James Caroll

"They said this day would never come," Barack Obama declared in Iowa last week, and the ghosts of this nation nodded. With an African-American competing seriously for the presidency of the United States, the last act of a centuries-old drama begins.

This week, spring fever takes the form of the fever pitch to which concern over global warming is rising. Last Saturday was the National Day of Climate Action, a campaign organized by writer Bill McKibben, aimed at getting Congress to "step it up" and cut US carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050.

The hanging of Saddam Hussein Dec. 30 offered a view into the grotesque reality of what America has sponsored in Iraq, and what Americans saw should inform their response to President Bush's escalation of the war.

``No question Guantanamo sends, you know, a signal," President Bush said last week. ``It provides an excuse, for example, to say the United States is not upholding the values that they're trying to encourage other countries to adhere to."

Last week, the rattling of sabers filled the air. Various published reports, most notably one from Seymour M. Hersh in The New Yorker, indicated that Washington is removing swords from scabbards and heightening the threat aimed at Iran, which refuses to suspend its nuclear project.

The ancient myth has it that a person entering the maze will never find the way out. As if that were not terrifying enough, inside the maze lives the beast whose special appetite is for the young.

It's interesting to me that the tribunes of the truth right now are the people who have felt the loss of the war most intensely, the parents of the dead American soldiers.

The single most important fact about the birth of Jesus, as recounted in the Gospels, is one that receives almost no emphasis in the American festival of Christmas.

To say, "We must love one another or die" is only to say that, among nations, a new communal politics defines the only future there can be.