JOHN BERGER’S MOTORCYCLE

Express

I’ve a vivid memory of John Berger, whose latest book, Here is Where We Meet (Pantheon), appeared this past summer: seeing him on his giant black motorcycle. I was about to go walking in the mountains near Sommand and was driving up a narrow road that passed through Quincy, a village of a dozen-or-so houses nestled amidst rolling Alpine pastures. Suddenly, a motorbike overtook me at breakneck speed, but then pulled up abruptly at a lay-by not far ahead. Off came the helmet and the rider’s identity was revealed. I cruised by, staring in wonderment at a fast approaching octogenarian, robust and trapu—as the French might say—with close-cropped white hair. I remember thinking that the English ex-pat novelist-playwright, film scriptwriter-poet, art critic-essayist—how do you classify this guy?—looked like a cross between a portly Batman and C. Wright Mills’ elder brother; yet instead of an urban warrior piling into Columbia University, Berger’s beat is rural Haute-Savoie, France, some 30 miles east of the Swiss city of Geneva.

Have the Democrats Become the Party of Al Franken?

Express

In the month of October, as the Plame Game dragged on and the hard right scuttled Harriet Miers in favor of Samuel “Little Antonin” Alito, all of the leading figures in the Democratic Party watched quietly from the sidelines. Except, of course, for Al Franken, who, though ostensibly a political commentator and satirist, actually has become a leading voice of the Democrats. Temperamentally unsuited for the sidelines, Franken is instead always in the middle of the action, mixing it up with the party’s opponents.

The Revolution of Exalted Embarrassment

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And so the Revolution of Exalted Embarrassment begins. The silence of the products, the deep put-on of the products, is no longer the monarch before which we grab and swipe and save and spend. In fact we are belly-laughing profoundly. We are watching the amazed wandering away of our hands. Our consumerized gestures have had some kind of century storm blow through them. We’re just NOT BUYING. And why aren’t we buying? Because YOU, CHILDREN, YOU STOPPED ME. And I am from the Church of the Necessary Interruption and I am returning the favor. I break you from your mindless fondling of the bottle of something or other that you thought you would buy, you look up, giggling, perhaps nauseous, then you pull away from the product. Can we even remember what that product was? It was powerful and silent, and introduced to us by happy famous faces along the walls of the streets.

Triumph of the Dear Leader: A Journey Inside North Korea

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The 2005 “Arirang” Mass Gymnastics and Artistic Performance, May Day Stadium, Pyongyang, D.P.R.K.

Just before noon on Saturday, October 15, 2005, 90 U.S. civilians buckled into the cramped seats of a vintage 1960s Soviet-made Ilyushin Il-62 flying out of Beijing and bound for Pyongyang, the epic, showcase capital of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

The Bear and the Mouse

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In the snowy March of 2003, I climbed Slide Mountain, the tallest of the Catskill range at 4,180 feet, and met a wild-looking man named Sean McFall, who was staying 35 days on Slide’s shoulders, in the three-foot snow drifts, with the ice blowing from the treetops and his demonic-looking white bulldog keeping him warm when the temperature dropped to minus 20 degrees fahrenheit. “Got enough food and two sleeping bags,” McFall said, “so I don’t have to step one foot outta these woods.”

Excerpt from For God and Country

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Ed.’s note: James Yee, former U.S. Army Muslim Chaplain at Guantanamo Bay, here recounts his experience at Gitmo’s Camp Delta.