GRINDING TO A HALT
In a discussion of 2001, Stanley Kubrick's movie, and 2001, the year, Anatole Kaletsky challenges the notion that we're living in a time of social upheaval. "It is arguable," he says, "that technical and social change is slower today than at any time since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Anyone with a sense of history must surely acknowledge that, in terms of social change, we baby boomers who were born in the years after the Second World War, have lived our entire lives in a period of extraordinary stability. … To suggest that our generation has experienced a rate of social change remotely comparable to the revolution that separated our comfortable baby-boom adolescence from our parents' impoverished (or gilded) youths in depression-era Britain (or, in my case, in the famine-ravaged Russia and dismembered Poland of the interwar years) is manifestly absurd."

LOCK, STOCK, AND SMOKING BARRELS
In a review of Michael A. Bellesiles'Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, Jackson Lears argues that "the most influential mythic narrative composed by the contemporary right is the story of Americans and their guns. It is a Turnerian tale of frontier self-reliance. In British colonial North America, the story goes, boys learned to shoot almost as soon as they could wipe themselves. … Small wonder that the colonial militia became such a fearsome fighting force; it was composed of crack shots, citizen soldiers who would learn guerrilla warfare from the Indians and practice it to perfection on the hapless British redcoats in the Revolution. Following the revolutionaries' victory, the Second Amendment to the Constitution affirmed every individual's right to bear arms—a right that has remained crucial to the protection of personal liberty against intrusive government power."

ABOUT HOLDEN
Earlier this week, Emily Wax reported on the National Council of Teachers of English's ejection of J.D Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye from school reading lists because the central figure, Holden Caulfield, was white and privileged. The head of the NCT's Commission on Literature, Michael Moore has replied to Wax's report. "I was dismayed to see the quote that was attributed to me in Tuesday's Washington Post. I did not refer to Holden Caulfield at any time as a privileged, white male (whose time had passed). I did say that multicultural literature is here to stay. The context for that quote was that more and more teachers have been exposed to many different writers and are using literature for many different purposes. I said that the so-called canon represented a lot of thinking over a long period of time, but that teachers choose the literature they teach to fulfill a purpose. I suggested that if a teacher thought there were good reasons to teach Catcher or not to teach it, that was really what teaching is about."

ARE YOU WHAT YOU EAT?
"The question is whether our humanity will control technology, or the other way around. That's the crucial issue." In the opinion of Dr. Leon Lederman, at one time head of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, this is the question that will dominate the new century. In its wisdom, the Food and Drug Administration has decided that technology will control humanity by declaring that genetically modified food does not need to be labeled as such. In addition, the FDA says farmers and food companies who wish to label their produce as "not genetically modified" cannot do so. As the New Scientist says, the biotech industry, as represented by the Biotechnology Industry Organization"applauded the new regulations, which will go into effect in 60 days."

WATCH OUT FOR STUPID CONSERVATIVES
In the Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson says that with the Clinton years almost behind us, expect Democrats to return to their stomping grounds. In short, count on much fulmination against cuts in government expenditure as well as spleen and invective aimed at the rich. Ferguson forgets to add that we can also expect lots of plaintive whining from conservatives about the urgent need to "roll back" legislation signed by President Clinton—for example, laws banning assault guns. As an article in the National Review suggests, however, the whining has already begun. Gun enthusiasts will doubtlessly feel a shot in the arm after reading Dave Kopel, Dr. Paul Gallant, and Dr. Joanne Eisen's article, which argues that gun regulation is "repressive." "Gun-owners are increasingly unwilling to sacrifice more rights in a futile effort to appease prohibitionists," the authors write. "At the same time, the gun-prohibition lobbies are trying to get people to view gun owners with the same kinds of mean-spirited, irrational fear and hatred that were once inflicted on black people who moved into white neighborhoods. 'They' must be dangerous, the hate groups warn."

THE IDENTITY OF FRANCE
Yahoo! lost its battle with the French government to auction Nazi memorabilia on its Web site, as Lee Dembart writes in the International Herald Tribune. But it remains unclear what motivated the French government to pursue Yahoo! in the first place. A French citizen can presumably travel to a foreign country and purchase exactly the same memorabilia. Why penalize the Internet? As Dembart suggests, anti-Americanism as much as anti-Nazism seem to be the issue. The decision is odd not least because of France's reluctance to discuss its collaboration with the Nazis during the German occupation, a theme of Mosco Boucault's documentary film, Terrorists in Retirement. As Alan Riding writes in the New York Times, "between the time Mr. Boucault began shooting the 90-minute documentary in 1982 and its single broadcast on French television in 1985, it also provoked a heated debate that mirrored France's growing discomfiture over its wartime role. … Movies, books and two war-crimes trials of French collaborators, Paul Touvier and Maurice Papon, have told a less uplifting story of the deep involvement of the collaborationist Vichy regime and of the French police and militia in the deportation of 76,000 Jews from France to Nazi death camps. … With three of the film's 'terrorists' still alive, perhaps it is time for the documentary to be shown again in France." Perhaps Yahoo! could be persuaded to sell the movie on its Web site.

HEAVY TRAFFIC AT THE TIMES
"Everyone knows someone who's touched by the issue of drugs, so if you can make the dramatic thriller elements more satisfying then you can get away with talking about the other stuff. And people are certainly coming to see it." So says Stephen Soderbergh, director of Traffic, in an interview with the Guardian. The impact of Soderbergh's movie has been so great that the New York Times recently held a colloquy to discuss the film's portrayal of the so-called "war on drugs." The panel included "former addicts, a convicted dealer, a medical historian, a prosecutor, a retired drug agent, a sociologist, an advocate for needle exchanges for addicts and a psychiatrist." In the Evening Standard, Christopher Hitchens says that Traffic"may do to the 'drug war' what certain Roaring Twenties films did for Prohibition—in other words, expose it as a corrupting and dangerous racket. … A rebellion against the stupidity of the 'war on drugs' is the next big thing in American politics and society. Every time the first step—the decriminalisation of marijuana—has been put to a vote it has been carried with large majorities, even in states as conservative as New Mexico. … One has the sense of a long-standing taboo beginning to lose its power."

NEW SITE
Peter Maass has joined the ranks of authors and journalists who have taken the Internet into their hands by launching their own sites. Unlike Andrew Sullivan's burdensome home page (which invites readers to choose between "heavy" and "lite" versions, as if, as in the case of Budweiser, one wanted to be presented with such a choice), Maass' page is simple and striking. The designer is Matt Haughey, a founder of the discussion page Metafilter.

AN ENGLISH ENTITY
The journalist Auberon Waugh died in the night. For many readers of the Telegraph, the Spectator, the New Statesman, and Private Eye, he was one of the most accomplished British columnists of the last 30 years. His views were often reactionary, sometimes radical, frequently angry, but never, ever plain. In the Guardian, Geoffrey Wheatcroft writes: "His father [Evelyn] died at 62 and his mother at 57—and he suffered from ill-health all his life, partly resulting from severe wounds sustained during national service at the age of 18. That may, in part, have accounted for the acidic personality which made him the most verbally brutal journalist of his age. Everyone who met him remarked on the contrast between his ferocity in print and his personal geniality, but this was hard to explain to those who didn't know him, especially if they had been on the rough end of his pen." Waugh's friend A.N. Wilson writes about this contradiction in the Evening Standard. "Anthony Powell, one of the figures whom Bron [as Waugh was known by friends] mocked and vilified in season and out, used to say that there was a strong vein of sadism in both the Waughs, père et fils, and this was probably true. But whereas Evelyn Waugh enjoyed tormenting people socially, Bron could do it only at one remove. He refused to be resentful, though he caused such resentment in others. The gallant refusal to whinge about his ghastly father was matched by his perverse attitude to drink-driving. Two of his sisters were run down in motor accidents, one fatally. He was bitterly grief-stricken by Meg's death, but, to the point of tedium, he lambasted the police for trying to make the roads a safer place. He appeared to regard the freedom to drive when drunk as one of the inalienable human rights."

WHAT CULTURE IS THERE IN COLLECTIVE IDENTITY?
Writing in Foreign Policy magazine, novelist and one-time Peruvian presidential candidate Mario Vargas Llosa questions the idea of cultural identity, which he describes as "dangerous." "From a social point of view, it represents merely a doubtful, artificial concept, but from a political perspective it threatens humanity's most precious achievement: freedom. I do not deny that people who speak the same language, were born and live in the same territory, face the same problems, and practice the same religions and customs have common characteristics. But that collective denominator can never fully define each one of them, and it only abolishes or relegates to a disdainful secondary plane the sum of unique attributes and traits that differentiates one member of the group from the others."