Steven Spielberg’s film Lincoln opens with a screen of uniformed men brawling in a formless mass on a rainy field. Two black soldiers in Union uniform emerge from the scene and speak to a man who hunches toward them. We see this is President Lincoln, with whom the soldiers are soon discussing emancipation, equality, suffrage and civil rights in the century to come.
11:59 PM 12/05/2012
From this interesting political year of 2012, a topic that’s unlikely to get revisited is the pair of scandals involving U.S. officials who hired prostitutes while on visits to Latin America. Ordinarily a good sex scandal is subject to extensive reprising. But these ones aren’t, because they contain an element that’s genuinely distasteful throughout our media and society: women who are deemed “of ill repute.”
9:37 AM 11/15/2012
It looks as if a youthful ebullience is in the capital’s air. That seems to be the message of Obama’s re-election and of the scandal at the CIA, which bespeaks a similar enthusiasm.
4:53 PM 10/15/2012
In this election year, the nonstop use of electronic media plunges us back to an age in which rumor and word-of-mouth were the agents of destiny. As a character sings in The Barber of Seville, “Calumny starts like a breeze.”
