Ayatollah Two-Step
Obama, Still Right on Iran
Pierre Tristam / June 28
Obama knows his history. But that’s not the reason he’s responding just as George W. Bush did before him (Bush did nothing during the 2003 Iranian student uprising). For all the bluster about supporting a more democratic Iran, the idea makes American presidents nervous. It makes America’s allies in the Middle East nervous. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Algeria, the United Arab Emirates and a few other little Sunni-led tyrannies from the Persian Gulf to North Africa pretend to hate the Iranian regime’s Shiite revolutionaries. They hate democratic movements and what they inspire even more. They’d rather live with a nuclear Iran than a democratic Iran, which would threaten every one of those tyrannies the United States unquestioningly props up.

Single Prayer Plan
How Obama Is Killing Health Reform
Pierre Tristam / June 21
There is no health care debate in the United States. There’s not even a debate over principles. You’d think a nation intent on overhauling a broken system that presidents going back to Harry Truman have been trying to fix would want to openly discuss what it wants — universal care? Single-payer? A private-public combination? Nationalized insurance? Nationalized care? All very different things. None is being aired in congressional hearings and town hall meetings, with one exception: Tinkering with more of the same. When even Barack Obama — the last great hope for reforming the West’s trashiest health care system — plays into the rhetorical ambushes of reform’s enemies, it’s clear that the debate has been hijacked by shams over the language of reform rather than its substance. And for all his skills at countering the pimping of language to crooked uses, Obama is flirting with collaboration on this one.

Kindelstücke, Op. 1
Erotics of Font and Print
Pierre Tristam / May 31
I’m not usually indecisive. But a new object in my life had me stumped. It up-ended my assumptions and made me doubt thousands of my most intimate relationships. It made me say sexist things I’ve never said before: The object is more desirable than an Alberto Vargas pinup and more devilish than Carmen. The most troubling thing isn’t that it was a gift from my wife, but that she meant it to spice up my middle-aged life, not hers (let alone ours). I wasn’t looking for spice. My harem, stocked in hardbacks and soft-covers from all continents, is quite diverse, thank you. I didn’t know whether to love this thing or hate it, surrender to it or make a guarded peace with it. It told me I have no choice. It’s here to stay.

Campus Class
Public Universities Abort Mission
Pierre Tristam / April 19
Brooke Wolfe is an Atlantic High School honor student with an excellent 3.63 grade-point average. She applied to Florida Atlantic University —not exactly the Harvard of the Gold Coast—and four other schools. She was turned down by all five, forcing her into the third-rate anteroom of community-college education. What should never have happened to Wolfe is happening to thousands of students across the state. They have the grades, the will, the ability to make it in any state school. What they lack is a state university system enabled to give them the chance. It’s not for lack of space or capability, but of lawmakers literate in what’s best for Florida. It’s not just Florida, of course. Quality university education is becoming a privilege across the country, betraying the democratic mission of America’s great post-World War II higher-ed boom. And that’s without mentioning cost as academe’s fattest poll tax. Florida isn’t just fast-tracking the shift. It’s excelling at it.

Torturers’ Gallery
Obama’s Memo from Nuremberg
Pierre Tristam / April 19
There’s a bomb of a contradiction at the heart of what’s passing for a debate on the torture regime of the past eight years. President Barack Obama calls those years of secret prisons and “enhanced interrogation techniques” a “dark and painful chapter in our history.” That’s not just a suggestion of something amiss. It’s an admission and an indictment of wrongs, in terms that have been applied to atrocities like war crimes and slavery.And if there’s a bomb of a contradiction at the heart of this debate, there’s also an elephant: George W. Bush. His name is hardly mentioned in all these stories of shame and torture. It’s all about the lawyers, the process, the exigencies of the moment. But it isn’t. The decisions were his. “I am the decider,” as he put it. And so he was. This “dark and painful chapter” began with him. His orders for secret memos. His orders to torture. It should end with him.

Ghosts of Tom Joad
Steinbeck’s Wrath at 70
Pierre Tristam / April 5
Homeless camps now sprawl instead of developments. Unemployment numbers are spilling off front pages into our lives. Employers are turning workers into modern-day sharecroppers (every man his own contractor). And next week, as if on cue, marks the 70th anniversary of the publication of “The Grapes of Wrath,” John Steinbeck’s novel of foreclosure and dispossession in the 1930s. How timely. Steinbeck gave the decade’s angers its voice. It was outraged and lyrical — as revolted over the country’s exploitative instincts as it was hopeful of its redemptive capital. Have we lost something since? The din of hateful sanctimony mugs the airwaves, giving no chance to a voice like Steinbeck’s, at once protesting, confident and forgiving. But nothing has been lost, exactly.

Civilized Pretensions
Epidemic of Institutional Sadism
Pierre Tristam / March 29
Savana Redding was ordered to the nurse’s office for a strip search. Over ibuprofen pills. She was 13. Savana did not consent to the search but complied in humiliating details. She was forced, literally, to shake her bra and her underwear, exposing herself in front of the nurse and an assistant. Nothing was found. I don’t know what’s more perverse: The principal’s zero-tolerance stupidity over ibuprofen pills, the degrading search, or the fact that nine U.S. Supreme Court justices will hear this case next month to decide what limits, if any, there should be on school authority. But this isn’t authority. It’s criminal abuse—of authority, of the child, of human dignity. How do we come to this? Stupid question, considering the accumulating record of a society where ideals of justice and humaneness mix with the basest controls in the name of discipline and order. They’re close relatives, those school officials who order a 13 year old strip searched, to those who have children Tasered, or to police officers who now use that instrument of torture as a routine means of subjugation, or to prison guards who do the same with restraining chairs. When the barbaric becomes routine, it’s called protocol. What should be denounced and forbidden is accepted and debated.

Waltz With Hamas
Israeli Atrocities in Gaza
Pierre Tristam / March 19
Israel immediately, and often justifiably, alights to the foulness of anti-Semitism when Arabs or others make no distinction between Israel and Jews, between the political and the ethnic, the act and the person. But there is such a think as Israeli bigotry, as vile and as consequential as anti-Semitism—the more so, between Israel and Palestine, given the relationship between the two. Israel is the powerful one. Israel is the occupier. Its bigotry has far more potency, when it is executed as policy—as it is every day, Palestinians will attest—than the pathetic bigotry of desperation Palestinians engage in. When a soldier says that “the lives of Palestinians, let's say, is something very, very less important than the lives of our soldiers,” he’s saying it all: Arabs, in Israeli soldiers’ eyes, are less than they are. Less than human. Less than zero.

• Israeli Atrocities: The Full Story
• Israeli Army Will Investigate. Then What?

Bonus Crimes
From Iraq to AIG
Pierre Tristam / March 16
Sometimes I wonder whether this country not only has lost its moral compass, but does what it can to forbid its recovery. Then I remember: of course it has. Iraq. Afghanistan. Black sites. Torture. Guantanamo. AIG. Bear Stearns. George Bush. The gathering depression. Tim Geithner turning courtesan for his old Wall Street pals. It’s all of a piece. There’s no pretense of propriety or civility, let alone of anything resembling moral behavior. There’s greed. There’s thievery. There’s more greed. Then there are apologies for the thieves and the greedy, half of that compliments of the government we thought we’d elected to clean house.

Exhuming the Sabra & Shatila Massacre
“Waltz With Bashir ”
Pierre Tristam / March 8
There is no such thing as an “intractable” problem in the Middle East. There’s dishonest (and repressed) memory, the mother of intractable problems. Then there’s the reality of human suffering bleached of the distorting loyalties to god and country. That’s the suffering Ari Folman comes to terms with in “Waltz With Bashir,” starting with his own. It’s the movie’s universal language, touching all that Folman finally remembers — Israelis, Palestinians, Lebanese, and even, by extension, the Americans who were dragged into the entirely preventable madness at the heart of his story.

Hero Worship
The Real Dopes
Pierre Tristam / February 15
In the space of seven days -- long enough, if you're a god -- the greatest swimmer of all times and one of the best baseball players of the day were discovered to have a thing for dope: marijuana for Michael Phelps, steroids, or whatever spin-enhancing euphemisms he's on now, for Alex Rodriguez. As always, when athletes are hounded off their pedestals by the same fantasists who put them there, the gale-force judgments that followed spoke less to the athletes' character than to their critics' duplicity -- and to the country's delight in turning, on a dime, hero-worship into inquisitions.