A Century of Destiny | Newsweek Boomer Files

Heavy Medals
6/11/2009 12:00:00 AM
Compared with their World War II counterparts, today's senior U.S. military officers are so weighed down with medals that they appear in danger of listing to port. The military at first disdained all decorations as undemocratic. Not until the Civil War did it hand out medals, and then there was only one kind: the Medal of Honor. In World Wars I and II, the list grew—the Navy Cross, the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star and others—and after World War II came a great expansion of good-conduct decorations. There's been little talk of reducing the list. "It would be like starting employee-of-the-month and deciding you don't want to do it anymore," says Doug Sterner, a medals expert who runs a Web site called HomeOfHeroes.com. Medals still have meaning. A chestful of them is a kind of walking résumé. But there is something slightly opéra bouffe about lieutenants wearing more than Ike on D-Day.
Romancing the Stones
Cathleen McGuigan 6/6/2009 12:00:00 AM
It's not polite to call the Elgin Marbles the Elgin Marbles anymore. Not even in the British Museum, where the ancient Greek sculptures and reliefs have resided since the early 19th century, after a British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire named Lord Elgin hacked them off the Parthenon. Even in that age of imperialism, many Brits saw Elgin's acts as cultural vandalism. Lord Byron slammed the marbles' removal in his bestselling epic poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. The call for their return has grown since Greece won its independence from Ottoman rule in 1829, led by the Greek government in particular since the 1980s. In the noisy debate over the restitution of ancient artworks to their original locale, no case is more controversial or inflamed than the question of the Parthenon marbles: should the British finally send them back?
Rescued From the Nazis
Michael Levitin 5/30/2009 12:00:00 AM
When the 20-year-old Felix Mendelssohn conducted Bach's Saint Matthew Passion in Berlin in 1829, it caused a national sensation. In those days, when a composer died his contemporaries stopped playing him and his music died as well. But Mendelssohn, a brilliant composer, pianist and conductor who felt indebted to Bach, broke with tradition and performed the work for an audience that included the philosopher Hegel, the King of Prussia and the poet Heinrich Heine. It was the first time the piece had been played since Bach's death in 1750, and it ignited an era of rediscovery that turned the baroque composer back into a household name. Without Mendelssohn, the Nazis might never have embraced Bach a century later as an exemplary Aryan composer, calling him "the most German of all Germans." But in a cruel twist of history, Mendelssohn's role in rescuing Bach didn't stop the Third Reich from banning his works and destroying his legacy because he was a Jew.
Wall Street’s New Game
Michael Hirsh 5/15/2009 12:00:00 AM
If he were alive today, the great economist Mancur Olson would recognize today's financial conundrum. A crisis this fundamental calls for a complete rethinking of how Wall Street and other financial centers are regulated. But that's not happening, nor is it likely to happen. Even the dramatic regulatory scheme for derivatives laid out this week by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner—a vast improvement on what he initially proposed in March-doesn't get at one of the central problems: "regulatory arbitrage." Faced with a plethora of different agencies, many of them weak, Wall Street's giant firms do business in the shadowy cracks between the regulators. The classic example is AIG, ostensibly an insurance company. Because AIG bought a small savings and loan at one point, the giant parent company managed to place itself under the supervision of the tiny Office of Thrift Supervision-the financial equivalent of a gnat watching over an elephant. The result was that AIG's London finance unit went virtually unmonitored and wreaked disaster by selling credit default swaps worldwide. Countrywide Mortgage, one of the biggest peddlers of bad loans, used a similar strategy by also designating itself a thrift.
BOOKS
Ahead Of Time
Andrew Nagorski 5/2/2009 12:00:00 AM
Maybe it had something to do with the difficulty of spelling Thaddeus Kosciuszko's name: after all, George Washington wrote it 11 different ways in dispatches and letters before he finally got it right. Maybe it had to do with the more glamorous reputation of the Marquis de Lafayette, another European who joined the American revolutionary cause. Or with the fact that another Pole in the Continental Army, Casimir Pulaski, perished glamorously in battle. Whatever the reason, Kosciuszko has long failed to get the recognition he deserves.
SPECIAL REPORT: TRAVEL
Visiting the Second City
Cathleen McGuigan 5/2/2009 12:00:00 AM
Sicily is a magnet for tourists, with its ruggedly spectacular coastline and ancient Greek and Roman ruins. But many travelers steer clear of Palermo, the island's capital and mafia stronghold. Yet it's a far less expensive destination than Rome. Palermo is one of the world's great "second" cities—like Manchester, England, or Buffalo, New York—that's maybe a little grittier than the better-known cultural capital that overshadows it, but full of its own historic riches. Palermo's civilization reaches at least to the Phoenicians, who settled during the first millennium B.C. From there, the city's timeline looks like a fever chart of invaders, colonists and conquerors. Of its multitude of significant old churches, two overlooking the city's Piazza Bellini perfectly embody the cultural collisions: the starkly beautiful San Cataldo, from the 12th-century Norman conquest, is topped by three small red domes, a reminder of the enduring Arab influence; right next to it, an architectural hodgepodge known as La Martorana contains stunning 12th-century Byzantine gold mosaics as well as Baroque frescoes and froufrou from five centuries later.