Since it's the end of the week, and if you haven't read the
current issue of The New Yorker, you're probably never going to, let me
propose a brief roundup of its interesting
collection of nonfiction features. Perhaps you'll change you rmind. (Only one is
available online, but there is also an online interview with author
William Finnegan.)
First, Anthony Grafton, author of a delightful book on
footnotes, assesses, in "Reading Ratzinger," the thinking of the former cardinal, by going
through the catalogue of one hundred thirty items written by the Pope held by
Princeton's Theological Seminary. As a graduate student, Ratzinger learned how
Augustine and Bonaventure both learned important points of orthodoxy in
confrontations with heretics. I must say that Mr Grafton seems a bit dazzled.
One paragraphs ends with the theologian's conclusion that "The true Church could
not be founded on the exclusion of others"; the next reports that Ratzinger has
"recently approved the exclusion from the Eucharist of Catholic politicians who
defend abortion rights." It may be that the first is an instance of exclusion
from the Church, not the Eucharist, but that is a distinction without much of a
difference. I came across nothing, in any case, that excited my respect for the
Pope's critical thinking. Mr Grafton leaves us with the implicit conclusion
that, however brilliant, Benedict XVI is not a genuine intellectual at all.
As the organ and liturgy drown out the weaker voices of liberal
critics, as the searchlight of orthodoxy retrospectively reveals the errors
of [liberation theologian] Leonardo Boff and other dissidents, the Pope and
the magisterium - the centralized authority of Roman Catholic wisdom - have
no need to look outside for enlightenment.
That was my understanding to begin with.
Everyone seems to be thinking that nomination of John G Roberts
to take Sandra Day O'Connors seat on the Supreme Court was timed to distract
attention from the Rove-Plame simmer. But how about Seymour M Hersh's piece,
"Getting Out the Vote," on
how we may have poured millions into
influencing the Iraqi
elections in January? To be sure, this is not one of Mr Hersh's
strongest stories, and because it can be argued that "everybody else was doing
the same thing" (bringing contra-democratic forces to bear on the voting), any
outrage is bound to be anemic. But I think there's enough substance to the
report to add one more log to the "we don't practice what we preach" pyre for
the eventual immolation of the Bush Administration. Whatever else Mr Hersh's
piece leaves you with, you will groan with the fear that our intelligence
services have not really curbed their taste for proaction.
As if to compensate for the discouragement of the preceding, be
sure to read William Finnegan's review of the New York Police Department's
anti-terrorism forces, "The Terrorism Beat." Sounds like the last thing you'd
like to read? Well it's not. Even if that honor didn't belong to the next
piece, Mr Finnegan's account of the serious and effective-sounding overhaul that
the city's approach to terrorism has undergone since Mayor Bloomberg appointed
Raymond W Kelly to serve a second term as Police Commissioner. (Mr Kelly served
for a year under David Dinkins.) From two dozen officers prior to 9/11, the
force has grown to about a thousand, in a Police Force ten times that size.
Operating in the vacuum created on the one hand by a CIA and an FBI disgraced by
intelligence lapses, and on the other by the disgraceful failure of the federal
government to take any meaningful action to protect New York City, the Mayor and
his Commissioner took their own initiative. From drawing on the city's large
population of immigrants who can speak the languages of the Middle East - or, as
it is referred to here, "Western Asia" - to establishing humming control centers
that coordinate tireless detective work, to posting officers in key foreign
cities - not to help with investigations but to learn from them - to the
deployment of Hercules squads at the hint of danger, the city's response to
terrorist threat bristles with zeal and, so far, manifest competence.
Endless vigilance, no victory; success means nothing happens.
Every day without an event is its own success. I could not resist gloating at
the implications of the following:
Hardening the target: that's the term of art for the overarching
goal of local counterterror work. It can help to know what's happening
thousands of miles away, but a densely layered system of municipal defense
is a terrorism deterrent of a special type. It says, basically, Try another
town.
The next, and final article
is all about the comeback, in modern medicine, of leeches. Anybody with even a
smattering of historical study under her belt knows that leeches were the bane
of pre-modern medicine, often making patients worse rather than better. But
according to John Colapinto, writing in "Bloodsuckers," ever since the
discovery, in 1884, of the first natural anti-coagulant substance ever
discovered, in the saliva of Hirudo medicinalis, the leech has enjoyed
scientific, if not medical, interest. The medical interest kicked in in 1985,
when a Boston surgeon had to cope somehow with a child's outer ear that he had
successfully reattached, only to watch it darken with congested blood. A mad and
surreptitious scramble for leeches saved the day, and, ever since, leeches have
been the handmaidens (and the handymen - they're hermaphroditic) of
microsurgery. They bring an incomparable array of complex wonder drugs to the
healing of re-connected veins and healing joints. (They may even be approved for
the treatment of osteoarthritic knees - just in time for me!)
If there's a word for the little sketches that adorn the texts
of articles in The New Yorkers - and I'm not talking about the "drawings"
that have only recently been recognized by the magazine as "cartoons," a word
shunned under previous régimes - I don't know what it is, but in this week's
issue, they're all by the same hand, and they all depict whimsical engines of
self-propelled aviation.
