to be educated, privately and expensively.

He went to Punahou school, a 17-acre oasis of calm, order and privilege tucked behind a low stone wall topped with cacti. Thirty years after he graduated, you can still see teenagers at the end of the school day goofing around a basketball court as Obama would have done, playing a furious game of water polo or lounging around on the lawns.

But in Obama's own telling, this was a period of unease, a time when the inner wrestling with race and his own identity began in earnest, as he sought to understand his place as a black youth raised by white parents in a far-flung corner of the United States where there were few African-Americans. He has described his longing to feel like a black American, watching the grainy TV in his grandparents' 10th- floor, two-bedroom apartment so that he could copy the dance steps on Soul Train or lap up Richard Pryor's stand-up act. Bedtime reading was Malcolm X and James Baldwin.

A few pages on, his personal entry has a photo of him playing basketball. Where other students used their entry to praise their teachers or to write about the challenges ahead, Obama left the school with the motto: "We go play hoop". The teenage Obama also left a self-composed photograph titled Still Life, featuring a turntable, a beer bottle, a basketball figure, a matchbook and a packet of Zig Zag cigarette papers. Alongside the photograph he gives thanks to "Tut, Gramps, Choom Gang, and Ray for all the good times". Tut for his grandmother, Ray is Keith Kakugawa, another mixed-race child, and Choom Gang is Hawaiian slang for marijuana.

Was Obama consciously trying to play up to a stereotype of the young black man? Eric Kusunoki, Obama's class teacher during his final four years at school, didn't see any of the alienation Obama discusses in his memoir. "It was a surprise," says Kusunoki, who still teaches at the school. "He didn't seem to be an outsider. He was well-known, popular, active in student activities." Other contemporaries also recall a relaxed, happy young man. Perhaps, they wonder, he was keeping his turmoil inside. Perhaps it was no more than "teen angst". But Obama himself has described these years — drinking and using marijuana and cocaine while at high school — as his greatest moral failure.

Once high school was over, Barack Obama — like his parents and grandparents before him — began his own journey. But where they had headed west, he now headed east from Hawaii, first to Occidental College in Los Angeles, then to Columbia University in New York, and finally to the very place his mothers's parents had escaped, the American midwest. And where his parents had yearned to slip free of roots and start anew, the young Obama seemed to be on a different quest. Having bounced from Hawaii to Indonesia and back before he was 10, he apparently longed for the sense of being anchored that comes with roots and memories that predate your own life. "I made a chain between my life and the faces I saw, borrowing other people's memories," he wrote. According to the New Yorker magazine, "he wanted to be bound".

The quest for steadiness seems to have begun immediately, whatever Obama would say later about his "dissolute" youth. His fellow students at Occidental have described young Barry Obama as a man who even then showed some of the discipline that has been on display during the last, long, two years. He jogged in the mornings and studied hard, even if he did allow himself the odd joint here and there. "Not even close to being a party animal," said one friend. Later, at Columbia, his mother confessed herself worried by the barrenness of his quarters: she told him he was living like a "monk".

Once he had graduated with a degree in political science, specialising in international relations, he stayed in New York, casting around for a career. He wrote to various civil rights organisations and black politicians: none wrote back.

In 1985 Barack Obama was unemployed. Eventually he answered an ad for a community organiser in Chicago, working with those on the south side of the city laid off by the shuttering of the steel industry. The Developing Communities project, inspired by the writings of social thinker Saul Alinsky, was looking for a black organiser who could work with the black unemployed. When Obama's application arrived, his future employer worried that this Obama of Hawaii might actually be Japanese. Once reassured, he offered him the job — on $10,000 a year, with $2,000 to buy a car.

He began work amid what he later described in Dreams from My Father as "the boarded-up homes, the decaying storefronts, the ageing church rolls, kids from unknown families who swaggered down the streets".

But Obama encountered scepticism among the neighbourhood's entrenched powers: church ministers and city bigwigs who clung to their turf, wary of the college-educated outsider.

Still, he was a good listener, often spending hours with individuals at a time to hear the full story of their lives. It was as if he wanted to learn from them as much as to help them, to learn how it was to live as a black American in a black American community.

Over three years, Obama led countless meetings on street corners and school gymnasiums, pulling together a coalition of churches, struggling middle-class residents and public-housing tenants.

He was efficient. He once arranged for 600 residents to talk with officials about contaminated water. He stood at the back, clipboard in hand, with a diagram setting out the names of all those who would speak and what points they would make. He had arranged substitute speakers in case anyone became nervous.

He was learning the centrality of preparation — and organisation — to making political change.

He achieved some modest victories, pressuring the city to open a jobs centre in the neighbourhood, demanding action to remove asbestos from a housing estate. And he was introduced to a minister who, he was told, was keen to help Obama's organising efforts. His name was Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

It was in this period, in 1988, that Obama made his first journey to Africa, visiting the relatives and half-siblings he had never known, taking several weeks to travel around Kenya with his half-sister Auma. "It was like going through a secret garden," Auma told the Guardian. "Discovering a new plant here, a new plant there and watching it bloom."

Obama listened for hours to Mama Sarah tell her stories, then stopped at the graves of his father and grandfather. "I saw that my life in America … all of it was connected with this small plot of earth an ocean away," he wrote later. He sat at the double graveside and wept for a long time, before feeling a "calmness wash over me". Back in the US, and after three years of pounding the streets of Chicago — writing short stories on the people he met that were, according to one who read them, "beautifully crafted" — Obama wanted to send himself back to college. He won a place at the very top: Harvard law school.

It was there that the first outlines of what would become Obama's distinctive political style began to form, or at least become apparent.

During his first year he became an editor on the Harvard Law Review — a publication whose prestige has no equivalent outside the US. The foremost jurists in the land submit their writings to a panel of students for acceptance or rejection — and these students then edit the work of their elders. Obama excelled at it. In his second year, he stood for election and became the first African-American President of the Law Review.

He won thanks, in part, to the votes of conservatives on the review. They did not agree with him on the issues, but they were impressed that he truly listened to them, that he seemed to take them seriously.

On one occasion, he made a speech defending affirmative action that effectively articulated the objections to it. Rightwingers believed Obama had shown them deep understanding and respect. It was a mode of discourse that Obama would employ again and again (most notably in May 2008, when he sought to stem the bleeding caused by his association with the fire-breathing Rev Wright, with a speech that demonstrated empathy for white as well as black resentments). A former teacher at Harvard, Martha Minow, has said that "he spoke with a kind of ability to rise above the conversation and summarise it and reframe it".

In the breaks from Harvard, Obama would return to Chicago, increasingly regarding the city as his true home. It was after his first year, in 1989, that he took a summer job at a prominent law firm now called Sidley Austin. There he met Michelle Robinson, a young attorney at the firm assigned as his mentor.

She was wary at first, a fact she likes to retell: "He grew up in Hawaii! Who grows up in Hawaii? Who names their child Barack Obama?" He seems to have had many fewer doubts about her. She had everything he did not: a solid, stable family rooted in a black American community. Obama soon decided he did not want a career in corporate law, and that he wanted to make a life with Michelle.

When he returned to Chicago after graduating from Harvard Law School, he found his reputation had preceded him. His election to the presidency of the Law Review had prompted a clutch of glowing profiles in the national press. Many of the city's top lawyers wanted to recruit him.

One civil rights attorney, Judson Miner, had read about Obama and called Harvard to speak with him.

"They said, 'Is this a recruiting call?' and I said 'I guess so,'" Miner told the Guardian in his office in a converted townhouse in downtown Chicago. "And this young lady said to me — jokingly — 'well, you're going to be 643rd on the list'."

As the Obama campaign often liked to mention, he could have had his pick of top, high-paying jobs, on Wall Street or beyond. But first he responded to a call which had come following those magazine profiles — from a literary agent suggesting he write a book. Initially conceived as a treatise on race relations, it became the deeply personal memoir Dreams from My Father.

So Obama passed up Wall Street and returned to Chicago in 1991. He did not become a bigshot lawyer but returned to community organising with Project Vote, a registration drive aimed at increasing participation among African-Americans. In less than a year, Obama had hired 10 staff, recruited 700 volunteers and registered 150,000 new voters. It was experience that stood him in remarkably good stead. Not only was he now making contacts with Chicago's political establishment, he had learned from the ground up the mechanics — and importance — of grassroots organisation. It was his mastery of this often neglected area of politics that would, come 2008, give Obama the edge over Hillary Clinton — and eventually help propel him to the White House.

In October 1992, as the project wound up, Obama and Michelle married at Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ. By now Obama had abandoned the agnosticism of his father and the eclectic, pick-and-mix anthropologist's view of religion of his mother.

His search for stability had, in part, led him to become a Christian. In a neat piece of symbolism, the wedding party was at the South Shore Cultural Centre — a rundown, formerly all-white country club.

Soon, Obama was building a portfolio career. He worked at a law firm renowned for its civil rights advocacy and its efforts to improve deprived neighbourhoods. In one case, he represented community organisation Acorn in a successful suit accusing the state of Illinois of failing to help the poor to register to vote.

In another, Obama represented a non-profit economic development group working with landlord Tony Rezko to provide better housing for working-class Chicago residents.

Both those associations would hurt Obama in the 2008 campaign. Republicans accused Acorn of involvement in voter fraud, while Rezko, who later donated money for Obama's first run for elected office, was this year convicted on corruption charges.

When he was not at the firm, Obama was teaching at the University of Chicago. Douglas Baird, the professor who recruited him, recalls Obama as a popular lecturer. In addition to Obama's charisma, Baird said students were drawn to his ability to present ideologically charged subjects like race, voting rights and constitutional law without thrusting his own beliefs on them.

"He always listens, and he might not agree with you, but you never felt he was brushing you off," Baird said in his office in the University of Chicago law library.

The Obamas were now living in Hyde Park, an uber-liberal neighbourhood of Chicago dominated by the university. Politically it was idiosyncratic, a middle-class island within the less affluent and largely African-American south side, racially mixed in a city that is still heavily segregated. It tended towards the liberal and intellectual, always keeping a distance from the legendary Chicago Democratic party machine.

Obama's thoughts were increasingly focused on elected politics. Ever since Harvard, if not before, he had been thinking about how best to effect change. His years as a community organiser had persuaded him that he couldn't do enough at grassroots level: the big decisions were taken by elected politicians.

In 1995 he saw his chance. Alice Palmer, a popular African-American member of the Illinois state senate, was vacating her seat, which included Hyde Park, so that she could run for the US Congress. Obama would aim to succeed her.

Baird was horrified. "Our basic view was that he was a very talented man who was squandering his future," he said. Baird urged him not to waste his intellect on petty state politics but to join the University of Chicago law faculty as a full professor. Obama said no: he was running.

As events unfolded, Obama would show the steel that has been revealed repeatedly in the 2008 campaign — and which confounded those who believed he would be too professorial for the hardball of politics. Palmer backed Obama to succeed her but when she lost her congressional race she changed her mind: she wanted to keep her state senate seat. Having built a campaign apparatus, attending countless get-togethers, some tiny, in people's homes — including one where he met the former Weather Underground militant William Ayers — Obama refused.

Palmer rushed to obtain enough petition signatures to win a spot on the ballot. Obama supporters mounted a legal challenge to the validity of her signatures and had some of them thrown out by a judge. While he was at it, the Obama team spotted irregularities on the rest of his opponents' forms too. By the time he was done, Obama's was the only name left on the ballot.

Not much has been written about Barack Obama's spell in the state senate in Springfield, Illinois — and yet, given the brevity of his service in Washington — it remains the clearest guide to his politics.

He arrived facing hostility, especially from some African-American colleagues who had been fond of Palmer and resented what they saw as an over-intellectual outsider sneaking into office on a technicality. Two men in particular constantly ribbed Obama, interrupting and heckling him while he spoke. They called him a "white man in blackface", rifling through his autobiography to find more ammunition to hurl, taunting him for being raised by a white woman. One favourite line, according to the Washington Post, was: "You figure out whether you're white or black yet, Barack, or still searching?"

With his wife and, later, two daughters back home in Chicago, it was a solitary life. He lived, Alan Partridge-style, in the Renaissance Inn on the edge of downtown, playing basketball at the YMCA in the morning and watching sports on TV at night. The highlight was an hour-long phone call with his wife every evening.

But Obama learned a crucial lesson in Springfield, that progress wouldn't come through smart policy papers or stirring speeches. Relationships were the key. He had to win the trust and support of his colleagues.He headed for the golf course, realising that was where the old boys were doing much of the business. When a first round proved a disaster, he took lessons. He joined the senators' poker game — "with more skill than luck," says one former player, more "cerebral" than instinctive — faithfully bringing a six-pack of beers to each game. His poker buddies were all over 50 — and all white.

Obama had an aide advise him in the science of being a regular guy. Among the lessons: order regular mustard, not Dijon, and no more button-down shirts.

Soon he was earning respect. Obama made a point of cultivating Emil Jones, a veteran African-American member of the senate who emerged as a key mentor — one of several older men in Obama's career who, amateur psychology would suggest, served as surrogate fathers. As Obama eyed an even greater prize — a seat in the US Senate — he became utterly open in his ambition, explaining to Jones that he wanted to pass enough important bills to build a record on which he could run for higher office. Eight years after his arrival as a novice, Obama was becoming one of Springfield's senior players. The wordy speeches were gone now, replaced by rare, concise interventions reserved only for topics of sufficient weight.

Crucial in this transformation was the same knack he had shown at Harvard for bringing conservatives on board, even for liberal initiatives.

A showcase for that talent was a proposed crackdown on police guilty of stopping more black drivers than white. Republicans opposed the move, seeing it as an attack on the men in uniform. Patiently Obama went through the legislation, meeting specific objections one at a time. He won over the right by explaining the new law would protect Illinois from potentially costly lawsuits for racial discrimination. Eventually, the bill passed — with both Republican and police support. Obama had learned what former senate majority leader Tom Daschle — tipped for a key role in an Obama White House — calls a central rule of politics: "The best way to persuade is with your ears."

In Springfield, Obama underwent a training in the practical politics of pragmatism. Even when the greatest foreign policy issue of the age — the Iraq war — loomed, he found a way to stake out a left of centre position that might not alienate the right. Addressing a rally in Chicago's Federal Plaza in October 2002, Obama delivered a stunning denunciation of the planned invasion, at a time when such a stance was not popular nationally. And yet those there were struck by Obama's opening line, repeated several times. "I don't oppose all wars," he said, as if trying to bring aboard moderates who would not ordinarily join the anti-war cause.

The spell in Springfield had included only one unambiguous mistake. In 1999, Obama saw Congressman Bobby Rush, a former member of the Black Panther party, lose a challenge to Chicago mayor Richard Daley. Against the advice of a string of mentors, Obama sensed an opening and challenged Rush for his congressional seat in a primary. But he miscalculated Rush's vulnerability, underestimating his popularity in the 70% African-American district. Rush derided Obama as a dilettante backed by well-heeled whites in Hyde Park — the first surfacing of the "not black enough" charge that would become an early worry in the battle for the Democratic nomination — and crushed him by a margin of two to one.

And yet, the defeat turned out to be the first in a series of lucky breaks for Obama. Mark Karlin, a former public relations consultant, said that it forced him to broaden his political horizons.

"He realised he wasn't a 'black candidate', that he wasn't going to be the voice of the black community. He's a blend of America, and he came to see that as an asset," Karlin said.

What's more, if Obama had won the seat in the House, it would have been too early to go for the bigger target in the Senate, which materialised a couple of years later. With luck on his side, Obama saw not one but two opponents fall by the wayside, successive rivals destroyed by messy divorce scandals. Boosted by a series of high-profile endorsements and a single TV ad in which Obama called for politicians to tackle problems, not each other, he won the Democratic nomination comfortably, pulling in impressive numbers of white votes. Then, in November 2004, he won the Senate seat itself, notching up a staggering 70% of the vote.

Obama's candidacy had caught the eye of the John Kerry campaign as they sought a keynote speaker for the 2004 convention. The Senate candidate in Illinois was not only young but he had a remarkable, uplifting story to tell. And Kerry wanted his convention to be positive.

Which is how a mere state senator came to be given a slot on primetime television to deliver the speech that turned Barack Obama into a superstar. His message — that there were no red states, no blue states, only the United States — struck such a chord that Obama literally became famous overnight. Dreams from My Father was reissued and became a huge bestseller; Obama won a Grammy award for the audiobook. He was not just a celebrity, but a phenomenon. The buzz about a presidential candidacy began before he had even been sworn into the senate in January 2005.

That posed a challenge for the freshman senator. But, as always, he made a plan. Mindful of the resentments he could stir, he vowed to earn the respect of his colleagues. He refused national media interviews, devoting his time instead to getting to know the state he now represented in Washington. In his first nine months in office, he travelled to the remote corners of Illinois nearly 40 times, holding constituency surgeries in out-of-the-way libraries and village halls.

He avoided glamour assignments, speaking in the Senate on workaday topics like highways and dams. He would make a point of deferring to longer-serving colleagues. Crowds may have mobbed his office, hoping for a glimpse or an autograph — or a photo of the leopard-beating stick from his grandmother's village that Obama had on display there — but he preferred to put in 12-hour days, eating take-away food at his desk.

This time, he did not even attempt the clubbable chumminess he had affected in Springfield.

Perhaps sensing there was no time for that, he focused only on the work. Solitary while most senators are social, and with his wife and daughters still in Chicago, he returned to the monastic habits of his student days. He leased a one-bedroom apartment, in a neighbourhood filled by people half his age who kept him up at night. Friends would receive draft sections of his second book, The Audacity of Hope, that had been emailed over at 3 or 4am. Work and exercise, that was Obama's Washington life. Then, when the legislative session was over each week, he would rush to the airport to fly home — economy class — to see his family.

The time was too short to reveal much, but at least one aspect of Obama's modus operandi should travel with him into the White House. By all accounts, it's the same working method he employed at the Harvard Law Review.

He would ask his policy advisers to convene the top experts in a given field for a dinner. Obama would make introductory remarks, then sit back and listen — hard. Similarly, when convening his own staff for a key decision, he might stretch out on a couch on his office, his eyes closed, listening. According to one account, "he asked everybody in the room to take turns sharing their advice, insisting on the participation of even his most quiet, junior staffers". He particularly encouraged internal argument among his advisers, thrashing out both sides of an argument.

After eight years of a president who ostracised those advisers who dared tell him what he did not want to hear, the Obama style will mark quite a change.

America's new president arrives with a distinction shared by perhaps none of his predecessors. It is not just a biography more nomadic, more complicated and cosmopolitan than any one of them. Nor is it even the accelerated speed of his ascent, a state senator in 2004 elected president just four years later. Barack Obama's most unique feature may well be his self-awareness.

He is someone who has reflected on himself and his background with often brutal clarity: Dreams from My Father is searingly honest. The result of that process of introspection is a man who has come to terms with himself, a man unusually comfortable in his own skin.

This might explain the preternatural calm Obama has displayed through the last two years. He says of himself that he does not get too high and does not get too low. Journalists who have followed him describe his "inner gyroscope", his almost freakish ability to stay steady — like a man able to lower his blood pressure at will.

It should not be underestimated how rare this is in a first-rank politician. Many, if not most, are driven by some kind of neediness: Bill Clinton craved the love of a crowd. But Obama seems to need nothing, except maybe solitude: spells in the gym or time on his campaign plane, left alone with only his iPod for company. When he was running for the Senate in 2004, aides thought he should have a driver. He said no: he liked the solitary drive. Like the gym, it was time for him to clear his head.

The upshot of all this is that Obama can seem aloof. It can be a weakness in a candidate, this distance: some Democrats always feared Obama was too chilly to connect with poorer, blue-collar voters. And it can translate into arrogance. During his Senate campaign, he confided to longtime family friend Valerie Jarrett his ambition to be president. "He said, 'I just think I have some special qualities and wouldn't it be a shame to waste them'. He said, 'You know, I just think I have something'."

Such inner confidence is a strength. He won, in part, because he ran a campaign that was as steady and unruffled as he is. Its motto: no leaks, no drama. His second book makes plain that Obama can see the absurdities of political life; he is able to write about politics with an ironic, amused detachment. By keeping some part of himself outside the hurly-burly — viewing the conversation from above, as his former Harvard tutor put it — he avoids drowning in the immediate, the day to day. He can see the bigger picture. He did that in the campaign, always putting strategy before tactics, and there is good reason to hope he will do the same in government.

Even if Barack Obama had lost this election, you would say he has had a remarkable life and that his is an extraordinary story. It is rooted in two faraway continents and began on an island in the distant Pacific. It involved a struggle to reconcile black and white within the soul of a single man, a quest to find the solid after a childhood in which too much had been fleeting. And now it has seen the son of a goatherd in Africa and a young mother from Kansas ascend to the most powerful office in the world.

Incredible as it seems, all that is mere prologue. The story's most remarkable chapter starts today. - courtesy The Guardian

This is what they said about…..

1.

The G-20 meeting provides a forum for a new kind of global economic cooperation. Now is the time to work together to restore the sustained growth that can only come from open and stable markets that can harness innovation, support entrepreneurship and advance opportunity – US president Barack Obama.

2.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said he believes world leaders will "rise to the challenge" of dealing with the global economic crisis at the G20 summit meeting in London on Thursday April 2, 2009.
The prime minister said he hoped the meeting would ensure "global solutions" were put in place to tackle the downturn.

The G20 brings together the world's most powerful nations that collectively represent 85% of the world's economy. The group was originally set up after the Asian financial crisis in 1999 to discuss international co-operation among finance ministers and central bankers - Guardian UK

3.

“They were apes only yesterday.
Give them time.”
“Once an ape-always an ape.”…
“No, it will be different…Come back here in an age or so and you shall see…”

The gods, discussing the Earth, in the motion picture version of H.G. Wells’ The Man Who Could Work Miracles (1936)

4.

He [Coleridge] talked on for ever: and you wished him to talk on for ever- William Hazlitt (1778-1830), lectures on the English Poet.

5.

Leadership is like the Abominable Snowman, whose footprints are everywhere but nowhere to be seen – Warren Bennis (1925-) and Burt Nanus (1936-) , Leading Others, Managing Yourself.

6.

It was involuntary. They sank my boat- John F. Kennedy (1917-1963), when asked how he became a war hero. In Arthur M.Schlesinger, Jr. A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, 4.9, 1965.

7.

It is far more impressive when others discover your good qualities without your help- Judith Martin.

8.

It is closing time in the gardens of the West and from now on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude or the quality of his despair – Cyril Connolly (1903-1974), The condemned Playground.

9.

Liubov Andreevna: Are you still a student?
Trofimov: I expect I shall be a student to the end of my days – Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) The Cherry Orchard, I.

My discussions on war (and peace) with George Bush

Thursday, 19 June 2008

by Alistair Horne

Last Sunday, to my considerable surprise, I was invited to a dinner at No. 10 in honour of President George W Bush, making his valedictory visit to Europe. I say surprise, because, under Socialist rule, Downing Street has been beyond my reach. On this occasion, the initiative manifestly came from the White House, with the President suggesting that he might like to meet a group of us Brit historians. Present were experts on subjects ranging from the French Revolution to Winston Churchill.
It may have been Whitehall's most expensive banquet ever – given that security precautions are said to have cost us taxpayers £1m – but I have no inhibitions in declaring that I enjoyed the evening quite enormously.
For all his current headaches, our host, the PM, was charmingly courteous – and with a considerable interest in history. I had the honour of being seated on the right of the President. I had first met him, just a year ago, having been invited to the White House, following his reading of my book, A Savage War of Peace; Algeria 1954-1962, which had been recommended to him by Henry Kissinger.
Then – as last Sunday – far from being the wooden, robotic figure as seen on the television screen, I found him relaxed, humorous, and considerably interested in contemporary history. (It seems to have surprised the US media when he declared that he went to bed at 9pm so that he could have time to read. I think I believe that.)
In the Oval Office last year, I was questioned intently on how de Gaulle got out of Algeria; I had to reply, "Mr President, very badly; he lost his shirt." Though it was clearly a disappointing response, Mr Bush replied, with emphasis: "Well, we're not going to get out of Iraq like that." That was shortly after the launch of the "surge". This Sunday we talked almost entirely about the Second World War – its turning-points and "what-ifs" – and the "special relationship", which both leaders toasted reciprocally in generous terms. The President was well-informed, and a flatteringly good listener.
We kept off the Middle East.
Of course, as a critic of Iraq, and current US policy towards Israel and Palestine, I could have wished that the White House had studied the lessons of the Algerian War before rushing in in 2003. One day history itself will doubtless inform us as to whether Bush might have acted more cautiously, had he had the lessons of history at his elbow, rather than the impetuous rashness of hawkish advisors like Vice President Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.
It all leads one to reflect whether history has its uses to political leaders; and whether denizens of the Oval Office, in general, are more conscious and respectful of historians than their opposite numbers in No. 10. (Were a similar question asked in Paris, whence I have just returned, there would be no doubt about the answer: Frenchmen have always been more aware of history, and culture generally, than their Anglo-saxon counterparts.) Whereas Gordon Brown, given a little peace, might well set a new standard, I have no evidence that Tony Blair (or his consort) ever read anything – except possibly Hansard. John Major had the instinct, but was too beset by troubles to find the time. Margaret Thatcher's interests were focused, but patchy. Winston Churchill, obviously, was the most steeped in history of any recent British PM; had he achieved nothing in politics, he would retain a place as one of our foremost historians.
But probably the best read of any, not only in history, was Harold Macmillan. To fight the "Black Dog" of depression, he would regularly lock himself away for hours at a time to read. He claimed to have re-read the whole of George Eliot during the Suez Crisis of 1956. Critics may claim that, as Chancellor, he should have been doing other things; but his response was "Dear boy, if I hadn't been able to get away and read, I would have been driven stark, staring bonkers...!"
Over in Washington, the ill-starred Richard Nixon was an avid reader of history; and he had at his shoulder the Harvard-trained professional, Dr Henry Kissinger. Its lessons doubtless informed his mould-breaking opening to China.
JFK in his first two years in office committed grievous errors of foreign policy. But by the time of his greatest test, the Cuban Missiles Crisis of October 1962, he was evidently reading Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, with its gripping account of how Europe blundered disastrously into war in 1914. One would like to think it might have helped him in handling Khrushchev, potentially as rashly explosive a non-thinker as Kaiser Wilhelm II.
If only. If only the Kaiser could have studied the Napoleonic Wars, he could well have paused before letting the Schlieffen Plan march him across neutral Belgium – thereby bringing in Britain and its Empire. Had Hitler known more of history than a corporal on the Western Front, he would surely have trembled before engaging with Anglo-American sea-power. He listened too much to crazy pseudo-historians like the geopolitician, Professor Haushofer.
But then Napoleon himself never learned from the lessons of the limited warfare of the previous century; had he done so, he would have consolidated peace with Russia on the Niemen in 1807. And we would all be speaking French, and sending our children to better schools...
Of course, if we historians urge our leaders to study history more intently, that must be special pleading. We all want to sell books. But if last Sunday's experience at No. 10 is any guide, it was a thoroughly beneficial two-way flow. I certainly learned a lot.

Alistair Horne has just finished an authorised biography of Henry Kissinger in the year 1973 and is the author of a series of books on French history

courtesy The Independent

The Bush Presidency

Wednesday, Dec. 31, 2008

By Michael Kinsley

"We will reopen Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House." —the 2000 Republican platform

But they never did. Eight years later, the barricades remain. It was a phony issue, of course — just another stick with which to beat Bill Clinton, who closed the road at the insistence of the Secret Service. In an interview with PBS a month after Sept. 11, 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney stated the obvious: "Pennsylvania Avenue ought to stay closed because, as a fact, if somebody were to detonate a truck bomb in front of the White House, it would probably level the White House, and that is unacceptable."

Sept. 11 is the excuse for many of the Bush Administration's failures and disappointments. It is also the basis for the one great claim made on George W. Bush's behalf: At least he has protected us from terrorism. In the seven years since that day, there has not been another foreign-terrorist attack on the American homeland. The trouble is that there were no foreign-terrorist attacks on the American homeland in the seven years before 9/11 either. The risk of another terrorist attack didn't increase on 9/11 — only our awareness of the risk. The Bush Administration took office mocking the concern that someone might blow up the White House but soon enough was echoing that concern.

The platform on which Bush entered the presidency eight years ago comes from a lost world, in which even the party out of power saw an America of unthreatened prosperity and security. "Yesterday's wildest dreams are today's realities, and there is no limit on the promise of tomorrow," the GOP said. The biggest foreign policy challenge America faced in 2000, according to this party document, was to avoid misusing our enormous power. "Earlier generations defended America through great trials," the platform declared. Then it quoted the Republican nominee, Bush, on the importance of showing the "modesty of true strength. The humility of real greatness." Even enthusiasts of Bush's foreign policy would not describe it as displaying the humility of true greatness. More like the pugnacity of lost greatness. All that talk of one superpower — us — bestriding a "unipolar" world seems as dated as Seinfeld reruns.

The measure of Bush's failure as President is not his broken promises or unmet goals. All politicians break their promises, and none achieve the goals of their soaring rhetoric. But Bush stands out for abandoning the promises and goals that got him elected, taking up the opposite ones and then failing to keep or meet those.

In 2000 Bush excoriated his predecessor for launching wars without an "exit strategy." In 2008 he leaves his successor a war that has already lasted for years longer than America's involvement in World War II, with no exit in sight. Bush got elected warning against using U.S. troops for "nation-building" — meaning any goal beyond immediate military necessity. Then once in office, he promised to bring democracy to the entire Middle East and ended up destroying Iraq as a nation in the name of saving it.

Bush leaves the stage still justifying his Iraq disaster on the grounds that prewar intelligence showed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He acknowledges that this intelligence was wrong but maintains he relied on it in good faith. Who cares? What matters is whether there were WMD, not how sincerely he believed there were. WMD were how he justified the war. How do you explain to families of the war dead why a war must go on for years after even the man who started it thinks starting it was based on a mistake?

The current economic calamity was a bolt from the blue to many who should have known better, but only one of them had been in charge for the previous eight years. Only one spent much of that time bragging about how swell everything was, thanks to him. Many shared the heedless assumption that there was no limit on how much government or individuals could borrow, but only one turned record surpluses into record deficits. And only one lectured us, Reagan-style, about burdensome government and then, almost casually, expanded government's role in the economy more than any President since F.D.R.: taking over banks and bailing out the auto companies.

O.K., but didn't he do anything right? Well, he came up with serious money to treat AIDS and malaria in Africa. He used the bully pulpit to embrace Muslims in the great post-9/11 American bear hug, when there was real danger of the opposite reaction. And you could say that Bush's disastrous presidency vindicates democracy. Let's not forget that, in 2000, more people voted for the other guy.

courtesy Time weekly, January 12, 2009

Bush’s legacy

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

By Michael Tomasky

Artists and geniuses, and titans of commerce and global affairs, actively leave legacies. Beethoven reinvented the symphony, Picasso jolted us into abstraction. Gandhi taught us nonviolent resistance, and Bill Gates came up with the chip. Towering figures all. Legacies, immutable and eternal.

But we use “legacy” in a second sense, do we not? Chernobyl, for instance, has a legacy: UN-led efforts to reduce nuclear fallout. Here in the US, a notable example is that of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in Manhattan in 1911, in which 146 garment workers either died in the flames or jumped to their deaths, which helped propel certain reforms and the broader American trade union movement.

Tragedies don’t actively leave legacies, but rather legacies are created out of their ashes. And this is the context – the only context – in which we must think about the legacy of blessedly exiting administration of George W Bush.

Am I being unfair? Is there not even one positive thing to say? OK. It was nice the other day, in fact quite nice, that Bush announced new protections for 195,280 square miles of American-controlled Pacific islands, reefs, surface waters and sea floor. That was well done. Bully.

But the world the Bushies tried to create – the legacy, that is, they attempted to leave has virtually nothing to recommend it. Even they know it. Vice-President Dick Cheney, in an exit interview with one of the last remaining friendly media outlets in the US (the Reverend Moon-owned Washington Times), said: “I’m personally persuaded that this president and this administration will look very good 20 or 30 years down the road in light of what we’ve been able to accomplish.”

Now, let’s parse why he said that. He knew he couldn’t say with a straight face: “We’ve been incredibly successful and leave office with our heads held high.” Even the man who said in May 2005 that the Iraqi insurgency was in its “last throes” couldn’t pull that one off. At the same time, Cheney and other defenders can’t say: “Well, we blew it, we screwed a lot of things up.” The admission would be refreshing of course, but it isn’t done.

So they are left with this stab in the dark. Bush’s defenders surely know that even this scenario is bloody unlikely. But, you know, it could happen. So it’s worth putting the spin on the record, just in case it does.

A list of grievances from the likes of me would be, I confess, a bit predictable and tedious, so there’s no point in doing much besides briskly enumerating the lowlights, notorious and somewhat lesser known. The lies about the war. The phony Saddam–al-Qaida link. The use of one of our greatest national tragedy for partisan political purposes. The smearing of political opponents as unpatriotic. And in the face of all that, the temerity to botch of the prosecution of the war.

The corruption of the justice department. The torture, the waterboarding, Abu Ghraib. The domestic surveillance of only God yet knows who and what. Guantánamo. The intimidation of scientists, the doctoring of governmental reports on global warming. The utter inaction, also, on global warming. The utter inaction on healthcare. The utter inaction on the economy. The utter indifference – no, hostility – to any regulation of the mortgage market.

I promised I’d be brisk, but there’s a little more. The phony “compromise” on stem-cell research. Katrina – ah, yes, New Orleans. Can’t forget that. It, in turn, opens up an entirely fresh Pandora’s box peopled with unqualified incompetents and unyielding ideologues who were given their government jobs merely, or at least chiefly, because they swore a mafioso-like fealty to capo Bush and consigliere Karl Rove.

One more and I’ll stop. In 2003, the bookstore at the Grand Canyon mysteriously started carrying a book giving a “creation science” interpretation of the canyon, positing not that it is 4-5m years old, as rational people believe, but fewer than 6,000. After all, it couldn’t be older than the Garden of Eden, right?

The wreckage – intellectual, ethical, moral, and physical, in terms of the lives lost by our soldiers and Lord knows how many Iraqis – is everywhere. The shame, even if Americans prefer not to admit it to Europeans, is immense. We know what we have done. We know how bad it is. If you watch US television news, you will see roughly half the people presented defending Bush. But that’s only because TV has to strive for balance. Believe me, the real percentages are more like 80%:20%. Four out of five of my fellow citizens know we have erred.

For that reason, we can turn our attention now to Bush’s legacies-from-the-ashes, positive and wholly unintended. Without his failures and, crucially, our collective acknowledgment of them, we would not have elected last autumn a man who is both a history maker and (seemingly) an intelligent and competent empiricist who believes in considering actual evidence (!) before making decisions. Without his failures and our collective acknowledgment of them, we would not be resolved as we are – some of us are merely resigned, but that’s good enough – to start addressing our festering problems and proto-crises: our energy woes, our over-consumption of everything, our healthcare mess, our global condition.

The incoming president has a mandate to move on all these fronts. It is an astonishing and exhilarating thing to see; for the liberally inclined, an invigorating and, indeed, joyous time to be alive, as Wordsworth wrote à propos the French Revolution. Whether he will succeed, well, we shall see what we shall see. Without question, some hopes are too high. Human nature is human nature, despite what Marx and his inheritors thought. The communists couldn’t change it, and Barack Obama won’t change it either. He will succeed here and fail there.

But that isn’t the question for today. We will have four or eight years to delve into all that. The question for today is, does the opportunity exist, at this historical moment, for a reordering of national and global priorities on a scale greater than anything seen since the Great Depression and the aftermath of the first world war? Yes, it does.

And for this, paradoxically, we have Bush to thank. Speaking of Marx, you know how the Marxists used to say “the worse, the better”? The dialectic hasn’t always worked out the way they said it would, to put it mildly. But in the current case, it’s playing out pretty perfectly, no? Bush made things so much worse, made it so evident to almost all of us, that things can only get better. Maybe in all that heavy reading he’s allegedly been doing the last three years, Bush has a) become a secret liberal and b) dipped into enough Hegel to have learned how to set the dialectic in motion.

Or maybe he’s just a really lousy president. Who was in over his head to begin with. I wonder how it feels, how it really feels, to know that, outside of the obvious mass murderers, you were one of the worst leaders in the history of modern world. Because he knows it. He’ll never say it, but he knows it. I say, let him live with it, every day. And let the rest of us thank him for failing so colossally and then get on with the rebuilding.

courtesy The Guardian and The News