Christmas passed rather smoothly. Though all my blood relatives are Jewish, some of my relatives by marriage are not, and so we celebrate Christmas. Besides Christmas, another thing non-Jewish people have thankfully brought into my family is drinking. Christmas begins with a champagne toast and shrimp cocktail hors d'ouvres and continues through a lovely lasagna course, accompanied by wine that flows freely through the three-pie and cheesecake dessert.

Being around a large group of extended family, not all of whom get along, most of whom have been to therapy and now know exactly why they don't get along, thus making them even less interested getting along--it used to make me nervous. But by drinking even more than I eat at Christmas I can now happily ignore whatever tense moments occur.

This year, I am proud to say there were none. Everyone is maturing. The adults are all passing 50, if not pushing 60, the elder generation is well into their 80s, and the pre-teens are developing the healthy levels of cynicism necessary to survive large extended family events.

The realtive-by-marriage and Republican Party donor who usually seeks me out and picks nasty fights with me thankfully abstained this year. He usually begins by telling some convoluted parable that is supposed to illustrate to me why communism failed in Russia, and why opportunity is available to everyone in America. I then find myself trying to defend the ideals of communism while still within the context in which Soviet Russia equals the actual practice of communism. Then I am interrupted repeatedly or goaded into raising my voice until I find myself hyperventilating in the bathroom while digging my fingernails into my palms.

Not this year, though. This year was uneventful. Well, except for this minor incident.

My grandmother, well past her normal alcohol intake, requested loudly that my brother and I "bring some marijuana" next time we visited. Apparently when my grandfather ate the hash meatballs at Shirley Kaufman's New Year's Eve Party in 1973, my grandmother didn't get any. "I want to try some before I die," she said.

My mother overheard this and said, "Ma, you had open heart surgery last year. How do you know how marijuana is going to interact with all your medications? Kids, if you give Grandma dope you could kill her. You could kill them both. Don't do it!"

"I think we should do it," said my brother. "We can go to Central Park."

I have had some weird-ass drug experiences, and some plain old weird-ass experiences, but the idea of getting my 84- and 86-year-old grandparents high and taking them to Central Park was so weird, I truly could not imagine it.

"I'm telling you," said my mother. "If you give Grandma and Grandpa dope you'll be very sorry. If they don't die, one of them could have a psychotic break."

My grandmother was off the topic and reminiscing about how much she loved going to the Metropolitan Art Museum with me when I was a kid. "You had such insight into the paintings!" she said. "I must have told fifty people what you said about them." I don't doubt it. I'm the first grandchild, therefore everything I say is quotable. Suddenly, I could almost picture it. Everyone likes to get high and go to the art museum! If pot makes you insightful, and your Jewish grandparents already think you're eminently insightful, then pot + your Jewish grandparents + the art museum would at least give the illusion that everyone invovled was very, very insightful.

I suddenly pictured my grandmother, already crazed with the slightly threatening love of a Jewish grandma, in the state of increased awe and appreciation marijuana can induce. What new superlatives would she use to describe her grandchildren? What new voracious metaphors would arise? She already used to tell us she could eat us up. Would Stoned Jewish Grandma profess to love us so much, "I could skin and boil you alive before feasting on your delcious flayed flesh?"

Would Stoned Jewish Grandma get the giggles? What about Stoned Jewish Grandpa? We've got a little more data on him. The story goes that at Shirley Kaufman's fateful New Year's Eve party, after he consumed the hash meatballs, Grandpa Sam began dancing blissfully with another man's wife and became mellow enough to wave off the imperative to drive home ahead of the approaching snowstorm, which for him suggests a level of excitement just short of reckless abandon.

I've always thought that old people should do a lot of recreational drugs. My grandmother runs a writing program at the local senior center. When you teach writing to kids, as I sometimes do, you have to consider kids a different phases of development. When you teach writing to senior citizens, as my grandmother does, you have to consider people at different stages of dementia. My brother and I hit upon a brilliant idea. "We could run a recreational drug program at the senior center!" we chortled.

When the dinner hour was over, I incited all the kids to put down the new cell phones and video game systems they had received for Christmas and come outside to play on the swingset. "I really dig your swingset," I told my cousins. "It's so great."

I was feeling quite youthful because after a whole bottle of wine and a large plate of lasagna, I was happily trying to beat a nine-year-old in a high-swinging contest. "You can swing really high," she said. "Years of practice," I said humbly. "I can hang upside down from my knees," she said, inverting herself over the swingset's trapeze element. "I went to circus camp." I couldn't compete with that and told her so.

My brother and I started playing a complex game of tag with the kids, the kind that devolves into everyone running around the other side of the house. We played until we were called in for dessert. Or I thought we were called in for dessert. It was actually the woman from the house next door calling her family in for dessert, but luckily our family was having dessert at the same time.

The rest of Heavily Suburban Interfaith Christmas Experience was a pleasant stream of immediate-family bonding through various exercises in overeating, experiencing nature and watching movies. There were bagels, there was lox, there was risotto. We were informed that the family cat is dying and our parents would like us to sell their art collection on eBay. When everyone else went to bed, I went outside and watched the lights move around the house and finally extinguish. I sat in the swing watching the house and the stars from inside my new, extremely warm spacesuit of a parka (it's military spec), until my toes went numb. I have this weird disorder where my toes drain of blood completely when it's cold. It runs in the family.

I knew this would happen. The rest of my family is asleep and I'm wide awake here in the weird little room that used to be my brother's bedroom, until I went to college and we switched rooms, so now it is my semi-old bedroom but really my dad's office and also a kind of receptacle for all my parents' random extra stuff. There's a lava lamp next to an adding machine on the desk here. It's the same adding machine we used to use to play store.

My high school and college diplomas sit, unframed, on the bookshelf next to my high school yearbook. On the bulletin board above the desk my dad has pinned an iron-on patch from Wel-Met camp, which he attended, a picture of himself and his friend Steve, who he met at Wel-Met camp, wreck diving in the Carribean and a two-page spread of a kangaroo from a nature magazine who, when I asked about it, my dad referred to as "my friend." The kangaroo does look very cool, like a jazz musician would look if jazz musicians were sometimes kangaroos.

The shelves above the desk contain a black-and-white picture of my mom, about 20, looking moody and sad, a black-and-white picture of me, about 20, also looking moody and sad, a pink music box that I recall worshipping in my early childhood as some kind of touchstone of my own precarious femininity, and my birth announcement, which my aunt Ellen made for me and has these special characters on it that she invented called, if I remember correctly, Grumpets. Grumpets have square heads but are very friendly.

The nightstand, recently purged of all my junk (a collection that should be sealed in plexiglass and called, "Nighstand Drawer, 1992-1997," so perfect a group of adolescent artifacts did it contain), is empty save for my dad's bar mitzvah album, which came to live here after my grandmother passed away two years ago. Strange how our parents keep our histories in boxes for us and we only take full possession of them after they are gone.

I love my dad's bar mitzvah album. His mother was and he is small and olive-complected. I am, too, though to a lesser extent, as my mother's side is tall and fair and some of them are even redheads. My dad and Grandma Betty almost look Latin, giving the impression that a velvety youth from Spanish Harlem has been inexplicably dressed in a yarmulke and tallis. From the pictures, I can't tell if my dad is truly serious or abjectly miserable, though I take the fact that the next day he burned all his Hebrew school books in the family barbecue to be evidence of the latter. I was not bat mitzvahed and so there is no album here to bind in white leatherette the shames of my early adolesence, glasses and Jersey-style poufy bangs among them.

I could amble downstairs and leaf through my baby albums again. I do that a lot when I'm visiting my parents' house. I never tire of trying to connect the tiny person in the pictures to myself. It's a kind of meditation. "That's me," I say to myself over and over. "That's me." I stare at the baby, who does indeed look like me, and try to remember being small and helpless and new. My parents are in the pictures and I recognize them, but I still believe at some level that the tiny person in the pictures was some other being, who after a year or so was replaced by a smaller version of my current self, someone with curly hair and more defined features and clothing that consists of differentiated articles, someone I recognize, someone I remember being.

I could bundle up and go outside and lie on the hammock in the backyard, or sit on the big bench swing. The swing abuts a kind of woodsy area and I would sit there sometimes in high school, scaring myself into thinking someone could come up behind me like in a horror movie, daring myself to keep the swing moving, making its ominous creaks. I would look at the back of my parents' house, which was then my house, its continuous wall of white vinyl siding, the windows through which I could see, even in the dark, every piece of furniture I knew so well, and I would never imagine that things would be as they are now, not once. I never imagined I would meet the people I have met or do the things I have done or think the thoughts I now think. I didn't comprehend then that all the tiny, mundane aspects of a life that was a continuous present to me would one day just be talismans I would use to evoke the past. It never occured to me, sitting in the swing, that I would one day sit in the swing just to remember the feeling of sitting in the swing. It never occured to me that the mess I hoarded in my nightstand drawer, of letters and folded notes and primative emails from the numerical email addresses of boys far away I never saw again would be swept away and boxed and no longer important to me as anything but a passing idea for an art project.

I could sit on the front steps of the house and marvel at the soundstage quiet of the dead-end street this house is on. I could sit and stare at the newly-paved asphalt, lit more than adequetely by the audible streetlamps. I could walk, as I sometimes used to, up the street and around the one loop that forms the peculiar intersection that is labeled with two signs that read "Morewood Oaks," and not see a single other waking soul, nor even a single light on, not even the bluish light of a television or computer screen. I could wait for a rainstorm that would fall on this well-lit, empty street so perfectly and theatrically that it would only add to the illusion that this is a soundstage. I could find the semi-deflated basketball in my parents' garage and bounce it on their driveway and listen to it echo off the garage door of the house across the street.

Or I could get in the bed I picked out for my thirteenth birthday, the bed I lay in and tried to imagine my unimaginable life, the bed I rolled out of at 6 a.m. for six years of junior and high and high school to catch the early bus, the bed I brought my first boyfriend home to crowd into, the bed where I had mono and Lyme disease and where I cried about things when I used to cry more than I do now, where I worried about things I no longer care about and prayed for things to happen that have long since come true, and try to sleep.

Check it out, people. Beloved SuperLefty friend and confidant Avi Salzman at the top of www.nytimes.com!. His journalistic integrity prevents him from participating in such partisan events as the FUCK YOU movement, but enables such fine reporting as this.

I am sorry to have abandoned you, my darlings. I understand that without my postings you have, as one disgruntled reader writes, "nothing to read when you come home late and drunk."

My excuses are many. I have been visited by medical students and law students and wanted to impress them by cooking such delights as thirteen-ingredient fried-egg sandwiches and improvised chocolate fondue. My attendance has been required at several rock and roll events and solstice parties. Holly and I had to be sure to get stoned by the fountain in Lincoln Center and see the Wes Anderson movie before she left town for Christmas.

The precocious children of New York have required my services for their semester math finals. Do you know how to tell if a hyperbola opens up-down or side-to-side? Well, it depends on whether the equation starts with x or y. But if it's an ellipse, the equation always starts with x. So how do we tell whether an ellipse is vertical or horizontal? The orientation of the ellipse depends on whether the a (the larger number) is the denominator of the x fraction or the y fraction.

Oh yes.

Yesterday I had four brilliant young Jewish women lined up along the BDFQ line, stretching from the West Village to the outer reaches of Brooklyn, all of them studying for their pre-calc final. It was a festival of curly hair and logarithms. My teaching of logarithms has improved exponentially (little math joke there for those who know that a logarithm is an exponential function [and here, in the interioir parentheses, is where SuperLefty reveals to the world that despite her decadent habits, she is and always has been and always will be THE BIGGEST NERD]) since that dinner party where I drank the special cocktails made from the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy recipie and the public health students were talking about their statistical analysis and suddenly logarithms were instantly clear to me at a whole new level.

On the way home from the math olympiad (not THE math olympiad, which I also participated in in the mid-1990s, but just my own personal math olympiad) I was reading One River, a book by an ethnobotanist about his adventures seeking sacred plants in the Latin American rainforest. A drunk but affable man sat down next to me on the G train platform and asked for directions. He turned out to be Peruvian (or so he claimed) and when I politely tried to get back to my reading, he asked that I read aloud to him. I couldn't think of a good reason not to, so from Bedford-Nostrand to Metropolitan Avenue, I read to the second car of the G train a particularly vivid description of a famous ethnobotanist's experience at a Kiowa peyote ceremony.

A reader has written to ask if I have any opinions on the Israeli-Palenstinean conflict, and if I haven't posted them "for obvious reasons." I have no idea what these obvious reasons might be and so, Michael J. Brandt, I will soon post my opinions on the Israeli-Palestinean conflict. Whatever they are.

Dispatches to follow from my heavily suburban interfaith Christmas experience.

I heard on NPR today that the Iraq war has the lowest fatality rate of any war. This is because of the incredible speed and efficiency with which wounded soldiers are evacuated to hospitals in Baghdad, Germany and eventually, the United States. Only 10% of casualties are deaths.

So for every soldier killed in Iraq, ten others are wounded, some of them horrifically. The challenge, said voice on NPR, is to provide the necessary rehabilitation for these young men and women to lead productive lives after injuries such as having their faces blown off. Apparently, you couldn't always save someone who'd had his face blown off. But now you can. You can have a soldier who's lost a limb or even his face back in the United States getting top-of-the-line medical care within 24 hours. And then there's just the minor question of what the rest of his life is going to be like.

I couldn't help but think of Johnny Got His Gun, the wrenching book by Dalton Trumbo that depicts war and its gruesome effects on otherwise young, healthy people. I couldn't help but think of how the United States government blacklisted and interrogated Dalton Trumbo during the Red Scare.

But most of all, I couldn't help but think, if we can get this young person into a helicopter, onto a plane, and into an operating room with such efficiency, why can't we do it before he sustains such horrible damage to his otherwise functional body and mind? Why do we wait until the car bomb explodes or the shrapnel finds its way through the holes in the body armor, to get these people to safety?

It feels like a combination of maternal and childlike naivete to say, "Get them out of there before something bad happens to them." That combination of maternal and childlike naivete might also be called "pacifism," or more simply, "logic."

And if you die in Iraq, you really get the royal treatment. I read about that in that other bastion of liberal medica, The New Yorker. If you die in Iraq, your body is treated with utmost respect and reverence. Warehouses full of uniforms in every size and permutation are waiting to outfit you for your funeral. Nevermind that troops still alive to fight another day of this war are writing home to their parents begging for equipment the U.S. Armed Forces hasn't seen fit to supply. Skilled morticians make every effort to make your body viewable. If they can't, they wrap whatever's left of you in such a way that your medals can at least be pinned to it. The Army pays for whatever funeral your family wants, sends personnel to perform whichever official duties they think will honor your ultimate sacrifice.

Why is it that only when our soldiers are wounded or dead does our country start to treat them at least a little more like human beings?

In the last week I have experienced two of life's great pleasures.

# 1: Being Covered With a Cozy Blanket While You Are Already Sleeping

It was Holly's birthday and we had eaten a lot of pumpkin cheesecake after a large meal during which we were given a free chocolate dessert. We had been playing a game where we tried to thing of phrases in which the word with more syllables comes last, like, "come hell or high water," but not like, "Jesus, Mary and Joseph." Soon after, I passed out on the couch. Passing out on the couch and realizing you are going to stay there is also one of life's great pleasures. You go from thinking you are going to have to take cabs and trains home to your house to realizing that you aren't even going to brush your teeth or undress. Even the people who actually live in the place where you are passing out are going to travel further to get to bed. You, by virtue of passing out on the couch, are already in bed.

But it gets even better. Sometime even later in the already late night, I was momentarily awakened by a fluttering noise and a pleasant weight settling all around me. I remember rolling over and falling back into the fantastic kind of sleep I only get on someone else's couch--like a perfect nap that lasts all night. When I woke up in the morning I found myself covered with a cozy, handmade quilt. Debra, Holly's roommate, had come home from Jay-Z's surprise birthday party (different story) and covered me with the warm, cozy quilt. It was so lovely to be covered with the warm, cozy quilt in the middle of the night. Such a feeling of security and warm coziness.

Then I experienced yet another one of life's pleasures, which is waking up already dressed and ready to go. This can be less pleasureable depending on when your last shower was and what you did the night before, but thankfully I was fairly clean and free of any lingering smells one might acquire in the course of an evening. It was an altogether refreshing stay on the couch, except for the fact that I think it aggravated my sciatica, causing me to throw my back out during a routine move in yoga class later that day.

Did I mention it was only Holly's twenty-sixth birthday and I am nearly a year younger than she is? Maybe it is good that I'm getting to the point where I consider being covered by a warm, cozy blanket worthy of mention. Things are starting to deteriorate for me at a very young age. On the upside, I would like to think that the sciatica is not my fault, i.e., not the result of any of my bad habits or vices, and therefore, I will be giving up none of them, and in fact adding cozy blankets to my list of addictions.

# 2: Running for and Making a Train

My day began and ended with a trainward sprint. I woke up fifteen minutes too late, enabling me to partake in one of life's greatest small pleasures, which is dodging through a crowded, echoey train station. I grew up passing through vile, festering, Penn Station, which has terrible acoustics and feels like a fallout shelter. I sieze any opportunity to race to catch a Metro-North train, which instead places the dramatic event in the far more scenic and cathedral-like Grand Central Station. This privilege cost me an extra $3 on the train and was worth every penny.

When the train arrived in at my stop in Yonkers I was totally unprepared and spread out over three seats in the middle of the car, gazing at the Hudson River. I bolted upright, gathered myself and sprinted off down the aisle, forgetting that my forward running motion would cause a side-to-side swinging motion on the part of my heavy shoulder bag. As the conductor started to announce the next stop and the bell started to ring, I heard a loud "thump!" and an unpleasantly surprised, "Jesus Christ!" behind me. I had clocked a seated passenger in the head with my wildly swinging bag. "I'm SO SORRY," I shouted, flinging myself in the direction of the closing train doors and barely clearing them. I stood on the platform, biting my lip and ducking my head to see if I could make an apologetic face at the woman I had clocked. I was embarrassed and a little shamed. But then something marvelous happened. The train pulled away and I realized I'd probably never see her again.

I had come to Westchester on both buisness and family matters. I wish I could say that my family is my business and that I am in fact connected, but this is not the case. My family are all involved in various noble service professions and I had come to see if we could find a convergence in our mafia of social service. After spending the afternoon at my aunt's nonprofit, I spent the evening dining with the Westchester contingent of my clan (paternal side). My clan has two Westchester contingents, both conveniently located straight up the Hudson River, both lovely to visit.

It was a lovely visit. Another one of life's pleasures I am constantly rediscovering is spending time with your family. My eight-year-old cousin and I started designing a line of merchandise we are going to make to celebrate the weirdness of our family. Then we ordered in sushi and my uncle got us those super-special rolls I'm always too cheap to get, that are everything good smoked or fried and wrapped in everything else good. They were delicious. Then my ten-year-old cousin came home from his breakdancing class and demonstrated his moves for us. Then we all ate dessert from the kids' Halloween candy stash. Then the kids took baths and the little one put on fuzzy pajamas and we discussed scalp sensitivity while my aunt combed her hair.

The kids went to bed and I stayed to watch The West Wing with my aunt and uncle. I had forgotten what quality television The West Wing was. This episode was particularly gripping. It seems like everyone wants Josh to run their campaign in the upcoming election. And Alan Alda--Alan Alda! Hawkeye!--is going to play the conservative-with-integrity. My aunt said that they should just continue the show after Martin Sheen's term ends, with a Republican president with some shred of integrity, and that would be fantasy world enough. We agreed that The West Wing has become almost too painful of a fantasy world since the Moron Puppet took office.

Then my aunt and uncle and I discussed our varying attitudes toward time and lateness. My aunt and I seemed to share the same attitude, which is "why motivate in any direction unless it's an absolute emergency?" I was glad to find out that someone else approaches time this way. "If I have to leave at 7:45," my aunt said, "at 7:44 I'll think, okay, I still have time. Then at 7:45, I'll say to the kids, 'It's 7:45! We have to go! We have to make the bus!"

"Yes," I agreed. "I hate to abandon what I'm doing until it's absolutely necessary, and I enjoy turning ordinary tasks like making the bus into suspenseful adventures."

My uncle pointed out that it was about the become a suspenseful adventure to get me to the next train back to New York. My aunt and I got into the station wagon to go to the station. When we got to the station, I was suddenly confused. Many times, when I've taken a inbound train from Westchester late in the evening, they've been single-tracked on the usually outbound track. "Is this the right side?" I wondered.

"It is," said my aunt. "Isn't it? Now I'm confused." She started to turn the car around but just then I saw the train approaching from the north, on the side we were on. "Run, Emily, run!" exclaimed my aunt.

I ran. The trains late at night are shorter and I was at the back end of the platform. It was wheezing to a stop and the last car was tens, if not dozens of yards ahead. I held my anti-Bush-buttoned bag steady with one hand and waved wildly at my aunt over my head with the other hand, sprinting for the now-opening doors of the Metro-North train. As I poured on the last bit of speed I didn't even know I had, I heard something clatter from my bag. I looked back, just as I lunged inside the train, and saw the tube of Arnica ointment I had been using to treat my sore back lying on the platform. But the sprint had rejuvenated me. My back no longer hurt. I was young again, reborn! The doors closed and the train headed down the Hudson, back to New York City.

Sometimes I think I shouldn't wear an anti-Moron Puppet button on my bag everywhere I go. It has occured to me that overtly expressing a political opinion in the home of someone who employs me to teach their child math might be overstepping my bounds. But then I think, "I don't want the filthy money of anyone who doesn't agree with the sentiment of this button. I only want the filthy money of people who do agree with the sentiment of this button."

I really love my anti-Moron Puppet button. It's the one with the high-contrast image of the Moron Puppet's head in the middle of a red universal "NO" sign. I used to have one that said the word BUSH in the middle of a "NO" sign, but it was not as pleasing to me. The word BUSH was printed over the diagonal red line, for one, thus making it seem like BUSH should overcome the "no" sign, instead of the other way around. For two, the word BUSH all the time is a bit much. Then you get into all the bush-related puns, which I am just not always in the mood for. Sexual/political double entendres are only amusing to me the first several hundred times.

The image button is much better. The Moron Puppet's head is just unrecognizeable enough to make it bearable for daily viewing, and yet recognizeable enough to get your point across. I am nothing if not stringent in my standards for the graphic design of my political buttons.

I was visiting my aunt, uncle and cousins up in Westchester the other night when my eight-year-old cousin pointed at the button and said, "Who's that?"

"Who do you think it is?" I said.

"Bush," she said.

"How did you know?" I asked. "It's kind of hard to see who it's supposed to be."

"Well, because that pin says to cross that guy out, and I thought about people I'd like to cross out, and I thought of Bush."

As her father says, she's a very deep child.

My flecked green sweater is two sizes too big. I believe the proper term for it's flecked-ness is heathered. It was on sale after Christmas in 1996 and despite (or perhaps because of) its odd size and color, it spoke to me.

This was a time of frequent sweater-purchasing at such purveyors of East Coast coziness aesthetic as Abercrombie & Fitch and J. Crew. These stores catered to the desires of Jewish suburban teens to simulate the experience of Christmas in Maine by wearing woolly sweaters. At a certain point in the late-nineties, when I was disposing the income of my parents on sweaters and college, I had more sweaters than Bill Cosby. My dutiful purchase of these sweaters can be read as an attempt to do my third-generation duty of Jewish immigrant assimilation and buy into a kind of bland American suburban adolesence readily available for purchase on such distinctly non-quaint arteries of commerce as Northern Boulevard, Long Island. My dutiful attendance of college can also be read as such an attempt. I attended a diverse university where immigrants from all over the world (and their descendants) frolicked with varying degrees of ease in large stone buildings, reading, with varying degrees of ease, a canon not quite as diverse as the students of the university themselves.

It is a delicious and not insignificant irony that this sweater, like all wool sweaters, is particularly adept at trapping strands of my hair with it's tiny, Velcro-like hooks of wool fuzz. And so the sweater (symbol of WASPiness, symbol of wealth, symbol of sweatershop labor in nations too hot to need sweaters parlayed into corporate wealth by conglomerates that own the trademarked combinations of words that themselves evoke the idea of WASPiness if they fall short of conferring its reality) quite literally becomes a receptacle and gathering device for the incriminating evidence—the telltale, twisted strands of my Semitic hair—of the truth the sweater itself seeks to conceal.

Tom Brokaw didn't cry. Not eight minutes ago, Tom Brokaw signed off the air forever and damn it, the man didn't even well up. I dashed home from a rather pleasant wander through the darkening, windswept streets of Brooklyn and parked myself in front of a network television broadcast with a glass of wine and some nibble-sized pieces of really good parmesan cheese for nothing.

I don't know why I was so excited to see Tom Brokaw cry. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I missed MacNeil crying when he left the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. When I heard that MacNeil cried (not that I would know which one MacNeil even was) I was sorry to have missed it. Also, while I was spending Thanksgiving weekend with my parents in Long Island, engaging in such wholesome American pastimes as watching television with a blanket over my legs and the dog at my feet, my dad and I segued from a (taped) episode of The West Wing into the NBC Special "Tom Brokaw: Eyewitness to History." It was a smooth ride from the completely fictitious political landscape that is the product of Aaron Sorkin's imagination to the completely fictitious political landscape that is the product of Tom Brokaw's.

Having watched Tom Brokaw distill four decades of American history into a predictable montage of violence and unnecessarily powerfully white men, I now understand perfectly why the vast majority of the American people not only understand nothing, but seem to take a certain perverse pride in it. This is because though the evening news gives the illusion of coherence with its clanging-bell noises and simplistic graphics, it actually perpetuates a view of the world that is absurd and disjointed.

Tom Brokaw, and dare I say, the entire mainstream news industry, are perpetuating a vast conspiracy of misunderstanding. It's not deceit exactly. It's the notion that things are happening. Good things. Bad things. Terrible things. Wars. Genocides. Revolutions. Trials. Convictions. Evictions. Explosions. Disasters. Trends. Epidemics. Crises. Curiosities. We can watch these things, we can interview people about these things, but we'll never really know why exactly they are happening.

We are live at these events, these wars, genocides, disasters, "elections." We are reporting live to you, from these happenings, as they happen.

These events will continue happening after the commercial break.

These events are still happening. We are describing the images on your television screen using superlative adjectives.

We don't know why. We don't ask why.

And we never will.

Gee-whiz, Tom.

Aw shucks, Brian.

Back to you, Tom.

Thank you, Brian.

Isn't that crazy, America? That sure is crazy. I'm Tom Brokaw, and I just don't know what the world is coming to.

Goodnight.

I always thought that news anchors were somewhat paternal figures, telling America their disturbing bedtime stories in a soothing cadence. The newscast even has its own bedtime-story ending. They end with "Goodnight," instead of "The End." But Brokaw's summary of his years of news reporting revealed to be nothing so much as a permanent American boy, frozen in a moment of perpetual nostalgia for a world uncomplicated by meaningless violence. If the meaning of an event is complex or in flux, Brokaw either oversimplifies it or assigns it a meaning. Reminiscing about the 1968 Democratic National Convention, he describes walking a corridor of enraged protestors and the police who were ready to beat them. "I thought to myself," he intones, "This country is divided."

Wow. Now that's insight.

That's where Brokaw's real life as a journalist begins. In Tom Brokaw's world, events without a simple, sound-bite-sized meaning are simply incomprehensible. Though he is not alone in his fetishization of the bygone (and ficitious) American unity of the Depression and World War II era, he took it to new heights by wrapping everyone who lived through it in the title, "The Greatest Generation."

The American people are not encouraged to understand their world, because they are not encouraged to question their world. They are encouraged to watch a half-hour newscast at night and consider themselves informed by a man who has his face slathered with makeup in order to appear lively under very bright lights and then mumbles to himself and shuffles papers theatrically after these very bright lights are turned off.

In Tom Brokaw's very last broadcast, his successor, Brian Williams, reported a story from the Walter Reed Medical Center, where American soldiers who were wounded in action are recuperating from their horrific wounds. Brian Williams interviewed a young soldier who lost his leg in Iraq. This soldier was in good spirits and described getting out of Iraq in exchange for his leg "a good deal." Just before Brian Williams sent the newscast "Back to you, Tom, one last time," he concluded his several-minute piece on just how glad these soldiers are to be alive, lost limbs and all, by saying that these young men and women might just be part of America's "next Greatest Generation."

No mention of the soldiers who don't think that losing a leg in Iraq was a very good deal at all. No mention of the soldiers from either Gulf War who have unexplained illnesses, whose children have birth defects.
No mention of whether this soldier's lost leg has any higher purpose, and if that higher purpose is really the democratization of Iraq, or if it is in fact keeping America's SUVs running.
No mention of how the Walter Reed Medical Center, with its in-house advanced prosthetics lab and its physical therapy and taxpayer-funded means of piecing together otherwise healthy young people who have been ripped apart by (also taxpayer-funded) weapons, compares to the medical care Iraqi civilians with similar injuries receive.

That's a little bit complicated for a bedtime story.