You get the sense of things when you closely follow news reports and COMMENTARY daily.  This is true when euphoria wanes and winning recedes into a morass that makes a lie out of the claims for victory and reasons for going to war.  This is also true for the young and eager soldier, off to be a hero. He finds he must go back after promises to go home soon dissipate in bureaucratic double-talk why the war is not yet finished and Johnny is off to be a soldier once again in a second try.

You can get the sense of a sea change in language after the sensationalism of a bare majority is translated into a mandate to plot a doubtful program of change in the way we manage energy, poverty and justice to prevent the terrorists among us not just threatening but making us guess when they will strike again here at home.  It is not so much the claims and counter-claims of the major news commentators in the continual battle of words.  It is more like realization has set in that a phony status quo or freeze in events has begun to look more and more like the enactment of a bad play whose scenario is caught up in an imagined past. Such a scenario was written into a story just published by Philip Roth.  It was about how FDR did not win the election to save the world for Democracy but it was won by Charles Lindberg who made nice to Hitler and in return was given a medal.  There was no war against the forces of Nazism, Fascism and Totalitarianism.

This is a complicated line of story telling and matching it up to events today by a senescent writer of daily essays, Bill Safire, who published in the NY Times this morning, “Roth Plot II” in the Op Ed Page.  He pushed the Roth idea of an alternative history into a replay of Bush II NOT going to war with Saddam Hussein. Curiously, the other Op Ed essayists were on the same page of change of language about the morass we find ourselves in the world because of the choices made by George W. Bush.

Bob Herbert presents the picture of our trying to win the WAR ON THE CHEAP and what this does to the few soldiers selected to go back to the scene of battle they thought they had won earlier.

Peter Khalil blurts out a story that says, IN IRAQ, LESS CAN BE MORE. He says we should focus on better training for fewer troops.  The last story on the same page is about LOCAL HEROES – soldiers who win over the “insurgents” by living model lives in the towns they control as conquerors.  Something in the language has changed.  The euphoria is gone and there is clutching at straws for comfort. I guess I will read Mr. Roth’s book for what might have been.