I am sitting by a candle beneath a shuttered window in a city blacked out against aerial attack. There is little intelligible news from the front, and the long hours between news reports are filled with old Palmach songs and coded messages calling reservists to their units.

The dimensions of this war are still unclear, but I fear that the shrill wail of yesterday's siren has shattered our peace for a long time to come. Each of us has already fixed in his mind the moment war broke in to violate our private lives and mock our petty dreams of tomorrow.

The empty office of the Vice Presidency was once only an unimportant appendage to the American body politic; a pretext for mild witticisms. Once every twenty years or so its occupant would suddenly rise to the Presidency upon the death of the elected incumbent. But since those spectacular events occurred so infrequently and with such varied consequences for the nation's political affairs, no steady attention ever focused on the office itself. Except for their previous service in the Vice Presidency, what did Andrew Johnson and Chester Arthur have in common? Or Theodore Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge? It seemed impossible to derive from their experiences any settled conclusions about the Vice Presidency either as a preparation for the Presidency or as a way of providing a standby President.

In the midst of pervasive malaise America tries to look forward to celebrating its bicentennial. It is not an easy thing to celebrate a birthday when the body and spirit are sick. Little wonder that social analysts and critics are calling for a renewal of the American spirit, the recovery of an American tradition from the distortions of our recent past. It is this tradition that must provide guidance for the future that is already upon us. Daniel Bell, in his The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, is but the latest of the company of exhorters, which includes such critics as Sydney Ahlstrom, Robert Bellah and Gibson Winter.

A politically ambitious young man approaches a fork in the road. Standing there are Hitler, Lenin and Juan Domingo Peron.

“Which is the way to political power?” asks the young man.

“No doubt about it. Go right,” answers Hitler.

“No. No. No. The only way is left,” retorts Lenin.

“Don't listen to those two,” advises Peron. “The best way is to signal left and then turn right.”

The joke making the rounds of South America is greeted with a stony silence in much of Argentina as leftists are becoming aware that they have been had by an old warrior more interested in a political comeback than a social revolution. The feelings of betrayal and disillusionment are bitterly sinking in. Where does the Peronist Left go now that Peron has turned right?

The best way to begin Noam Chomsky's For Reasons of State is to read the epigraph, a lengthy quotation from the nineteenth-century anarchist saint, Mikhail Bakunin, from which the title is taken. Central to it is an impassioned assertion that “the entire history of ancient and modern states is merely a series of revolting crimes” and that kings, ministers, statesmen, bureaucrats and warriors, past and present, “if judged from the standpoint of simple morality and human justice, have a hundred, a thousand times over earned their sentence to hard labor or to the gallows.” It is a fiery and, in more ways than Chomsky may have intended, an entirely appropriate invocation. This is the Bakunin who appears later in the book, in “Notes on Anarchism,” as the eloquent sniffer-out of the coming “red bureaucracy,” the confessed “fanatic lover of liberty,” the prophet of thai “intelligent and truly noble part of youth” that will ultimately adopt the cause of the people.

The assassination of Amίlcar Cabral in January, 1973, was reported in the American news media, but there was no follow-up, and few Americans recognize Cabral's name, or even the name of Portuguese Guinea, the small colony he had hoped to lead to independence.

From a geographical point of view the obscprity of Portuguese Guinea might seem well deserved. Wedged between Senegal and the independent Republic of Guinea, it is about 40 per cent the size of Portugal, but its population is less than that of the city of Lisbon. Mostly hot and humid, much of the colony is covered by bayous and salt-water swamps. The people, who until recently were about 99 per cent illiterate, are divided into a number of traditionally antagonistic groups that are religiously, culturally and linguistically distinct.

Historians may conclude that the Vietnam war ended some time during the week beginning March 25, 1973. Certainly in the news media—and no war has had its signposts so vividly marked out by press and television—it was ending throughout that week with increasingly complex last-minute drama, right up to the conclusive pictures of “one of the last U.S. soldiers out of South Vietnam” and “the last prisoner out of North Vietnam.” The last prisoner, more than anything, was the definitive image. Other official aspects of impending peacetreaty negotiations, troop withdrawals, cease-fires, lulls, resumptions, “peace in our time” speecheswere worn thin by months of assertion and publicity. They were no longer quite powerful enough to symbolize finality. It was the last prisoner of war physically out of North Vietnam that allowed the New York Times to announce on March 30 that “the U.S. war role in Vietnam is ended.”

In Pompidouian France the government's objective is to make everyone believe that having more is living better, with the result that even the less affluent are purchasing new cars and second hemes, and no one, seemingly, is learning how to repair old ones or is concerned about the 11 per cent interest rate on new mortgages. A French jeweler today will not even look at your Timex watch, and the day has already come when the staterun Gaz de France is reluctant to take on any new customers because this could necessitate laying larger pipelines to satisfy increased demand.

The roots of patriotism are in childhood. At least in Western languages this is expressed in the terms that most commonly evoke patriotic sentiments—fatherland, motherland, homeland, native country. Patriotism most basically refers to places, people and things with which one is at home, and there are few later experiences that can match the sense of at-homeness experienced by the child. The world then is still a very new place, and most of it is very strange, much of it terrifying. The familiar, the secure zones of the world have, for this reason, a particular sweetness about them.