This month’s issue of Harper’s has a short piece about George Bush’s misunderstanding of his favorite painting:

So Bush’s inspiring, proselytizing Methodist is in fact a horse thief fleeing from a lynch mob. It seems a fitting marker for the Bush presidency. Bush has consistently exhibited what psychologists call the “Tolstoy syndrome.” That is, he is completely convinced he knows what things are, so he shuts down all avenues of inquiry about them and disregards the information that is offered to him. This is the hallmark of a tragically bad executive. But in this case, it couldn’t be more precious. The president of the United States has identified closely with a man he sees as a mythic, heroic figure. In fact that man is a wily criminal one step out in front of justice. It perfectly reflects Bush the man . . . and Bush the president.

The Atlantic Monthly has made its awesome, super-amazing content available for free on its website.

This is one of the magazines that Hugh McKenna, my high-school English teacher, suggested I subscribe to (the other was Harper’s). I’ve been reading them ever since and subscribing to them off and on since college. Moreover, this is the magazine that Emerson wrote for. I can not say enough good things about The Atlantic. It is like a readable version of Smithsonian with substantiated opinions and commentary. At least once a month I want to tear out an article from my copy of the magazine and mail it to someone. I usually give the whole issue away once I’m done with it and this leaves me wishing I’d photocopied the relevant articles before passing them on. But no longer! Woohoo! It’s as easy as copying and pasting a link into an email message now.

I know that when I hand the hardcopy issues over to other people to read, they usually read them. I’m not so confident that people will actually read the pieces if I just email them instead. Something about hardcopy insinuates value and time well-spent whereas a copy and paste is so easy to gloss over that I fear friends will just ignore the articles I email them. But that’s never stopped me before. So but anyway, two articles from the past two issues that if I could have I would have photocopied and mailed to a bunch of people to read are below.

First, from December’s issue:

Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters by Andrew Sullivan. This is the piece that tipped the scales for me. I’d been deeply in agreement with what I’ve read of Obama’s policies (usually via Lessig’s website). Sullivan’s case though is about the transformative nature of an Obama presidency:

Obama’s candidacy in this sense is a potentially transformational one. Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America—finally—past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us. So much has happened in America in the past seven years, let alone the past 40, that we can be forgiven for focusing on the present and the immediate future. But it is only when you take several large steps back into the long past that the full logic of an Obama presidency stares directly—and uncomfortably—at you.

At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a mo­mentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce.

Regardless of where you stand on the upcoming election, Sullivan’s piece offers the hint of how to move forward into real social change for America.

Second from the January issue:

First, Kill All the School Boards by Matt Miller. It wasn’t until recently that I learned that the vast majority of my not-insignificant local taxes (80%) are controlled by a school board that is elected by a single-digit percentage of citizens. The whole notion of a local school board–of finding more than a couple of people out of a population of 15k–that has any idea how to educate all of a town’s children is preposterous. As Miller writes:

Our system is, more than anything, an artifact of our Colonial past. For the religious dissenters who came to the New World, literacy was essential to religious freedom, enabling them to teach their own beliefs. Religion and schooling moved in tandem across the Colonies. Many people who didn’t like what the local minister was preaching would move on and found their own church, and generally their own school . . .

Many reformers across the political spectrum agree that local control has become a disaster for our schools. But the case against it is almost never articulated. Public officials are loath to take on powerful school-board associations and teachers’ unions; foundations and advocacy groups, who must work with the boards and unions, also pull their punches. For these reasons, as well as our natural preference for having things done nearby, support for local control still lingers, largely unexamined, among the public.

Will this mean I’ll cancel my Atlantic subscription? Not likely. Many of the articles are too long to read online and I enjoy knowing that somewhere in my house lurks the current hardcopy issue and the opportunity to escape into a world of big ideas.