Tubeworms teeming in the Mariana Trench, the harshest, most abyssal region of this planet, reveal a moribund fact: that life is always everywhere relevant. If you think I am posturing, then gray your hair with the following paradox; its parts, when taken together, inspire a vexed dimpling of the brow.

Act One. Momentarily suffering what is strategically labeled a “depression,” a woman hires Dr. George Tiller to drive a needle through the muscular tissue of her abdominal wall and into the bloated, ripe plumb of her uterus. There, digoxin, the same chemical agent by which the serial killer Charles Cullen collected the forty-five trophies of his nursing career, induces a series of strengthening spasms, kicks, and convulsions until the chaos of cardiac arrest has stilled the hideous strength inside her. Waiting, vegetating, out in a motel somewhere among the unmemorable cornfields of forgettable Kansas, the woman picks the lint off the comforter on her bed, glad she does not have to stir night-long in the sweet stink of a hospital, whose nasal moxie would bully her into remarking her location; she can begin to repossess herself now, well before she’s returned to St. Louis, where she contracted the Thing and abided it as long as she could tolerate. Four days later, after the expanding dowels wedged through her cervix have warped it to the requisite size, the woman squats over a commode and squeezes, pushes, in the defecatory manner, as webs of sweat thicken on her temples like the trappings of any both strenuous and healthy exercise. Then a clunk resounds, bone-hard and heavy, on the porcelain sole of the gaping maw beneath her birth canal: “It is finished,” she seems to say. This is not like an egg-white, a tadpole, or even an eerie figurine; in fact, the blue-faced gaze could be mistaken for the vacant stare of a nine-month-old in a neonatal ward. It is, whatever it is, still a Thing.

Nine-months grown and four-days decayed, the fat homunculus of the brown-stained swaddle, the Tom Thumb of the garnet gangrene, turns in the latex hands of Dr. Tiller.

Act Two, Scene One. The boyfriend, whom can be called “Reggie” (because this act is different insofar as it can present things as human), enters the recovery room behind the snapping Crocs of Dr. Tiller, OB/GYN. Unacquainted with the initiatory rites of fatherhood, Reggie bothers the nearest orderly for an antacid, for his groaning bowels bemoan his latest contribution to this comedy of errors; that is, since “It’s a boy,” he was told, the suction of cheap-cigar smoke would have been a sensible pretense for him and the pediatrician of his heir manqué. (Alas.) Having survived her second round of waiting, presumably by tearing shapes off the baking sheet that lines the plastic pseudo-divan on which she now poses, “Regina” sights Reggie and shows her ecstasy in the celestial altitude and goalpost position of her arms. They perform an embrace suiting the common-law stage of intimacy and then, each assured of the other’s satisfaction, turn to their steadfast George Tiller, whose countenance is no longer the very image of a canker sore.

Act Two, Scene Two. Two hours have expired since Regina passed her gallstone into a commode, and one hour since Tiller filtered out the jellyfish of her afterbirth. Interrupting these family matters with a mannerly cough, the couple’s stork has announced the return of the portable toilet, which the orderly conveys carefully, as though it were a manger. Nine-months grown and four-days decayed, the fat homunculus of the brown-stained swaddle, the Tom Thumb of the garnet gangrene, turns in the latex hands of Dr. Tiller, a duet of spiders wrapping their prize, until the moldering midget emerges clothed from his crapper crib, having knocked his bleeding crown on the way out of the head (Aghast, the boy looks like he’s had a heart attack). In cuddles with the onetime “temporary depressive” Regina, whom the boy can’t call “Mom,” he humors a poke from Reggie, or sleeps like a rock, while Tiller reviews the medical report and tells them that nothing was wrong with their “baby.” Regina, Reggie, and the baby have up to three hours before the big bye-bye and decide, as Tiller told them is normal, to make the most of their life together. Once the orderly arrives with the clinic’s camera, available to patients for no additional charge, the couple crowds around the late-term abortion for a prideful portrait to be hung above the cracked mantle in their happy home. Then, helped by hands shoved under his camel-toe armpits, the baby steps from an inkpad onto a certificate that, when framed, will display footprints the imagination can follow on a rainy day. Having resisted the urge to name him before they saw him, Regina and Reggie now decide it’s “Thing” and are convinced they’ve got it right. Not three hours but seven minutes have flown, and that’s the lucky number, so black-footed, baby-photo Thing is back in the toilet. Come as soon as gone, Tiller wheels the porcelain perambulator through a sterile hall and a febrile quarantine, where he tips Baby into the crematorium whose fire has curled and closed the hands of sixty-thousand Things in the gesture of a droll farewell.

Dear Santa Claus,

P.S.: We’re going through budget cuts and a health initiative this year, so no cookies and only soy milk.

Mr. Obama,

Sending regards as warm as the heart of Yongbyon,
The Government of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Yet many foresighted analysts wag a cautionary finger at these citizens. Governmental regulation is, they say, somewhere between “ineffective” and “malicious.” Unquestionably, the American Mecca of free-market economics is the Cato Institute, located in Washington, DC. Striving to inform Americans of the effects of governmental intervention, often to many Americans’ distaste in the current political climate, Cato fervently seeks to widen the debate on public policy to include the more trenchant, long-term consequences of legislation.

I recently had the privilege of sitting down with Jerry Taylor, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, to discuss the government’s role in the energy market. Taylor, one of the most influential critics of federal energy and environmental policy, is a frequent contributor to major news networks, appearing regularly on NBC, CNN, BBC, and Fox News; his op-eds on public policy have graced the pages of newspapers, journals, and magazines across the country. He is a member of the International Association for Energy Economics, and he has served on several Congressional advisory bodies, testifying on Capitol Hill at crucial junctures of political decision-making.

Igor Sadovyi: Hailed as a huge success by the Obama Administration, the “Cash for Clunkers” initiative led to a notable increase in automobile sales for automakers. Yet some are saying that the environmental effect, at which the program was targeted, was negligible. What is your opinion on “Cash for Clunkers,” and should we expect to see similar initiatives in the future?

Jerry Taylor: It was really a stupid policy, but a very popular one, meaning we’ll likely see more of these stupid yet popular policies. There’s a mountain of academic works that have slapped around “Cash for Clunkers” by quantifying costs and benefits, finding that this is one of the worst government programs in modern history. A lot of those tabulations are being done by non-ideological sources like the University of California Energy Institute, a place where you wouldn’t expect to find slash-and-burn campaigns against governmental policy.

IS: As American drivers continue to spend inordinate amounts of money on gasoline, questions are being raised regarding the levels of federal gasoline taxes. In the past, you have advocated for the abolition of these taxes. What, in your judgment, is fundamentally wrong with having federal gasoline taxes, and what would getting rid of them accomplish?

JT: They’re not correcting any externalities: Whatever problems you find without the tax will be around with the tax. If your issue lies with pollution from cars, then tax pollution; it’s more direct, and more effective. If you want to reduce dependency on foreign oil for reasons of national security, then you tax foreign-oil imports. You don’t tax gasoline; that gets nothing accomplished.

IS: What is your view on current and proposed cap-and-trade programs, on their benefits and their shortcomings?

JT: That’s a big question. The simple answer is that the cost associated with a cap-and-trade program outweighs the benefits. It is obvious if you just look at the benefits that occur from US gas emissions: If you try to run those emissions through climate models, you’ll find that temperatures are reduced by just a fraction of a degree Fahrenheit—nothing of consequence. The benefits are virtually immeasurable. The cost, depending upon whom you ask, is either small, medium or large. Any cost, be it small, medium, or large, is going to be greater than an unquantifiable benefit.

his past summer, I traveled to Senegal to work on an archaeological field project led by Francois Richard, a professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago, and Ibrahima Thiaw, a professor of archaeology at Dakar’s Université Cheikh Anta Diop. Senegal, a small country tucked into the western-most region of Africa (the so-called “dark continent,” depending on the textbook one reads), has something of an under-appreciated archeological history. At the time, my largest goal for this experience was to shed light on the history of a people for and about whom few historical documents exist—it was, in this spirit, an opportunity to make real-world use of my academic skills. Yet the lessons one learns in the classroom, I quickly found, do not easily translate to the field.

After managing to lose twenty American dollars in the midst (and confusion) of my arrival at Léopold Sédar Senghor International Airport, I had the dizzying realization that I was not in Kansas, or at least Chicago, anymore. I was in an unfamiliar country, my knowledge of French was, at best, sub-par, and I didn’t know anyone other than two other students whose flights would not arrive for many hours. The burden lay solely on my shoulders; I was to make friends and learn to communicate with the people in Dakar—the same people whose ancestors were to be the object of my study.

From the start, the smallest tasks were made strange. Taking a taxi, for instance, required a bit of patience: After flagging down one of the many dilapidated cabs that circled the city, I had to bargain for my rate (It is a rite that seems to be inscribed onto the character of almost all sectors of business in Senegal). There was no digital ticker that slowly climbed as I’d waited at a stoplight; there was no direct fare from the airport to important landmarks; there was just bargaining. Yet as much as we tried, it was hard to haggle for good prices: Everyone in my group stood out as Americans—even me, despite my Jamaican heritage. Stranger yet was living at a Catholic mission in rural Ngasobil, not far from the city of Joal, where running water rushed sporadically through the pipes and the electricity hummed in and out as it seemed pleased to do—this not because of a lack of infrastructure, however. It’s the politics of the place: Senegal’s president, Abdoulaye Wade, makes an absolute priority of Dakar, achieving sometimes a complete absence of water and electricity from the marginalized Serer population on the coast.

Yet I learned to adapt to the conditions, carrying flashlights to dinner for when the power would go out, and storing water so that I could take a bucket shower and have something to drink. Coming from a country where a blackout (in 2003) could be met with widespread hysteria, it felt strange to realize, firsthand, that blackouts were a fact of life. Of course, we were there to do archaeology, and we’d endure what we could to accomplish that goal.

And archaeology we did. We had been laboring for days in the blazing sun when, during one of our mapping phases, something happened that I shall never forget. While we mapped, the many local kids who played around on the beach near our site – always curiously watching our work and shyly asking questions – helped one of our groups refill an excavated unit. It was welcome help: With the addition of twelve extra pairs of hands scooping sand into a two-by-two meter pit, the team was able to finish well ahead of schedule. Yet I was deeply impressed by the innocence, and the accompanying naiveté, of their actions. Did these children know that they had just aided in an archaeological dig whose findings could, possibly, transform the past of Senegal?

When I posed the question to Professor Thiaw, he told me that the people of Senegal recognized their past only insofar as it was convenient; fieldwork like ours has the potential to raise issues involving slavery, issues that many Senegalese prefer to de-emphasize because they don’t mesh well with their contemporary view of their society. I realized that, although I had grand ideas about giving a voice to the subaltern, to re-interpreting a dominant historical narrative, the people of Senegal were largely uninterested in the history I was trying to reveal: their own. Yet this disregard does not seem unusual when one puts it into the greater, and sometimes conflated, context of Africa and its attitude towards the past. There has been a push in recent years to distance the continent from its history so that it can compete in the global market economy, unencumbered by historical politics. This act of forgetting obscures, of course, the reality that today’s Africa is a product of its past—colonial or otherwise. Without working through the pain that this past has inflicted and still inflicts on the present, Africa threatens itself with stagnancy.

n Wednesday, we lost a mainstay of modern American politics. For almost half a century, Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy championed what his heart told him was just.

Breaking legislative deadlocks, forging unsuspected political alliances, and advancing urgent – by some accounts importunate – initiatives, he left his mark, as his legacy will continue to do for some time.

Although his life was occasionally marred by scandal and controversy, Senator Kennedy found stability in Victoria Reggie and, we would hope, laid his inner demons to rest when he publicly recognized, and apologized for, his “own shortcomings: the faults in the conduct of [his] private life.”

A large measure of Kennedy’s political success owed to his sincere and tireless passion. Whether one appraises his beliefs as laudable or one views them as misinformed, Kennedy’s stature as a public servant can hardly be questioned—at least regarding the degree to which he attempted to achieve all he promised his constituents.

I had the pleasure of meeting Ted Kennedy while serving as a Senate Page for John Cornyn (R-Texas). I had been waiting downstairs of the Capitol – near the trams that whisk staffers and politicians to and from the Hill – notifying the Republican cloakroom of the various senators on their way to a vote. As I began to proceed to the Senate chambers, I found myself walking next to the Senate lion himself.

After exchanging a short “good day,” the senator noticed my shiny, smooth-belly-ostrich cowboy boots and joked, with a big smile and a warm demeanor that I could not have expected, that I “must be the page from New York, for Clinton.” I laughed and rejoined that I was, rather, paging for the man who equated gay marriage with civil unions between men and “box turtles.” Ted chuckled as we headed towards the elevator on the way up to the Senate floor.

I then informed the senator that my boots were actually out of dress code for pages and that I’d been reprimanded on a few occasions—much to the amusement of the boot-bedight senators Cornyn, Enzi, and Lott. I told him I didn’t mind as my boots, which have been in my family for years, are a source of my pride and represent who I am. I’ll never forget his response:

“Well, as an outspoken person, you’ll soon learn that your confidence in your character and convictions, whatever they are, will never please everyone. I guess if we please everyone we never truly fight for someone.”

The elevator door opened and the senator promptly bid me goodbye as he made his way to the floor to fervidly fight for someone. I lingered in the elevator for a few seconds, humbled and inspired by the unexpected exchange.

This Saturday, Senator Kennedy will be buried at Arlington Cemetery. From a grave nearby and a plot looking down from a neighboring hill, Robert and John will welcome their brother home after all these years for continuing the impassioned legacy they had begun and to which they devoted their lives.

Outlining the issue and its best solutions needs to be done, therefore, at a graceful rhythm and with the utmost attention to particulars.

The fundamental problem with the current system is two-fold: soaring premiums and availability flaws.

Addressing the latter defect, the most cited statistic is the 46-million Americans who do not hold health insurance. Many take the fact at face value, deciding that these people are uninsured because of extenuating circumstances and that they would purchase insurance if they simply could afford it. Yet Medicaid is available to low-income individuals, and Medicare is available to the retired; while accounting for the shortcomings of both programs, the welfare-inclined must look elsewhere when trying to explain the status of the uninsured. Multiple studies have found that a large portion of the demographic consists in young, risk-loving individuals who would rather face the uncertainty of their future livelihood than pay high premiums. Of course, it’s not just the young who suffer high rates (and the young don’t suffer inflated prices just because of the hazards associated with vernal, spirited lifestyles). The cost of health insurance is skyrocketing across the board.

The Pelosi plan, backed by Obama, opts to establish a public-option program that – at least in name – allows one to choose between a private plan and a federalized plan whose prices are controlled by the government. Yet the choice no American has entails that, either way, everyone must pay for the public program. Choose the private option, and you’ll end up paying for both.

The government’s fickle method of lowering costs is, meanwhile, to contrive a monopoly over health insurance by plunging its own prices beneath those established naturally by the market; by sustaining a loss that only it, the government, could survive; by forcing private insurance companies to lower their own premiums in order to compete and, thereby, running them out of business. How the government is to fund its losses will be through taxes and deeper debt.

Having garnered the disdain of Republicans and fiscal Democrats alike, the proposed surtax on the wealthy has, of course, been one of the major impediments to the acceptance of the plan; increasing taxes during a recession, which further reduces spending in the economy, is also a terribly unpopular proposal. The failure to achieve even full party support before the August recess, a failure that has delayed any vote on the bill until the autumn, is undoubtedly a sign of weakness.

No one claims that healthcare reform is among the least of this country’s priorities. Yet only bipartisanship, backed by economically sound and economically just solutions, can lead to successful and lasting healthcare reform that is beneficial to all Americans.

It will be useful to string out a number of ideas, presently entering the discussion, that are alternative to the Pelosi plan in part or in whole.

Bobby Jindal, former governor of Louisiana, has proposed that the government post price data for all medical expenses. While this action might seem superficial, it would allow consumers to swap between various treatment alternatives manageable within their own budgets, giving them the ability to choose their optimal providers and medical procedures.

The atmosphere at the 2009 parade doesn’t feel too different from the party atmosphere at the ‘08, ‘07, or ‘06 parades, even though organizers have tended to highlight the fact that this is a big one. It’s the fortieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York City’s Greenwich Village, when patrons of the Stonewall Inn refused to let the New York City Police Department shut the bar down and started riots and demonstrations that continued in the Village throughout the early morning of 28 June 1969 and for the next few days. Technically, it’s only the 39th Pride-esque event: the first “Gay Power” marches started in June 1970, and generally became “Gay Pride” only in the ’80s. But nitpicking aside, it’s a not-small deal that the most recent, most public and outspoken incarnation of the gay-rights movement is about forty years old.[2]

It’s also the fortieth anniversary of contralto, addict, and icon Judy Garland’s death. Which may or may not have had any bearing on the Stonewall riot itself, depending on which account you read.

But age and death are no more the focus of this parade than of the three that preceded it. The floats – PRIDEChicago’s official registry lists 250 of them – are huge and teeming with drag queens and go-go boys performing for the crowd, throwing beads and condoms and candy. (If it’s hard to keep dancing or mugging for cameras while in stripper heels or with wings strapped to your naked back for three-plus hours, the performers don’t show it.)

Most are like that, anyway. The official list identifies floats no. 7, 7A, 8, 8, 8 again, 8A, 10, 10, 10, and 10, 11, 12, 19, 20, 32,[3] 36, 48, 64, 65, 65A, 80, 81, 83A, 105, 106, 107, 107A, 108, 121, 191, 193,[4] and 195 as occupied by politicians representing various levels of government, geographical areas, and degrees of queerness. If you were to count each politician as his own float, even those who clustered in poly-politician groups (platonic running mates? cheaper registration? safety in numbers?), you’d find that 13.2% of the registered paraders were looking for your vote. (This figure excludes political organizations, largely to avoid straddling the line between bald-faced electioneering and authentic attempts to participate in or represent the LGBTQ community. Perhaps it’s not necessarily clear which of these camps would claim, for example, the Human Rights Campaign, which has a representative role but also a brand to sell.) These floats are a little less spectacular: most of the politicos seem to be trying to force some kind of dignity—then again, it’s an often hilarious attempt in and of itself.

If you subscribe to the popular idea that shopping is a way of “voting with your dollar,” the political tally shifts dramatic, and occasionally confusing, degrees. (So PepsiCo, Frito-Lay, and the Exelon Corporation [154-6] seem to have a fairly clear agenda—whereas something about nos. 21, “PFLAG & Wrigley Co.,” and 41, “AIDS Care & Google,” is suspect at best.) The number of legally recognized limited-liability corporations at Chicago’s 2009 parade was staggering, and it seems likely that the majority of ’09’s floats were corporate-sponsored.

There’s something comic about some of the corporate floats, in that it’s sort of hard for a savvy consumer to imagine the logic that led to their presence. This chronicler is not sure, for example, what bp (née British Petroleum – no. 163) expected to gain from their float. It seems that if a car is low on gas, one first considers where the nearest gas station is, then where the cheapest one is. Were there steps in deliberative the process beyond those, they would hardly include “Which of the available gas stations is more likely to use a teeny-tiny fragment of my money to hire go-go boys to gyrate for me within the next twelve months?” Put that way, it’s maybe not the worst thing to consider, but even after seeing the float, I associate Fritos not with washboard-abbed public pride but with tubby, very private, binge-eating shame.

It’s hard not to love the display, regardless of who’s paying for it. In classic camp style, enjoyment is enjoyment, no matter the source or the context. Casual observation and a couple of clumsily attempted man-on-the-street interviews tended to reveal that STOCKYARD sounds like it might be a leather-fetish magazine, that people don’t come to Pride parades to talk, and that, if there is something essential about the experience of the parade, it’s that Pride is fun.

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[1] The uppercase letters don’t represent an acronym or anything; they’re apparently a typographic conceit, and are reproduced sic throughout.

[4] Float no. 193 was, in fact, “Schroeder (people for)”—an even more ambiguous label that makes his bodily presence still less certain than Jim Madigan’s supra.

Her coffin was a masterpiece in bronze and copper, miniature Pietàs on each corner, and a lid so polished when I stared at it, I had the eerie moment of looking at myself in a casket; the coffin shone too brightly graveside, as we read the 23rd Psalm and lowered her into the Earth. True to her wishes, we remained there until she was fully buried, and watched as a pile of dirt snuffed out the coffin’s light as quickly as a fall had snuffed out her own. It seemed an odd custom, a holdover from a time when the coffin would be lowered, the mourners move on, and then the coffin raised, body dumped, and coffin resold; as she lay dying, my grandmother would wildly grip my hand and tell me how she saw an undertaker turn in a pound of gold fillings for money at a local jeweler, her other hand covering her mouth–obscuring the details of her story–for fear of post-mortem desecration. I thought those times had passed.

But they have not; you need but pass by a newsstand in Chicago to see the terrifying news: Four people are being charged with felony human dismemberment and desecration of a burial site for allegedly exhuming gravesites to resell the plots. All are employees at a Cook County graveyard in Alsip, IL, Burr Oak Cemetary—the entire 150-acre crime scene is swamped by the grief-ridden families of the buried adults and residents of the crassly named “Babyland.” The national media is riddled with pictures like this one, showing a floor covered in headstones, each one helter-skelter and carelessly tossed, the clods of dirt still clinging to them. Every news anchor excoriates the intrepid entrepreneurs for disturbing the dead, causing the city and now the FBI to focus hundreds of hours in dealing with the queries of the over 6,000 families concerned with the whereabouts of their dearly departed, including the family that failed to find 10 of their buried relatives. In the clip reel, Cook County Sheriff Thomas J. Dart is quoted often, “We don’t have an end in sight.”

The gore from this particular situation aside, all burial ritual is not for the dead, rather it is for the living. It is the central part of the grieving process, the finality of saying good-bye by removing the person from active parts of society and relegating them to a bucolic field; it separates the person from the context of the life they led, and the act that is meant to honor the dead in memoriam is instead an act profoundly of forgetting. In a perfect world, parents are buried by mourning children, who mourn and remember until their children bury them, until those children’s children grow old and are buried too; after three and four generations, the lives which were so richly important become family heirlooms, great-great Grandma Montaigne’s fruit painting, great-great-great Grandpa von Dornenbürg’s Kiste he brought with him from Germany, until the items are sold off and the stories become irrelevant. As Henry Austin Dobson quipped, “Time goes, you say? Ah no! / Alas, Time stays, we go,” and within the span of a few generations, no one knows the names in the family necrology, and the grieving process that was sealed graveside has been consummated.

What Carolyn Towns, Keith Nicks, Terrance Knicks, and Maurice Daley are accused of doing was not wrong, merely incorrect and foolhardy. I’m not critiquing their business plan, but their execution. By violating the grieving process of the living, they opened themselves to eventual exposure; had they focused their entrepreneurial efforts on the long-dead, they would have been part of a noble process of grave reclamation common in England and Germany, where space is a premium and those dead for fifty years are liable to be exhumed and cremated. In a society that cremates a projected 36% of the dead in 2010, particularly considering cremation is the perfect form of dismemberment, any American is likely to desecrate a burial site when they camp in a beautiful stretch of woods or sail on Lake Michigan. As a society, we say that it is vile, wrong, and wholly improper for these four to have done this, while we travel to museums full of artifacts from tombs; we tour through the Roman catacombs and extinguish our cigarettes on the floor, never thinking as we hypocritically throw these four into the pillory.

When I die, from liver failure, lung cancer, or the heart disease that plagues the men of a certain age in my family, and those I’ve left behind have passed too, all that will remain of my grandmother is a few dusty photographs and the art she spent her life crafting; they won’t know about her caustic wit, how I would sit by her desk while we did crosswords, or how she made the very finest peanut butter and jelly sandwiches—and frankly, if what I pass down to them of her cannot communicate to them how positively marvelous she was, a rotten body in a plot they likely won’t want or be able to find will fail too.

Jefferson, Kennedy, Clinton, Spitzer: Our country has accumulated an impressive litany of statesman whose reputation, at one point or another, became eclipsed by the shadow of a monolithic libido. Sometimes the affair entered the public eye years after the fact, other times almost immediately; but the vox populi has long portrayed the Seventh Commandment as a political code.

Many believe that the U.S. has only recently favored a stricter scrutiny of the personal affairs of public officials—due, they claim, to the influence of the Christian Right on modern politics. Many also believe that the choking grip of an affair squeezes all the potency out of an elected statement’s political promise: “If he’s lied to his wife,” goes the logic, “what will prevent him from lying to the public?” But do the coup-de-foudre exploits of American politicians consistently entail, and consistently merit, the coup-d’état consequences?

Some will say that Governor Sanford dug his grave by fashioning himself as a zealous Christian and advocate for “family values.” Upon becoming a congressman in 1994, Mark Sanford vociferously supported President Clinton’s impeachment; in keeping with his vaguely nonpartisan standard, then-Representative Sanford even opposed Bob Livingston’s rise to the position of Speaker of the House, saying, in response to Livingston’s extramarital trysts, that “we as a party want to hold ourselves to high standards, period.”

Eight days before Sanford’s recent act of contrition, Senator John Ensign (R-NV), a fellow socially conscious conservative, admitted to having an affair with a married campaign staffer whose husband worked for the senator’s office. Katon Dawson, onetime chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party and former candidate for the chairmanship of the R.N.C., noted the Grand Old Party’s “political” affliction with concupiscence; it’s “the damnedest thing I’d ever seen,” he said; “whether it was the Nevada senator or Larry Craig, we’ve been struggling with our elected officials. We run on values, and we’ve been struggling.” It seems that every time the G.O.P. achieves an organized grasp on effective policy positions, another family-values Republican steals the moment away because of his personal penchant for, well, other positions.

Certainly, sexual hypocrisy has plagued the Democrats as well. Former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, decried in various arenas as the “crusader who cut off his own head,” had spearheaded a crackdown on prostitution while paying $80,000 for the pleasures of the flesh. “I cannot allow for my private failings to disrupt the people’s work,” Spitzer said; and he resigned from office. Consistency of word and deed may have strongly contributed to the political preservation of politicians like Bill Clinton and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who never touted a Puritan moral code and survived, respectively, a confession of adultery and accusations of sexual harassment.

Despite endless opportunities to acclimate their expectations and reconsider the basis for their judgments, Americans remain needlessly scrupulous in their scrutiny of politicians’ personal lives; as in the case of Spitzer, for example, it takes just one revealed misadventure to eradicate public confidence in a passionate and determined statesman. Other countries seem to respect the private nature of politicians’ bedroom proclivities and disregard their wayward antics; for the rest of the watching world, America’s swift judgment seems to indicate a deep-seated sexual repression.

Now, the blood of those who contested President Ahmadinejad’s re-election, and voiced loud support for opposition candidate Moussavi, stains the city’s pavement with the ruddy hue of defeat (not, it will be decided, the shade associated with Muslim martyrdom). In twisted contortions, their green face paint stares from the sides of cinderblock buildings, the remnants of vandalized automobiles, in fact whatever surface they used to brace themselves at the time they were caught, kicked, clubbed, and apprehended; and their headscarves lay strewn among shattered storefronts like so many broken dreams—dreams now dark and unspeakable. The government’s crackdown, crafted by the powerful Revolutionary Guard and implemented by the Basij Militia, was harsh and, by most accounts, brutal. Hundreds were incarcerated, the Iranian government acknowledges, and many dozens were killed or seriously injured.

By late last week, the country’s governing apparatus had succeeded in quelling the massive demonstrations that had challenged and, at times, gravely threatened its legitimacy. On Saturday night, for the first time since the results of the presidential election were announced, reporters in the field wired back to their bureaus that the dust of discontent had fully settled. In its place pervaded a hushed tone of depression, exhaustion, and fear. The masses of student protestors – whose cries for democracy had once caused buildings to tremble and, in some cases, crumble – quietly, secretly returned to their homes, having learned a valuable lesson in Repression 101.

On Monday night, the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, with the unsurprising support of the Guardian Council, confirmed that there would be no reelection; the partial recount they had granted included only ten percent of the nation’s voting precincts, many of which reported new results, giving President Ahmadinejad greater margins of victory. It was a final slap to the face of Moussavi and his supporters—the punch line of a grandiose, absurdist joke that lasted two weeks too long.

Today, it is clear that the Green “Revolution” has failed. As it turns out, the power of nonstop real-time Twitter updates, up-to-the-minute blog posts, and graphic YouTube videos was perceived, but not present. Palo Alto’s claims that technology had armed democracy with the weapons it needed to triumph over tyranny seemed comically overstated.

In spite of the ratings-driven media hype from both the left and the right, President Obama anticipated this outcome. In the face of criticism likening his inaction to that of President Jimmy Carter during the Islamic Revolution, he refused to label the election illegitimate. The day after the protests began, Obama issued a shockingly neutral press release, saying, “We don’t know yet how this is going to play out.” Eventually, he denounced the government crackdown on protestors as “outrageous,” but he remained mum on the issue of the election itself.