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In the current edition
October 15, 2006

editorial

The Man Who Murdered America: Some Thoughts on September 10, 2001. In his Farewell Address to the nation, George Washington warned his fellow citizens against partisan fury, foreign adventures, and what he denounced as "pretended patriotism." He clearly foresaw the manner in which the degradation of public life in the United States would lead to what he called "a real despotism." By all appearances, the despotism that Washington feared is upon us, and it is very real.


Lebanon, Two Months Later. After a year of reporting from Afghanistan and Iraq, Iason Athanasiadis traveled to Lebanon. What he saw was, in his words, a series of "surreal paradoxes": much of the country reduced to rubble, on the one hand, and, on the other, "scantily clad male and female bodies…gyrating to the beat" of Beirut's hottest nightspot, where the champagne is never stops flowing.


Memorial. Melanie Wallace discusses three films about the events on September 11. Ironically, she says, the films seem to constitute a more fitting response than the orchestrated commemoration she saw on television, which only managed to focus attention to the absence, five years later, of any memorial, permanent or temporary, to the dead in lower Manhattan.


Greece, 1946: From Ballots…. This is the sixtieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Greek Civil War-but, as Alexander Kitroeff explains, that "this" is simply sometime in the year 1946, since no one is quite sure when, exactly, the war started. A good case can be made, however, for the electoral fiasco of March 1946 as the point at which the situation in Greece deteriorated from deepening internecine conflict into civil war proper.


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greekart

Blinded By Darkness. Jonathan Goodman reviews the work of Iannis Delatolas, a photographer born in Germany of Greek immigrants who now works in New York City. According to Goodman, in his dreamlike scenarios, Delatolas visits the empty isolation of America's postindustrial landscape; what he discovers there is both a romantic darkness and a metaphor for losing one's way.

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The City Chronicle. Apostolos Vasilakis reviews George Pelecanos's newest novel and finds that the author's latest police procedural is a pretext for Pelecanos to elaborate and focus on the story's urban microcosm and plurality of forces and characters. As a result, Vasilakis concludes, the classic question in this kind of work-whodunit-"is almost irrelevant."