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...aspects of modern American life that still inspire admiration from overseas, and features of American innovation that nobody else can match. But I spend about half my time outside the U.S., and I have to say that in many ways, like Bernard Kouchner, I think that the magic is gone. You want modern transportation systems? Try France or Japan. New airports? Half the cities of Asia. The old assumption that American culture would sweep the planet no longer holds good. In Africa and Asia, they don't cluster round TVs to watch baseball's World Series, but they do hang...
...followership. To be sure, the fiasco of Iraq has meant that there is no new generation of people and nations keen to follow America's lead. But the fundamental point transcends Iraq. It is that the conditions which created leadership and followership in the post-1945 world are gone, and they're not coming back...
...long-hostile territory. Childers actually runs strongest in rural towns that support John McCain but resent growing Memphis, Tenn., suburbs like Southaven. That presents dilemmas for Democratic leaders back in Washington, who may find new members of their herd hard to corral. After the galvanizing force of Bush is gone, they'll have to figure out what still unites them as a party...
...Eastwick that the witches remember is gone. The mansion where they held their unholy revels has been cut up into condos. And they have been transformed too: Time has stripped them of the hotness that was once the source of their power. The bodies that gave them such glorious satanic leverage over the world are now dragging them down. One wonders whether anybody has ever described the small physical indignities of the aging process with as much tenderness and good humor as Updike. "Energy," Jane says. "I can't remember what it was like to have any. The thought...
...question that Updike the Elder is putting to his younger self in Widows is this: Once the sex is gone, where does the power come from? ("Everybody needs power," Alexandra tells her daughter. "Otherwise the world eats you up.") Updike has spent his entire career writing about characters who are animated almost solely by the engine of Eros. Now the witches' sex lives are over, but their lives aren't, and you sense Updike's twinkly eyes peering cautiously into the darkness, beyond the glow of the merely fleshly, trying to make out what the world beyond might look like...