January 2011

I thought your glimpses of John Quincy Adams in the February/March issue ("History Now” and “In the News") were particularly timely, coinciding as the issue did with the inauguration of that other son of a President, George W. Bush. President Bush has mentioned that since his election was made official, his father has taken to calling him Quincy, and this has inspired the younger Bush to try to learn more about the sixth Chief Executive. If he keeps up with his studies, I hope that President Bush will learn from his predecessor’s mistakes. J. Q. Adams was a fascinating man with many of the qualifications we would deem essential for any successful President. Nevertheless, his great failing was a certain intellectual righteousness that led him to underestimate men like Andrew Jackson and to overestimate his own ability to stir the nation. He made a fatal mistake on day one, when he named Henry Clay to his cabinet, an action that infuriated the Jacksonians and stained the Adams administration with the appearance of a “corrupt bargain” between the general’s two rivals.

LEARNING FROM Q KOREA IN PRINT AND ONSCREEN THE UNIVERSAL SOLDIER THE UNIVERSAL SOLDIER TUTTO QUELLO JAZZ A PROMOTION GOOD CENTS THE BUTTERFLY CASTE A CIVIL WAR TOUR

Call the Cape Ann Chamber of Commerce (978-283-1601) for a slim brochure or consult its excellent Web site ( www.capeannvacations.com ) for information on events, accommodations, and attractions. The site is strong on the area’s museums and historic houses and offers enticing looks at some small hotels and inns. Among summer events tied to the sea are St. Peter’s Fiesta, a traditional Portuguese ceremony that culminates with the Blessing of the Fleet (June 28 through July 1), and the Fishermen’s Memorial service, held to honor local sons lost at sea (August 25), both held in Gloucester.

In June of 1998, when Warner Bros, moved into Gloucester to film Sebastian Junger’s immensely popular book The Perfect Storm , everyone in town took a wait-and-see attitude. With its centuries-long history, Gloucester didn’t need Hollywood to put it on the map. After all, one resident said, “Movie people are all about make-believe. Folks in these parts don’t hold much with make-believe.”

But almost immediately, the whole town—or so it seemed—was pretty well won over. “Everybody, and I mean everybody, George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, the camera people, all of them were really wonderful,” says Gregg Sousa, the 37-year-old owner of the Crow’s Nest, a popular watering hole prominently featured in both book and film. “They’d come in after work, sit around, have a beer or whatever, talk with everybody—no problem at all.”

Longer ago than I have any desire to admit, I made my first and only trip to Venice, as part of a summer tour with a group of college students. The supposedly “liberal” National Student Association, which ran the trip and featured get-togethers and “exchanges of ideas” with college kids in every country we visited, was later revealed to have been a CIA front organization. I guess the idea was that we would captivate the blas», red-leaning youth of Italy and France with our fresh American optimism (why we wouldn’t be in danger of being overpowered by their European cynicism and pungent cigarettes, I don’t know). These days youngsters don’t need the CIA to make introductions; just hanging out at hostels, clubs, or other teenage haunts will do the trick.

You can fly to venice via a number of European gateways, but Delta, leaving three times a week from JFK Airport in New York City, offers the only nonstop flight from the U.S.

Two classic meditations on Venice are still in print and well worth reading: Mary McCarthy’s Venice Observed (Harcourt Brace, $11.00) and James Morris’s The World of Venice (Harvest, $12.00). The best account of its past—and Venice has a past wholly different from that of any other city on earth—is John Julius Norwich’s great A History of Venice (Vintage, $25.00).

It was fitting that when Y2K disaster finally struck, it did so in a way nobody had foreseen—and in a way nobody even recognized as Y2K disaster. But that was what the electoral mess in Florida really was. It was a breakdown in the ability of obsolete but essential computerized systems to accurately meet the needs of the society, and though it didn’t specifically involve trouble handling the number 2000, in every other essential it was exactly what people had been predicting a year before. It arose from inherent flaws in a 1960s-era computer system’s way of handling information with punch cards and from the fact that that computer system was unnecessarily still in use decades later; it was triggered by the system’s inability to cope with a specific situation arising in the year 2000; and it generated a level of anarchy that government itself seemed at a loss for a while to contain.