Suzanne Fields

FIELDS: An appeal to survival ethics

Washington is a company town, and what the company makes best are politics and policy. Sometimes the politics is "unprecedented," as certain historians called the duel between President Obama and former Vice President Dick Cheney.

May 28, 2009

FIELDS: A courtship of two countries

Diplomacy is like courtship, with its rituals to keep passions in check. Both diplomacy and courtship pose tests to see whether a meeting of the minds can turn into a tentative relationship of the hearts and a proper engagement leading to a union convenient to both sides. Diplomacy is courtship conducted in public and carries a lot of baggage because nations, like families, have diverging vested interests, sending contradictory and conflicting messages.

May 21, 2009

FIELDS: Souter, Specter and a soft shoe

Souter & Specter sounds like a vaudeville song-and-dance team, stuck in Cleveland and still dreaming of the Palace. You can almost hear their Peoria humor and see their old soft shoe.

May 8, 2009

FIELDS: The banality of moral preening

Evil is never banal. Hanna Arendt was wrong. Evil is fascinating and provocative and focuses the mind. Adolf Eichmann may have been a boring man to know. He may have thought he was merely a bureaucrat following orders, but his acts forever fascinate the human mind in our attempt to understand how he could have done what he did without a conscience, without remorse.

April 30, 2009

FIELDS: School choice a piece of cake?

First lady Michelle Obama set just the right example as the mom in chief. She made no speeches about Afghanistan or the stimulus for the global economy but returned from a boffo trip to London and Europe with better press notices than her husband.

April 9, 2009

FIELDS: Cultivating her own garden

Wonder Woman she's not. She has Wonder Woman's good biceps, as we've seen in photographs, but she's hard to picture in red, white and blue tights and starred spangles.

April 2, 2009

FIELDS: Obama’s public overexposure

Like the beat beat beat of the tom-tom, like the tick tick tock of the clock, like the drip drip drip of the raindrops, a voice within me keeps repeating Obama Obama Obama.

March 27, 2009

FIELDS: Red meat for dinner

The conservatives in party frocks and black tie were restless. They were hungry and thirsty. The bread had been devoured and the wine bottles were empty and the speaker had not yet begun to speak. There was one speech and one hour to go until dinner was served.

March 19, 2009

FIELDS: Women’s work is never done

Barbie, believe it or not, is 50, and still a dish. A doll is only a doll, but Barbie illustrates how over the last five decades women have become a touchstone for judging what freedom really means. How women are treated in different countries tells you a lot about the politics and culture of where they live.

March 12, 2009

FIELDS: Slings and arrows on the way

Barack Obama may be becoming presidential at last. The campaign mode of supplication and imitation is fading. The new president has done his Lincoln shtick, train ride and all. He's no longer tempted to make his Saturday radio address an imitation of a fireside chat (he still sneaks an occasional cigarette, but without Franklin Roosevelt's cigarette holder). Conservatives who were afraid to challenge his popularity, retreating to criticism of an unpopular Congress, are unlacing the gloves.

March 5, 2009

FIELDS: Royalty ain’t what it used to be

The rock group Hinder sings that "our homecoming queen was a lot like you and me... just somebody's daughter."

February 26, 2009

FIELDS: Obama and the real Hamilton

Obama might profit from following Alexander Hamilton's example.

February 19, 2009

FIELDS: Dreaming of Obama

Barack Obama is beginning to sound just a wee bit frantic for a man who has been president of the United States for a little more than a fortnight. A month from now, who knows? He got his stimulus package through the Senate, but it was a bitter partisan victory. But for two women and Arlen Specter, the always reliable Democratic allies in a partisan showdown, he got no help from the Republicans.

February 12, 2009

FIELDS: An ‘Obama effect’ on learning

Everybody wants a fix for the crippled system of educating our kids, but we're all alchemists. We think we can discover that elusive perfect formula, the magic bullet, the miracle elixir, the silk purse fashioned from a sow's ear, but all we get are mixed metaphors.

February 6, 2009

FIELDS: Some ‘victory’ for Hamas

"They cannot win against us, but we can lose against them."

January 29, 2009

FIELDS: Pomp ends, circumstance lingers

In with the new, out with the old. In with the Democrats, out with the Republicans. In with Obamaphoria, out with the relentless Bushbash. The pomp passes, the circumstance lingers on. We sat together under a tent that stretched from coast to coast, from satellite to satellite and around the globe, giving everyone who bestirred himself a front-row seat for the greatest show on earth. Inaugural 2009 filled the airwaves with guarded optimism and unbounded enthusiasm, rhetoric taking flight on the fragile wings of an attempted economic recovery and war on two fronts (at least).

January 22, 2009

FIELDS: We’re all ears

"Ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man." The Europeans could usefully hear that again.

January 15, 2009

FIELDS: The dawning of the Obama Era

The president-elect has landed. Like Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama on arriving in Washington headed immediately to the hotel to install his family where they wait to move first to Blair House and then across the street to the White House. When Lincoln misplaced his bedroom slippers, Henry Willard, proprietor of the Willard Hotel, scurried to find slippers big enough to accommodate Honest Abe. So far as we know, nobody at the Hay-Adams Hotel has had to attend to Mr. Obama's cold feet.

January 8, 2009

FIELDS: New generation of learning

The old guy with a scythe steps aside for the new babe in a diaper, and our usual reflection for this time of year is one of unusual anticipation of what the babe and the new president will bring us. Hopes are particularly high this year, despite the hard and immutable fact that some of the mistakes brought to us by the old guy with the scythe are bound to be transferred to a new generation.

January 2, 2009

FIELDS: Politics and poetry in season

The holiday season is all ablaze, with lights to brighten the eye and warm the spirit. The candles of Hanukkah, recalling the triumph of the Maccabees in repulsing an army of Syrians who tried to evict the Jews from ancient Israel, twinkle for eight days in the Jewish "festival of the lights." The lights of Christmas celebrate the birth of Christ, symbolizing the coming of the Messiah and the triumph of light over darkness in a world of suffering.

December 25, 2008