Hendrik Hertzberg

I saw a book signing on CSpan2 last night with HH. He's an editor with The New Yorker Magazine, and he appears maybe 30% of the issues in "Talk of the Town". His columns are consistently stimulating. Hertzberg is, as nearly as I can tell, a secular kind of guy; however, he worked in the White House during the Carter administration, and at one point during the program he responded to a question about Carter by saying that he was always impressed by the integrity of Carter, but partcularly by him in the years following the Carter administration.

At another point he was commenting on the general state of affairs in the country, and whether the United States could retrieve what it has lost during the Bush years so far. He was hopeful, I think, but on the other hand he was also pessimistic. Then he said something which I found particularly striking -- it was something like he was most discouraged about what he felt was a "moral collapse" of the country (he definitely used those two words). This collapse, he said, was epitomized in three ways: first, by the acceptance of a fraudulent or stolen 2000 election (I'm not sure which of those words he used or if he used another word to describe the election, but I remember the intent of his statement); second, by the war in Iraq; and third, by the economic changes in the U.S., notably the subsidies of the rich as epitomized by the movement to eliminate the inheritance tax.

It is refreshing to me to hear someone talk about real "values" -- at least the values that are most relevant to the life of the country as such.