Opinion | The Marketing of a Massacre

Andy Ayers of St. Louis recommended another passage in The Times, from Peter Beinart’s effort to envision some peace and progress following that slaughter: “It will require Palestinians to forcefully oppose attacks on Jewish civilians, and Jews to support Palestinians when they resist oppression in humane ways — even though Palestinians and Jews who take such steps will risk making themselves pariahs among their own people. It will require new forms of political community, in Israel-Palestine and around the world, built around a democratic vision powerful enough to transcend tribal divides. The effort may fail. It has failed before. The alternative is to descend, flags waving, into hell.”

In The Washington Post, Dana Milbank noted that at a juncture of grave uncertainty, “there is one eternal truth, one unwavering constant to steady us when all else is in flux: Every time the House Republican majority tries to govern, it’s guaranteed to turn into a goat rodeo.” (Ranga Parthasarathy, Emigrant, Mont., and John B. Jacoby, Cambridge, Mass., among others)

In Salon, Brian Karem took the measure of the Republican congressman angling to be House speaker: “Jim Jordan didn’t come to town to build anything. He came in a foul stench to tear it all down and piss on it, wearing a tie but no jacket, a perpetual sneer and the general demeanor of a waiter in a cheap diner surviving three-day shifts on speed and coffee.” (Pete Andrews, Chapel Hill, N.C., and Harriette Royer, Rochester, N.Y.)

In The Guardian, Timothy Garton Ash deconstructed the results of the recent election in Poland: “We can see that many voters simply got fed up with the corrupt, petty, backward-looking, obscurantist rule of the party led by the 74-year-old Jarosław Kaczynski, who is a kind of one-man walking anthology of resentment.” (Scott Denham, Davidson, N.C.)

In The New Yorker, Daniel Immerwahr assessed America’s distance from its agrarian past: “The small farmer, standing on his property with a pitchfork, has been an endangered species for a century. Today, a leaf blower would be a better symbol for those who tend the land. As the economist Brad DeLong notes, the Bureau of Labor Statistics counts more landscapers and groundskeepers than people working on farms.” (Timothy Rake, Forest Grove, Ore.)