To bring about change you need to practice dreampolitik. What Barack Obama demonstrated during his campaign, and needs to remind himself of regularly, is that politics can be the art of the impossible.

Dreaming of the ideal Bar-B-Que and its promise of class egalitarianism: in front of the grill man bonds with man, not over business or sport, but in the arts of familial nourishment and the sensually sublime pleasure of taste.

There was an advertisement, until recently, on a billboard in my neighborhood. Although the ad was replaced weeks ago, the image still haunts me.

I sat down this morning to write something for an Iraq war teach-in I was supposed to speak at and found that I had nothing to write. So I’ve written about this. What point can I make that hasn’t already been made? I’m a critic: I criticize, but what good does critique do now?