'Speak Softly," said President Roosevelt (T), "and carry a big stick." Sounds like good strategy for a country ready to take on the whole world. Yet for much of its history this country has been just the opposite. Many Americans believe the military power of the country is absolute and the leaders of the country can win any war they choose to enter if they are only resolute enough to push through to victory. In fact, often the bluster is hollow. Wars are lost, we are told, because Democrats surrender. The insistence that "we've never lost a war" persists as a slogan, though often it is the Republicans like Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon who surrender.

'All the Olympics are a little unnatural, of course, they are genial intervals of make-believe," writes Charles McGrath, the Irish-American litterateur in residence at the New York Times, "when the world pretends to be a happier and friendlier place."

The typical article written about Chicago politics by a journalist from somewhere else tells us as much about this city as does the too-long-by-an-hour "Dark Knight." You come into the city, talk to some of the approved journalists and political outsiders (the so-called independents), clip stories from newspaper archives, and begin to write. Thus American Pharaoh, a biography of Mayor Daley Pere. The metaphor of a sacred king of Egypt for Da Mare would be hilariously funny if it were not so grotesquely irrelevant.

T.S. Elliot summarized the issue, "When good does evil in its struggle against evil, it becomes indistinguishable from its enemy."

Taint funny! There are two audiences for the New Yorker magazine -- exiles from the so-called Big Apple and new immigrants who have moved into it. The former are people who used to live in New York and have had to move out of it, either across the Hudson River or the East River or the Narrows and are desperate to stay in touch with the politically and culturally correct fashions from Manhattan Island. The latter are the hayseeds who have moved onto the island and do not want to be perceived as hayseeds. Either way, they are snobs. Despite its occasional excellent journalism, its mean-spirited cartoons and turgid short stories are aimed at snobs who want to imagine that they are au courant in the mores of The Island.