Readings

Today's Observer carries an interview with John Berger, prior to the London season devoted to his work which starts on April 11th.



A couple of other readings from this week which I might have mentioned before:

This on Venezuela. It's funny, of course, but what it's laughing at should have been considered laughable to begin with, not greeted with earnest political commentary.

Also this from Gore Vidal.

And this, from an article by Ron Suskind, which has been quoted numerous other places, to be sure, but is nonetheless noteworthy:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''