"Please Don't Remain Calm": a bright light in public discourse

"Please Don't Remain Calm"

by Michael Kinsley

Norton, 336 pp., $25.95

To read Michael Kinsley in concentrated form is to be reminded that Kinsley's considered thought and decency are, in combination, a rarity in public discourse today.

It's also to be reminded that Kinsley — former editor of The New Republic and Slate, former co-host of CNN's "Crossfire" and now a columnist for Time — is all about taking words seriously, particularly those of the mighty.

In the first of 127 essays (1995-2007), culled mostly from Slate and Time, Kinsley quotes televangelist Pat Robertson: "Intolerance in any quarter is wrong, but inasmuch as we are able, we must ensure that the trend throughout the 1990s remains in favor of a Jewish homeland in Israel and not for the elimination of the Jews."

There's something vaguely disturbing about that quote. In a brilliant, darkly comic piece of deconstruction, Kinsley gives us the reasons why, among them: "There's a sort of implied advance permission to fail, as if success is a hopeless ideal and the effort is what counts."

Readers dipping into these pieces will find Kinsley's laser yet self-effacing wit addressing topics as varied as the Internet, political essayist Christopher Hitchens ("... his jewels of erudition, though flashy, are real. Or at least they fool me.") and The New York Times.

But if readers work through them front to back, they'll see in particular an arc in Kinsley's consideration of George W. Bush — who looms large over the book — that would resonate with liberals, if not the nation: Early concerns over candidate Bush's debating points, a grudging acceptance soon after the 2000 election that Al Gore could lose, morphing into passionate protest of the end game won by Bush's team of lawyers, followed by a long lament over the events in Iraq.

And, finally, to read Kinsley is to remember that in our run-up to an Iraq war that has become our shared nightmare, at least one writer understood what was happening as it happened: "We seem to be distant observers of our own nation's preparation for war, watching with horror or approval or indifference a process we have nothing to do with and cannot affect. Which is just about the case."