the voice that launched a thousand ‘whys?’

Helen Thomas was in Ann Arbor this evening for a brief reading. (One man at the post-reading Q & A reported that he’d seen her at a restaurant earlier in the day, the exact location lost under Thomas’s quizzical gaze and his growing embarrassment. “Maybe it was someone else,” he mumbled, although with a profile as distinct as Thomas’s, this is hard to imagine.) Southeast Michigan, going through a bit of a Nazareth complex these days, is happy to claim her—the daughter of Lebanese immigrants, she was raised in Detroit, and proof that, although the Detroit Free Press no longer lands on stoops seven days a week, and the Ann Arbor newspaper does not come at all, yes, good journalists can come out of the Motor City.

Thomas, born shortly after the conclusion of the War to End All Wars, began reporting from the White House on Kennedy’s first day in office, and, not coincidentally, on each and every war that followed. Of today’s, she unequivocally condones withdrawal. “George W. Bush wanted to be a war president,” she said, pausing for a very trenchant silence. “And he was.” As for President Obama, she wishes him to have more courage—an improvement we might wish upon all our psyches, although certainly one most critical in a man about to send 36,000 more troops into a land war in Asia.

Curiosity may be independent of courage, but an alliance of the two makes a word like “why?” even more lethal, which, one suspects, is why Thomas is so partial to that particular combination of letters. “I stay awake at night, thinking ‘how can I get them?’” she said, with that joyful slyness typical of those who identify themselves as “cynics with hope.”

Being an Ann Arbor crowd, one notes the weight behind each round of applause: hands moved eagerly in support of universal health care and Jimmy Carter’s legacy (things certainly worthy of approval). There was an inclination, however, to heartily applaud things not quite true, such as observations that “real cause of our financial catastrophe is Republicans”—the clapping sounding more cathartic than analytical, and thus, one imagines, uncannily similar to applause heard on the other side of the state, just last week, during the launch of Sarah Palin’s book tour. (Are there perhaps different book tour packages, those that zig left to Ann Arbor and San Francisco and Seattle, and those that zag right to Grand Rapids and Dallas and Orlando?)

In honor of book readings everywhere, then, we might recite Tennyson’s words, as Thomas did, in warning and with woe, for her audience tonight:

Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die...