What can Humbert Humbert tell us about No Child Left Behind?

There's really no point in trying to shame Bush fils when he starts dropping literary references; just stand back and enjoy the comedy as it unfolds.

Whether he's voraciously devouring Camus and three Shakespeares or completely misappropriating Graham Greene, the man leaves you breathless.  Shock and awe, indeed.

The argument that America's presence in Indochina was dangerous had a long pedigree. In 1955, long before the United States had entered the war, Graham Greene wrote a novel called, "The Quiet American." It was set in Saigon, and the main character was a young government agent named Alden Pyle. He was a symbol of American purpose and patriotism -- and dangerous naivete. Another character describes Alden this way: "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused."

After America entered the Vietnam War, the Graham Greene argument gathered some steam. As a matter of fact, many argued that if we pulled out there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people.

In 1972, one antiwar senator put it this way: "What earthly difference does it make to nomadic tribes or uneducated subsistence farmers in Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos, whether they have a military dictator, a royal prince or a socialist commissar in some distant capital that they've never seen and may never heard of?" A columnist for The New York Times wrote in a similar vein in 1975, just as Cambodia and Vietnam were falling to the communists: "It's difficult to imagine," he said, "how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone." A headline on that story, date Phnom Penh, summed up the argument: "Indochina without Americans: For Most a Better Life."

The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be.

But the same token, perhaps the problem with Lennie Small is not that he failed in hugging Curley's wife, but rather that he let go too soon.

Comments

[Roy Rubin]

how true congrats so rare in the arts