Reviewing a book ten years after publication is usually too late, but for Blue Ribbons and Burlesque: A Book of Country Fairs, by Charles Fish (Woodstock, Vermont: The Countryman Press, 1998.), it seems early still. Wanting somehow to capture the “magic” of the New England country fairs of his boyhood, Fish took photographs in 1969 and 1970 that remained as negatives in his attic for twenty-five years. Fish’s black and white photography provides “visible reminders” of a past that is almost entirely extinct as it once existed, yet the images allow the author to conjure the spectacle of animals, food, rides, strippers, freaks, machines and crowds – ritual elements of community that make the fairs nothing less than “a time of year, almost a season.”

After Oregon and Kentucky, the good-news-bad-news dynamic of the Democratic primary is intact. Obama inches closer to securing the nomination; Hillary shows no signs of leaving the race. Both camps are marking milestones and employing math to support arguments that any result other than the nomination of their candidate will signal a systemic travesty. And the possibility that the unresolved and bitter struggle will hurt the party’s chances against John McCain in November is still the centerpiece of mainstream analysis. But is it really good news for McCain? Is it all bad news for Democrats? Hardly.

For starters, McCain has not been able to take advantage of the Democratic party’s failure to settle on a nominee. His two major problems – money and message – are deeply troublesome to his own chances in a general election...

In politics, it is generally better to be lucky than right. As the mainstream matrix tells us daily, John McCain has been very lucky so far in the 2008 race because the life of the Democratic primary has been nasty and brutish, but not short. The Clintons are standing on Obama’s last nerve, and polls suggest that both candidate’s supporters will nurse their grudges into November. While I agree that the Democratic race has complicated the party’s general election strategy, I think McCain’s good fortune is in some ways deeper than has been discussed, yet in some ways the ferocity of the donkey fight is less of a break for him.

Among the countless tragedies of the earthquake in China is that it will now be easier to let politics erase several hundred thousand human beings in Myanmar. It's simple: the Chinese government wants help to save lives and the government in Myanmar is determined to waste life.

The only mystery behind Myanmar's disastrous refusal to allow international aid to immediately flow toward catastrophic suffering in the wake of last week's cyclone is why anyone is at all confused about the government's actions. The calculus is straight forward. Myanmar has a lot of poverty. Poor people are an economic burden and a political challenge. Letting several hundred thousand poor people die must seem like a no-brainer to the elites ruling a people who desire and deserve democracy.

Few would argue that anything other than the economy will be the most important issue to voters in the 2008 presidential election. That’s politics, and it relates most powerfully to individual dissatisfaction and crisis. Yet as citizens, caring for the whole, nothing is more important than the reality that our military is under fire in a war that our own government initiated and cannot seem to win. Citizens in a democracy have no greater responsibility than to make sense of their nation’s wars.