"A splendidly illuminating book." —The New York Times Like it or not, George W. Bush has launched a revolution in American foreign policy. He has redefined how America engages the world, shedding the constraints that friends, allies, and international institutions once imposed on its freedom of action. In America Unbound, Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay caution that the Bush revolution comes with serious risks–and, at some point, we may find that America’s friends and allies will refuse to (...) follow his lead, leaving the U.S. unable to achieve its goals. This edition has been extensively revised and updated to include major policy changes and developments since the book’s original publication. (shrink)

The best example of a Saturday Night Live (SNL) impressionist who goes beyond "spot on" to offer a creative impression is Dana Carvey. Just consider his impression of George H.W. Bush. Carvey performed Bush in cold opens and other sketches, developing a character that was not, in the ordinary sense of the term, spot on. To better understand the difference between creative representations and spot on representations, readers should consider for a moment the subject of music, and (...) specifically the phenomenon of tribute bands. A tribute band is one that attempts, as accurately as possible, to represent a famous band to a concert audience. Some might argue that Darrell Hammond was one of SNL's greatest impressionists, but the author argues that he was much like a tribute band. Hammond was available to offer a spot on impression of whomever the show might need for a given sketch. (shrink)

This popular and classic text chronicles America's roller-coaster journey through the decades since World War II. Considering both the paradoxes and the possibilities of postwar America, William H. Chafe portrays the significant cultural and political themes that have colored our country's past and present, including issues of race, class, gender, foreign policy, and economic and social reform. He examines such subjects as the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, the origins and the end of the Cold War, the culture of (...) the 1970s, the rise of the New Right, the events of September 11th and their aftermath, and various presidencies.Now thoroughly revised and updated, the seventh edition of The Unfinished Journey combines and reorganizes several chapters. The former Chapter 14, "New Rules, Old Realities," is now divided into two chapters. The new Chapter 14, "An Era of Political Malaise," covers the political history of the 1970s. It is followed by Chapter 15, "A Divided Culture, A Divided Society," which assesses the shifting cultural landscape of the 1970s and the emergence of major fissures in the social system of the nation. The final chapter contains substantial new material on the administration of George W. Bush, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the election of 2008, and the first year of Barack Obama's presidency. Brilliantly written by a prize-winning historian, The Unfinished Journey, Seventh Edition, is an essential text for all students of recent American history. (shrink)

This book collects and focuses recent writings of Arthur Schlesinger on the themes of its title. In its short Foreword and seven concise essays, the book aims to explore, in some contrast with the genre of “instant history,” the relationship between President George W. Bush’s Iraq adventure and the national past. This aim and the present work are deserving of wide attention, both because of the contemporary need to deal with the extended war in Iraq and because Americans, (...) in particular, need to attend to their own history, if we are to avoid past mistakes and make the best use of our ongoing political traditions and institutions. In order to know better where we might go in the future, we need an adequate picture of where we have been in the past. Schlesinger invites us to debate the war, the Presidency, and their relation to the American past. (shrink)

G. H. Mead left the following heretofore unpublished material in his desk at the University of Chicago, and it was first discovered by Charles W. Morris in the Summer of 1931. Mr. Morris, who was one of Mead's students in the 1920's, had been teaching at Rice University, but was appointed as a full-time staff member in the department of philosophy at Chicago in 1931; he was given the same office that Mead had occupied for many years prior to his (...) death in April of that year. Due to severely strained relations between the then newly appointed president of the University of Chicago, Robert Maynard Hutchins, and the regular staff members in the philosophy department, several of the latter left Chicago and were employed elsewhere in the fall of 1931. Consequently it seemed appropriate that Mr. Morris and some of Mead's other students should deal with the many unpublished typewritten conjectures that Mead left in his office. The entire book, The Philosophy of the Act, is a collection of items found by Mr. Morris, and the following material is from the same source. It came to my hands twenty-seven years ago because I was one of the collaborators in editing The Philosophy of the Act. If there is a slight over-lapping of the following material and subjects discussed in The Philosophy of the Act, it is for the sake of continuity and clarity. I have corrected the material for spelling and punctuation, and I have tried to give it a systematic arrangement. (shrink)

This is a expository and critical review of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. 's last book, War and the American Presidency. The book collects and focuses recent writings of Arthur Schlesinger on the themes of its title. In its short Foreword and seven concise essays, the book aims to explore, in some contrast with the genre of “instant history,” the relationship between President George W. Bush’s Iraq adventure and the national past. This aim and the present work are deserving of (...) wide attention, both because of the contemporary need to deal with the extended war in Iraq and because Americans, in particular, need to attend to their own history, if we are to avoid past mistakes and make the best use of our ongoing political traditions and institutions. In order to know better where we might go in the future, we need an adequate picture of where we have been in the past. Schlesinger invites us to debate the war, the Presidency, and their relation to the American past. (shrink)

Stem cell policy in the United States is an amalgam of federal and state policies. The scientific development of human pluripotent embryonic stem cells triggered a contentious national stem cell policy debate during the administration of President George W. Bush. The Bush “compromise” that allowed federal funding to study only a very limited number of ESC derived cell lines did not satisfy either the researchers or the patient advocates who saw great medical potential being stifled. Neither more (...) restrictive legislation nor expansion of federal funding proved politically possible and the federal impasse opened the door for a variety of state-based experiments. In 2004, California became the largest and most influential state venture into stem cell research by passing “Prop 71,” a voter initiative that created a new stem cell agency and funded it with $3 billion. Several states followed suit with similar programs to protect the right of investigators to do stem cell research and in some cases to invest state funding in such projects. Other states devised legislation to restrict stem cell research and in five states, criminal penalties were included. Thus, the US stem cell policy is a patchwork of multiple, often conflicting, state and federal policies. (shrink)

The flip side of radical autonomism is known as radical moralism. Splitting the difference between radical autonomism and radical moralism is the view known as moderate moralism, endorsed by contemporary aesthetician Noël Carrol. Radical moralism traces its roots back to Plato, who was all too aware of art's power to sway the hearts of its audience. The joke slightly depowers the powerful person, by transferring that power to the audience who laughs. John Belushi's Samurai Futaba sketches are more cringy than (...) funny to modern sensibilities, because the butt of the joke is Belushi's fictitious Futaba – a stand‐in for a stereotypical 1970s American understanding of a Japanese person. The butt of an impressionist's joke is usually, pretty straightforwardly, whoever they are doing an impression of. So, the butt of a typical Chase‐as‐Ford pratfall is Gerald Ford, and the butt of Carvey's famous “read my lips” antics is George H.W. Bush. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 31.1 (2001) 56-72 [Access article in PDF] Deconstruction and ZionismJacques Derrida's Specters of Marx Christopher Wise No differance without alterity, no alterity without singularity, no singularity without here-now. —Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx Introduction Following Jacques Derrida's first sustained critique of Marx and Marxism in Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (1994), an expanded version of his lectures (...) delivered at the University of California, Riverside, in May 1993, numerous "Marxist" theorists have responded to his provocative (and, for some, "untimely") intervention. Several of these critical responses have been gathered in Michael Sprinker's volume Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's "Specters of Marx" (1999), which includes contributions from such diverse theorists as Pierre Macherey, Antonio Negri, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, Aijaz Ahmad, and many others. Important omissions from Sprinker's book include Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's "Ghostwriting" (1995), an essay that Derrida nonetheless comments upon in his response "Marx & Sons," or any other feminist analysis of Specters of Marx, a curious absence in a text so riveted by questions of patriarchal affiliation. An even more startling omission from Sprinker's book is any analysis of Derrida's discussion of the Middle East, especially his remarks on the State of Israel and "a certain Jewish [i.e. Zionist] discourse on the Promised Land" [Specters of Marx 60] ("un certain discours juif de la Terre" [Spectres de Marx 104]). The myopic range of Marxist critiques of Specters of Marx is regrettable insofar as both Derrida and his Marxist critics ostensibly offer "radical" or "oppositional" perspectives on George H. W. Bush's New World Order while ignoring imperialist practices in places like Jerusalem, Golan Heights, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. In The End of the Peace Process (2001), Edward W. Said observes, "[w]hen one considers the broad lines of Jewish philosophy from [Martin] Buber to [Emmanuel] Levinas and perceives in it an almost total absence of reflection on the ethical dimensions of the Palestinian issue, one realizes how far one has to go" [208]. Said does not include Derrida in this trajectory of Jewish philosophers, possibly because Derrida has repeatedly disavowed any explicit affiliation with Judaism as religion, but I will argue here that Derrida's disavowal is implausible if not altogether disingenuous. In Ghostly Demarcations, Marxist responses to Derrida reveal how little real progress has been made in Western literary theory since the early 1980s, when now-tired debates about the Yale School echoed in nearly every humanities' corridor in the [End Page 56] United States. There are surely more compelling reasons to read Derrida today than to settle old scores with Ithaca-Irvine varieties of deconstruction. A key goal of this article is to enunciate Derrida's elision of the Palestinian question, not so much to undermine Specters of Marx, but to extend its power by venturing into domains that Derrida himself refuses to explore, a factor that weakens without totally disabling his deconstruction of Marxist theory. 1 The Rhetoric of Alterity In Specters of Marx, Derrida offers a complex, challenging, and virtuostic evaluation of Marx, focusing largely on "The Communist Manifesto" and The German Ideology. In particular, Derrida fixes his attention upon Marx's hostile and allegedly "obsessive" critique of Max Stirner, a rival Hegelian and "egological" anarchist. Derrida's criticisms of Marx turn on questions of spectrality, a suggestive way of describing the process whereby alienated or reified objects project illusory autonomy back upon the human subject. For purposes of the present essay, I draw attention to the rhetorical dimensions of the exchange between Derrida and his Marxist interlocutors, rather than the many subtleties implied by their respective analyses of this "new" concept formation. Such a strategy is useful not only because Derrida himself relies upon it in his essay "Marx & Sons," but also because it reveals key assumptions held by Derrida about deconstruction's political value, especially in the Middle East. Various contributors to Sprinker's volume do an impressive job of analyzing Derrida's critique of spectrality, especially Jameson, Warren Montag... (shrink)

This collection of previously unpublished essays is a celebration of the life and thought of a beloved professor who died of cancer in 1983. (pb).