Collins, Cohen and Kristof

Ms. Collins, in “The Dead Tree Theory,” says the stimulus money will be channeled through so many hands, it is inevitable there will be waste — like planting a dead tree. At which point, the Republicans will wave their withered branches.  Mr. Cohen, in “The Inner Life,” says perhaps the Age of Excess had to end before we could all turn inward just enough to rediscover the gold standard of the perfectly formed phrase, and make connections again.  Mr. Kristof, writing from Djabal Refugee Camp in Chad, gives us “Africa’s ‘Obama’ School.”  He says Darfur refugees hope that the Obama administration can help bring an end of the long slaughter in Sudan by backing an arrest warrant for the country’s president.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

Whenever a president gives a major address, like the one Barack Obama delivered to Congress this week, the opposition party delivers a rejoinder. Which American citizens always ignore. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s speech was, therefore, a kind of triumph. So bad, people actually paid attention!

We will pass over Jindal’s delivery, which sounded a little like a junior high schooler’s entry into the Chamber of Commerce “I Speak for Fiscal Restraint” contest. The content was the thing: a message to the nation that the Republicans were not going to have anything important or useful to say about the current economic crisis.

Absent any deep thoughts, the Republicans are going to complain about waste. The high point of Jindal’s address came when he laced into “wasteful spending” in the stimulus bill, and used as an example a $140 million appropriation for keeping an eye on the volcanoes in places like Alaska, where one is currently rumbling.

“Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C.,” Jindal claimed.

I don’t know about you, but my reaction was: Wow, what a great stimulus plan. The most wasteful thing in it is volcano monitoring.

Louisiana has gotten $130 billion in post-Katrina aid. How is it that the stars of the Republican austerity movement come from the states that suck up the most federal money? Taxpayers in New York send way more to Washington than they get back so more can go to places like Alaska and Louisiana. Which is fine, as long as we don’t have to hear their governors bragging about how the folks who elected them want to keep their tax money to themselves. Of course they do! That’s because they’re living off ours.

O.K., I’m done.

The Republicans can’t try to convince the country their ideas are better because of that intellectual bankruptcy problem. All they can do is make Barack Obama’s programs look feckless, plunging everyone into so much despair that by next summer the public will be ready to go live in caves and eat squirrel stew.

The waste argument is a perpetual winner because there will always be some. Years ago, when I was a reporter, I remember getting a call from a woman in the Bronx who was screaming: “They’re over on Moshulu Parkway planting dead trees!” Sure enough, a city work crew was digging holes along the side of the street and carefully sticking in brown and dried-up pieces of foliage. The men claimed the trees had simply lost their leaves for the winter — an explanation somewhat undermined by the fact that they were evergreens.

I’m telling you this because on Tuesday I was talking with a high-ranking Obama administration official about the stimulus plan. “There will be a dead tree planted, figuratively speaking,” he said somberly. “That will happen.”

How could it not? Much of the stimulus money is being channeled through state and local governments, through tens of thousands of governors, mayors, county executives, transportation commissioners, parks superintendents and so on. Try to imagine the person in that pyramid with the lowest I.Q., and you’ll understand that there’s a dead-tree planter hidden in there somewhere.

The White House is trying to overcome this problem with a Transparency and Accountability Board, overseen by Vice President Joe Biden. It is supposed to reassure the public that the stimulus money isn’t being wasted. But some people within the administration are arguing that that isn’t enough, that the government needs to bombard people with examples of what’s being done right — like holding big rallies for all the schoolteachers whose jobs are saved by the stimulus.

Or — and I swear to you this is a real idea — inventing a kind of stimulus logo, like the old National Recovery Administration blue eagle, that could be posted on every federally funded project, as one official explained, “to show the public exactly what we’re doing.”

Let us skip over the fact that the National Recovery Administration is best remembered as the part of the New Deal that didn’t work. Because we are instantly fascinated by the idea of designing that logo. How about:

Erp the Economic Recovery Portuguese Water Dog — Sasha and Malia’s incoming White House pet, setting a good example by taking on a second job to help support the family.

Isadore the Infrastructure Improvement Iguana

Arnie the Ant and Ginny the Grasshopper — Both wearing overalls and carrying shovels, symbols that troubled times fall equally hard on the party animals and the serious guys who saved their money and invested it with Bernie Madoff.

Petey the Penguin — Don’t want to go with another eagle. But everybody likes penguins. They march; they don’t fly into airplane engines …

Joe Biden — Dressed like a penguin.

Or, if all else fails, they could just get Bobby Jindal a prime-time program.

Here’s Mr. Cohen:

I was reading on the crowded subway when a distraught-looking woman stumbled into me.

“Please, please help me out,” she said. “Please. I’m trying to buy flowers for a funeral arrangement.”

She was African-American, middle-aged, wide-eyed. Her words were not addressed to me but to the whole subway car. The slightness of her build belied the strength of her voice. So many things are dying at the moment — an entire free-spending epoch is being laid to rest — that I wondered which particular burial she had in mind.

“My cousin was a good kid,” she said. “Please, please. For the funeral arrangement, I need flowers.”

People averted their eyes. Early-evening fatigued, city-churned, they did not want to hear talk of funerals, much less help pay for them. They were headed home to hear a new president diagnose the state of America. Some shook their heads, thinking, “She’s crazy!”

I returned to my reading, a profile of the British author Ian McEwan in The New Yorker. I admire McEwan, enjoy his novels, often read them in a sitting or two, but do not feel transported by him.

There is something too carefully plotted in his effects that precludes falling under his spell. His studied brilliance never quite attains greatness. Still, he takes a scalpel to sexual need and obsessive violence, the dark undertows of life, in ways that can be utterly compelling.

I read this phrase from McEwan — “Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information” — and nodded.

Having part of the picture incites an anxiety, the desire to see it whole, completed. I wondered who the stumbling subway woman’s cousin was, how “the kid” died, in a knife fight or from withering illness, what flower arrangement she had in mind (chrysanthemums? gladioli?) — or whether the whole story was made up, just a scam.

Piecing together fragments is what we do right now as we emerge from the Grand Illusion, a time when the human herd frolicked in limitless pastures to the seductive lilt of Ponzi promises.

We are trying to get our bearings, find out where the bottom is in order to put one foot in front of the other. Bernard Madoff’s investment firm did not buy any securities for clients in 13 years. And nobody noticed.

You couldn’t make this stuff up. It’s not only narrative tension that withheld information produces; it’s $50 billion going poof in the night.

As it happened, I’d been reading McEwan that morning on the late John Updike in The New York Review of Books: the profiled as profiler. He quotes Updike describing the facts of life as “unbearably heavy, weighted as they are with our personal death. Writing, in making the world light — in codifying, distorting, prettifying, verbalizing it — approaches blasphemy.”

But what beautiful, what necessary, blasphemy!

Perhaps the Age of Excess had to end before we could all turn inward just enough to rediscover the gold standard of the perfectly formed phrase, and make connections again. McEwan chooses a sentence from Updike’s “Couples” that could describe his own work: “Nature dangles sex to keep us walking toward the cliff.”

It dangles chance, too.

In the same New York Review was Anita Desai’s piece on Azar Nafisi, best known for her much-loved “Reading Lolita in Tehran.” I’d just returned from Tehran and devoured the review of Nafisi’s new book, “Things I’ve Been Silent About: Memories.”

“Reading Lolita” was precisely about turning inward, away from desperate events — in this case a revolution that had betrayed many of its protagonists, offering veils of repression rather than long-sought freedom — to the consolation of great Western literature. It was a book of passionate personal transcendence.

Nafisi’s new book is essentially a family memoir, but in the tumult of Iran, her story and the nation’s overlap. She alludes to the terrible misconceptions of Iranian democrats and leftists about Ayatollah Khomeini in the revolutionary fervor of 1979:

“Too arrogant to think of him as a threat and deliberately ignorant of his designs, we supported him. We welcomed the vehemence of Khomeini’s rants against imperialists and the Shah and were willing to overlook the fact that they were not delivered by a champion of freedom.”

This was truly a tragic illusion for which a heavy price has been paid by Iranians, their nation now scattered in a diaspora stretching from California to Australia. Many ache still for their homeland.

By comparison, the cost of American illusions pales. A decimated 401(k) is painful, but no exile. It is true, as President Obama said in his first address to a joint session of Congress: “We will rebuild; we will recover.” That, at least, is what American history suggests.

As the woman proceeded down the car, I could hear that phrase being repeated — “Please I’m trying to buy flowers for a funeral arrangement” — until at last it grew muffled in a kind of ruckus and a smooth-voiced recorded announcement overwhelmed it: “Courtesy is contagious. It begins with you.”

So does change from within.

Now here’s Mr. Kristof:

After Barack Obama was elected president in November, the Darfur refugees here were so thrilled that they erupted in spontaneous dancing and singing.

Soon afterward, the refugees renamed the School No. 1 in this dusty camp the Obama School. It’s a pathetic building of mud bricks with a tin roof, and the windows are holes in the walls, but it’s caulked with hope that President Obama may help end the long slaughter and instability in Sudan.

Soon we’ll see whether those hopes are justified. Next Wednesday, the International Criminal Court is expected to issue an arrest warrant for Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, for crimes against humanity in Darfur.

That would be historic — the first time the court has called for the arrest of a sitting head of state. It would be the clearest assertion that in the 21st century, mass murder is no longer a ruler’s prerogative.

There has been concern that Mr. Bashir will lash out by expelling aid workers or that Sudan’s fragile north-south peace agreement will become unglued if Mr. Bashir is ousted. Those fears are overblown. Time and again, Mr. Bashir has responded to pressure and scrutiny by improving his behavior and increasing his cooperation with the United Nations and Western countries.

It’s true that the slogan “save Darfur” should be reconceived as “save Sudan.” North and South Sudan are probably on track to a resumption of their brutal civil war that killed two million people until a fragile peace in 2005. But while saving Sudan raises immensely knotty, difficult challenges, President Bashir is part of the problem, and accountability is part of the solution.

In any case, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the Argentinian who is the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, is right when he says: “The question is not what President Bashir will do. The question is what you will do.”

If Mr. Obama needs inspiration, he can look at France, for it has shown that outsiders can make a difference. When I was here in the Chad-Sudan border area in 2006, Sudanese-sponsored janjaweed militias were rampaging through black African villages in Chad, killing and raping. These days, overall security is hugely improved, largely because the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, led a push to insert a European military force. It was a messy solution, for Chad is corrupt and autocratic, yet at least the skies are no longer thick with smoke from burning villages.

On that 2006 trip here, I met Abdullah Idris, a young farmer who had just had his eyes gouged out by the janjaweed. The mutilation broke my heart, especially when I saw Abdullah’s 5-year-old daughter looking at her dad’s face in revulsion, seeing a monster.

On this trip, I tracked down Abdullah and found him living with his family in a camp for displaced people. His daughter and wife lead him around, hand in hand. Security has improved enough that a few people are even returning to their villages from the camps.

Hats off to France! There are thousands of problems with the deployment, but it’s far better than standing by as militias gouge out men’s eyes.

Unfortunately, conditions are still desperate within Sudan’s borders. This week, news filtered out from Darfur that two more aid workers had been shot dead — on top of 11 killed and 4 more still missing in 2008. By the United Nations’ count, the number of violent attacks on aid workers almost doubled in 2008 compared with the previous year.

Yet there is a ray of hope: There are whispers in the dusty Sudanese capital, Khartoum, that other senior Sudanese leaders are thinking about pushing Mr. Bashir out of office if the arrest warrant is issued.

At the Obama School here in eastern Chad, the refugees are waiting to see if the school’s namesake will resolutely back up the International Criminal Court. I’m betting that he will. In the last Congress, three of the strongest advocates for the people of Darfur were Senators Barack Obama, Joseph Biden and Hillary Rodham Clinton, and one of Washington’s strongest advocates for action on Sudan was Susan Rice, who is now the ambassador to the United Nations. (She terrifies Sudanese officials; parachute her into Khartoum, and the entire Sudanese leadership might surrender.)

Meanwhile, the Obama administration is undertaking a review of the policy on Darfur, and it’s being co-led by Samantha Power, a White House aide whose superb book, “A Problem From Hell,” catalogs all the ways that American politicians have found excuses to avoid confronting past genocides.

The students at the Obama School have nothing to keep them going but hope. Let’s not disappoint them.