The trouble with Microsoft's public relations, to paraphrase Willi Schlamm, is Microsoft's public relations. Mercury News reporter Dean Takahashi recently interviewed Todd Holmdahl of the regnant software company's Gaming and Xbox Products Group, and the transcript thereof is an exchange with a man from whom you would not extract a single crucial datum short of using a bright light and rubber hose.

Last July, I was so impressed by the performance of a friend's Xbox 360 that I purchased one of Microsoft's latest gaming console a few weeks later, in August, a year before planned. Am I satisfied with the product? Yes. The few games selected over the last ten months have maintained my interest, and relaxing evenings denote money well spent. Signally, the 360's user interface, called the "Dashboard," keeps me in close rapport with a few dozen acquaintances across the country, a number of us playing together or chatting or sending messages back and forth, as if each one were carrying on his hobby in a different room but not so engrossed that he couldn't occasionally walk across the hall.

Owners of the 360, however, likely know a peer whose console suffered hardware failure serious enough to bundle the unit into a package bound for factory repair or replacement by Microsoft. Maybe more than once. I am such a peer myself. What broke, I can't say — but on a Friday in April, my Xbox flashed and signaled terminally, and after guiding me through two attempts at revival, a support operator pronounced the ivory box faithfully departed.

Now — how was my repair? Smooth. The unit was quickly swapped at no charge, and when I made a phone call a few days before the replacement arrived, an East Indian woman genially provided me a tracking number that I had thoughtlessly misplaced.

What is out of order here, in the market, is that however happy a tale like mine, variations of it are being told pretty often. An informal, mid-May poll of 71 colleagues revealed that two-thirds of us, nearly 50, had their Xbox 360 go dead. Which of those ran into similar problems with the first-run Xbox? Not nearly as many. How many found his laptop, tablet or cell phone summarily become unusable? A rarity. Superstition was a point of humor, as those whose consoles were still working asseverated cautiously, as if wary of a divine ironist. It was accepted, though — grudgingly — that a unit would fail eventually. And, too, if so, not painlessly. My substitution cost nothing because my warranty has not expired; were something to happen two months from now, I would pay $135.

"There is a lot of anecdotal evidence that the quality of the Xbox 360 isn't there," said Takahashi, referring to the many experiences that telecommunications made confluent. "How can you paint the bigger picture for me there?"

Holmdahl either had not stepped outside of his office for two years, or prevaricated. "We're very proud of the box. We think the vast majority of people are having just a great experience. You look at the number of games they are buying," Numbers, could he give numbers for return rates? "We don't comment on that."

Takahashi: "If you have a high defect rate, won't that ruin the business model?" Holmdahl: "The vast majority of people are really excited about their product." Takahashi signed off with "We'll see if the real answers shake loose from other sources," which is the politic way to accuse someone of being politic.

A rumor holds that Microsoft fixed one of the problems Holmdahl wouldn't tell Takahashi about, and consoles so patched will be sent out when a malfunctioning one comes in. There is also a successor model, the Xbox 360 Elite, on sale, which has better electronic specifications. But not everybody will want to buy or trade for the machine they think they should have received in the first. Here is some advice: product support can be treated as a loss leader, with repairs of the 360, which appear to be serial, priced at only $30. Or less. The peculiar estrangement between Microsoft and its regular customers may not be reconciled, but the company's baffling ways can be read in the public less as What are they trying to hide? than What's the catch?

If the general election in a president's fourth year is when executive party members conciliate so as to defend their high office, the election following two White House terms is an opportunity for factions to debate and persuade, and assume primacy. For November after next, the first race with a retiring vice president in eighty-eight years, both charter and ballot are fairly wide open.

On the right, there is time to pick and choose. National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru wrote a pair of critical pieces this month, limning competing interests on the right — the first, somebody else's and the second, Ponnuru's own.

Two weeks ago it was Porkbusters, a spry, independent populist group, in whose work Ponnuru saw "dangerous consequences." Some Republicans in Congress — and at least indirectly, President Bush — used the public's rising disapproval of spending earmarks to good political effect, defeating the Democratic party over jurisdiction of the Iraqi campaign by portraying a materiel bill as one foundered with largesse.

Porkbusters advocates, and has inspired, fiscal moderation in Congress on the assumption that if legislators win seats by sending federal monies to their districts and states, access to funds will become a privilege and then a commodity — and then an emolument. For many, especially those angrily picturing spinach farms on a military payroll, to say "Congress" and then "corruption" is to tautologize.

But to veto an authorization, Ponnuru wrote, demonstrated that "fighting pork was more important than fighting the war." More to the point: so what? "If the money isn't earmarked, the agency is free to spend it as it sees fit," and besides, the funds in question don't exceed two pennies out of a Washington dollar.

Ponnuru was off in places: the GOP's denunciation of the bill was shrewd politics, full stop. Redirecting money on grounds that it will be spent anyway is, elsewhere, called embezzlement; and the correlation is just a rhetorical twitch away. In Washington, it can be argued as to which congressional shenanigans bring about which. Otherwise, Ponnuru was right. There are more thorough — if laborious — methods to reduce federal excess. Bearing "hostility to earmarks" is mistaking a gambit for a platform.

Today Ponnuru offered a grave estimate of Rudy Giuliani's commitment to Ponnuru's cardinal issue of abortion. Suppose, he wrote, a Supreme Court shaped by Giuliani buried the constitutional right to abortion that a prior court unearthed. If a "Democratic Congress sent Giuliani legislation to codify Roe — and thus to take back that freedom from the states — would he really veto it?" If not, "pro-lifers would have gained almost nothing." Not that day, no, but if the court ruling were to be sustained as long as the previous one, Republicans, if still in the minority, would have several chances to reclaim the legislature. And all this lacks the comparative implication of what exactly the anti-abortion constituency has gained over the last seven years.

Where conjecture begins to tip over Ponnuru's argument is on the war. "Toughness and competence are not a policy; and it is not obvious that Giuliani is more competent, or tougher, than his principal rivals." OK, but the policies of Giuliani or one of his rivals couldn't be judged until January, 2009 — so character, public statements and records of leadership must suffice. Does Giuliani excel? Judgment reserved, Giuliani is still among the strongest Republican executives. Ponnuru won't reject the man outright, but he looks ahead to a successor and thinks, "Win or lose, then, Giuliani could damage the brand." Well, that is more of a concern for peacetime. You need to have a brand left to weaken it. How does one explain subordinating national security right now?

Prolongation invites complacency, a little. Eighteen months before Election Day and counting — former senator Fred Thompson half-bid for president just today, as popular as he appears distant from Washington. A Democratic Senate is near to passing an immigration bill, over which Republicans are reportedly blaming the president and his party. Ramesh Ponnuru, exacting, is pretty reasonable, but the broader right may start looking as unmanageable as a clowder soon, and no one should welcome that.

Just as April gave way, Rudy Giuliani discovered how to flummox leading Democrats: confidently engage the opposition party.

Giuliani described, in parallel, a Democratic administration's repudiation of policies to which he himself subscribes, and the reasons for that support. "We will wave the white flag on Iraq. We will cut back on the Patriot Act, electronic surveillance, interrogation and we will be back to our pre-September-11th attitude of defense." No concession can mollify, Giuliani warned, men who "hate us and not because of anything bad we have done," except for an inherent "conflict with the perverted, maniacal interpretation of their religion." On this, transgressions include, verifiable through a quick read of Islamo-fascist doctrine, "freedom for women, the freedom of elections, freedom of religion and the freedom of our economy."

What the former mayor said on April 24th was potent stuff alone. How one of Giuliani's leftist counterparts responded, though, was revealing. Barack Obama refused to rebut, as if the statement were an insult. He answered by beginning with a rebuke of Giuliani for imputing risk to a Democrat's presidency, and ending by imputing risk to George Bush's presidency. Later that week, party presidential candidates at a televised debate, queried on a martial posture in retaliation to twin terrorist massacres, either sidestepped the use of their obligatory war-making powers or admitted their reluctance thereto — well, all except Joe Biden, who is, anymore, as vestigial as Joe Lieberman.

The perfect shade Democrats want is not too tough, but tough; sort of tough enough. Implicit in the Democrats' fussing is the knowledge of what mettle the American electoral mean still demands of its executives, and why George McGovern, Michael Dukakis and John Kerry were runners-up.

But over here, William F. Buckley, Jr. argued that it is the Republican Party that has grown foreign to the habitat, all because it will not renounce the most challenging campaign of the war. "It can now accurately be said," wrote Buckley, two weeks ago, "that the legislature, which writes the people's laws, opposes the war," as far as polls on Iraq today are advocative inversions of those in 2003. He traced a path from 60-percent disapproval of the campaign to ruin, concluding that "There are grounds for wondering whether the Republican party will survive this dilemma."

Buckley speaks of a conundrum over the separation of powers, but uncovers another problem. If in political discourse something as distinct as a military retreat can be effectively paraphrased, and interpolated as honorable; and the evident democratism of a country's lucid majority willfully abandoned; then it is possible to pass by the axiom that men well outside of desperate circumstances do not volunteer for their assured doom or defeat. And chances actually prescribe someone who is optimistic about Iraq to be either an Iraqi or an American soldier standing beside him.

We can submit that when the public appears to want an escape, Congress is tractable. But what about that 60 percent? If Congress consents to giving up, it chooses what is pretend (morbid impressions of the public) over what is empirical (a slow-moving war of patent but understated importance, to which those fighting it hold fast). Decisions of war will no longer be made from indications of the theater itself, and Washington will be pulled into a disentitling state of luxation.

The last president to craft policy from within an imaginary plane was President Carter, who was distrusted long before the end of his term. Reality will extrude quickly and explosively if fronts are surrendered; there aren't any more halcyon days to be got on loan. Undesirable is more desirable than unworkable. A few Democrats will instinctively remember this, even through all of their dulling; just a few. Giuliani and Buckley are both right, then. The Republican Party probably is frangible: the isolationists will break off, maybe join with Democrats, yet either way lose.

In February I let my subscription to National Geographic expire on account of the magazine's deepening politicization, but by the beginning of last month a reasonable article published by the Society had changed my mind. "If National Geographic indeed still values factually responsible, and perhaps less sensational, reporting," I wrote, "that is worth thirty-four dollars annually."

Indeed, perhaps — but unfortunately not.

Due to the lapse in my membership, two belated issues arrived in one shipment, and each cover was another page in the brief for National Geographic v. Western Civilization. For the month of March, a somber article on elephant poaching and the vain efforts of African rangers to protect herds failed to offer the most likely explanation for a struggling preserve: the land is run by the government of Chad, a corrupt authoritarian state with the memorable per capita income of about a hundred dollars. Readers were encouraged to donate to support Chad's — elephants. The magazine noted that some ivory is legally marketed around the world and can be bought, for example, in the United States, see incriminating picture at bottom-left.

When I saw April's cover, a swordfish lolling upside down in a fishnet, I decided to wait for May.

May's issue came yesterday. I opened the package in the elevator. The first words out of my mouth were "You have got to be kidding me." The cover? "Jamestown: the Real Story." Next to a colonial painting of a bemused, painted Indian was a summary of National Geographic's exposé: "How settlers destroyed a native empire and changed the landscape from the ground up."

How the magazine could imagine that a majority of its audience hadn't been brought up on the selective derogation of European colonization, one can't say. The narrative's implication was simple: American Indians blithely dominated one another in a sylvan paradise, and would have until the end of time, too, had the Virginia Company not come from England.

National Geographic began with a misnomer, identifying the natives of Virginia as part of an "empire." Yes, a few dozen tribes on the coast were subservient to a chief named Wahunsunacock — also known to us, mercifully, as Chief Powhatan. But an empire is, if you don't intend to flout the English language, qualified by expansive territory or multifarious subjects. Powhatan's domain encircled Chesapeake Bay, and the tribes were all of a people known as Algonquians. The first human empire, the Akkadian Empire, was several times that size and incorporated several languages and cultures.

There aren't many defensible reasons to accept whatever happens to be the largest historical concentration of power as an empire. Doing so, however, addresses shortcomings of the local population that may contradict an argument. Such as: why were Powhatan's habitations so pastoral? National Geographic very nearly suggested it was by choice, even explaining a lack of domesticated animals as a lack of domesticable animals. Without question? North American Indians were barely within reach of the copper age — scarcity of suitable mammals or not, they may have arrived at husbandry on schedule, if ten thousand years too late. The word here, not used prominently in the article, is "primitive."

Why weren't the Iroquois, Powhatan's adversaries and those eventually responsible for the destruction of the Erie, mentioned once? At what point did the brute contests of men become morally exclusive, what with the history of the world a litany of encroachments, invasions and alterations? And on and on.

I chose to start a collection of the gilt-framed periodical four years ago because I read every National Geographic I came across in the couple of decades before then. Mummies, dinosaurs, astronomy: reports were completed to the best knowledge of their authors, not inaccurate so much as incomplete, and always fascinating. If I wanted to have to pause at the end of every third sentence, shake my head and think No, that isn't right, I would wait until the editors of The New Republic went on a safari and then buy the expositive issue. Yes, my response to all this I find invigorating, but there is a library nearby.

So yesterday, I canceled my subscription forthwith. This morning, I received a message from the Society assuring the return of my balance. An hour later, another message came from National Geographic something-or-other. In fact it was from an intern working with National Geographic Traveler, and she was verifying a story written about a bike tour in Italy through which the author met my cousin and his bride. I forwarded the inquiry along to my cousin, who soon called the girl. In the meantime, there was an error that needed correction — my cousin was thought to share my last name, when he is my father's sister's son — and a few facts clarified. I was pleased to give both. The intern thanked me and rewarded me with, of all things, a copy of the Traveler issue that carries the article.

So I have twenty-five dollars more to spend, and — resting in my mailbox, ready to be taken and read during some future lunch hour, shall be the National Geographic Society publication that I really wanted.

Fault him for being wrong, if you like: you can't call John McCain inconstant. Fair weather passed Baghdad and with it left a number of onetime meliorists, many of them covering their escape with essays on how they, personally, would have performed as commander-in-chief. The Arizona senator? Not a month after William F. Buckley, Jr. admonished him, in the form of a syndicated column, to disavow, McCain avowed, and became the second most powerful man in Washington to irrevocably endorse the Iraqi campaign. He scheduled an announcement speech to earn the most headlines; he even called the military operation "necessary and just."

With the political melee several months from now and Republican presidential primaries even further away, one can still pause and consider President, or Secretary, McCain. As a senator John McCain has adopted and opposed various resolutions during hostilities, often crosswise the Bush administration. His positions taken in turn would win and then lose him certain votes, and will if his name is on ballots in 2008. But on Wednesday McCain spoke elementarily, he spoke of Iraq — which he would say was a single subject.

"The war on terror, the war for the future of the Middle East, and the struggle for the soul of Islam — of which the war in Iraq constitutes a key element — are bound together," was McCain's thesis. "We must," the senator continued, "gain the active support of modernizers across the Muslim world, who want to share in the benefits of the global system and its economic success, and who aspire to the political freedom that is, I truly believe, the natural desire of the human heart."

We know, or can be reminded, that the second clause is multiply attributed to George W. Bush, the man to whom few apparently listen or invest confidence. John McCain would then have found, in underwriting the president's message, only the president's delivery lacking.

This point only needs placement. I observed then — and maintain still now — that the president was neither fatigued nor unprepared for the first debate in the fall of 2004 with John Kerry, but instead stunned and then exasperated by, then unresponsive to, the substance of the opposition party's dispute. Why had the senator narrowed the war to Osama bin Laden when thousands of terrorists were contracting with al Qaeda independently, far from Afghanistan? How could anyone submit foreign affairs to an inimical committee of nations? President Bush decided not to reconcile the evidence of his last three years in office with nonsense, and repeated his argument until time was called.

The world is at present beheld by war opponents as a series of crude divorces. Lines of reason are interrupted by subjective hops across an intellectual archipelago. Iraq? Distinct, extraneous. How to answer why there is an anxious and especial presence of the enemy in-country? Insist that antagonists are popular, or funds of miscarriage, and homesick for "the real war" in Afghanistan. Failing the aforementioned? Avoid the Iraqi capital, ostracize its elected government and try to expedite the termination of its new alliance with Washington. The broader war, its name, its meaning? That's easy: have Congress elide it.

George Bush has served the United States as an earthy man leavened by simple adages and a diligence suppressing any desire to explain the obvious. His office was prodigious during the eighteen months after September 11th, when no one could afford to collude. Without fluent address, the president has seemed to respond to opponents with rote or outraged silence. However absurd the other side gets, and it is getting wildly this way, Bush doesn't pierce and pull down their contentions — restraint that might be mistaken for assent.

The White House was spared John Kerry's supercilious indecision when the president was re-elected. Four years of traducement are borne well by George Bush's clarity of purpose and plain manner. Did the burden need to amount to what it does, now, in its entirety? Through a lingering presidency are those terrible months to find liability in every gift, to consign the incumbent as a man who lost sight of what he alone started. George Bush leaves either way. His replacement should look to surpass him where he was unable, however scrupulously he is followed. Of the candidates — that could be the senator who, making a speech the president should have, voiced an echo, in word and sincerity: "The judgment of history should be the approval we seek."

For the many who are disconsolate after learning that Elizabeth Edwards' cancer is recrudescent, worry not — husband John assures that he shall continue to run for president.

Elizabeth Edwards' affliction is common enough; each of us can match a friend or colleague lost to cancer with a finger and thumb, even begin to count twice over. The decision reached by the couple — agreeing only to succumb to the disease involuntarily — was and is the same of two others from the clerisy, Cathy Seipp and Tony Snow, the former having recently passed on.

The difference between Edwards and others is in what she and the former senator each said in an interview at the start of the week with television host Katie Couric. Life on paper, secondhand, has an impression of sameness. Unless told more, when we hear that Mr. Smith goes to the store and Mr. Jones goes to the store, both men are assumed to act in parallel; when instead Mr. Smith could be the patron who walked a block and Mr. Jones, the larcenist arriving by bus. John and Elizabeth Edwards chose to explain, even defend the instance of a life ending on a campaign trail, and in self-confession one has either timeless éclat or an unrecoverable giveaway.

The response to Couric's seventh prompt elicited materialism: time is short, so, in John's words, "We have to live today the best way we know how." And that would be "what we're spending our lives doing," or politics. Prodded by Couric on the question of opportunism, John Edwards was at first open about the cold assessments of polling tragedy in Washington. "There's not a single person in America that should vote for me because Elizabeth has cancer," he said. But then his words were clever, and the frankness dissolved into preterition. "I think it is a fair evaluation for America to engage in to look at what kind of human beings each of us are, and what kind of president we'd make." His only prior object of "evaluation" had been himself.

Couric asked about the couple's children several times. The children are in early grade school, but then so are those of Tony Snow's, and Snow has not elected to leave his White House position. Yet in her persistence, in simply her need to persist, Couric contrasted Snow and Edwards. The youths' acquaintance with mortality — we are all going to die, Elizabeth repeated — was not, as the parents went on, about the precious time to be shared with their mother, but rather the hardening stricture on their mother's time, time which was already committed to Mother's own interests.

"I've often said," stated Elizabeth, "that the most important thing you can give your children (is) wings." And then — "they're gonna have to be able to fly by themselves."

Couric had already injected her opinion on spending final days with work over family. She answered in metaphor. "They're still baby birds."

Said John, "But they've got to start learning to fly. And they're not ready to fly on their own yet, but they've got to start learning."

Evidently, the Edwardses were getting at a relevant aphorism, avian variety. The English language has a lot. Early birds get worms, debutants spread their wings, old hens grieve over empty nests, so — why, yes, the Edwards' children must take flight because their mother may soon never return. One of the very few examples in undisturbed nature, however, wherein a baby bird must learn to fly before due time is when the chick has about two critical seconds aloft, from the moment a cuckoo stepsister pushes it out of the tree to the moment it hits the ground and dies.

Neither Edwards can reasonably be thought of as willing to jettison his or her children. But while taking refuge in an idiom the pair let the onlooker see a political intercalation in the nursery, a confrontation between offspring and career, consequences thereof, and easily retracted causes for the whole of it.

Prayers to the Almighty are best made not with demands but deference to providential will. Even so, there will be at least one request for the long life of Elizabeth and the swift death of Edwards 2008.

Shinzo Abe, the umpteenth Japanese prime minister to have demanded of him the umpteenth apology for the umpteenth time, was asked at the beginning of the month, by a member of Tokyo's opposition party, if he would entertain grievance number umpteen plus one.

Back in January, an American congressman with the last name of Honda submitted a bill to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Language held the Japanese government in contempt of the duty to "formally acknowledge, apologize, and accept historical responsibility in a clear and unequivocal manner for its Imperial Armed Force's coercion of young women into sexual slavery."

This was about "comfort women," thousands of young foreigners who served as prostitutes for imperial soldiers. Mr. Abe made a cogent statement, insofar as Japanese executives have many times expressed regret for gross wrongdoing of their country's former government and its agents three-fifths of a century before. But the prime minister also said something untrue, which was that reports of impressment were apocryphal. "It wasn't like the government and the army took these women away like kidnapping," Abe protested, and oh, there must have been a lot of hands slapping foreheads.

The flesh stockade is so intrinsic to civilization, past and present, that if there weren't sufficient evidence of militarist Japan's manifold slave labors one could make a justified assumption about the compulsory terms of garrison brothels. Tokyo's obscurantist edition of the historical record, which has continued through three generations and reaches deeply in some places, understandably frustrates. Yet the furor it causes also distracts from a matter of selectivity and unction on the part of claimants, critics and the wailing chorus led by Seoul and Beijing.

Manifest are the atrocities committed, being committed this very hour, in China by a line of totalitarian regimes established nearly sixty years ago. What was it Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing admitted to the world ten days ago? "Japan should face up to history, take the responsibility, and seriously view and properly handle the issue." The reprimand must have diverted Li Zhaoxing from his ministerial priority of informing the democratic nation of Taiwan that formal declarations of independence would be ignored, possibly refuted by force.

The free South Koreans could, if they bothered, list a great number of inhumanities suffered at the hands of authoritarian governments before the last dictatorship fell in 1987; and if they looked to the north, they could trace the horrid police state above the 38th Parallel to the second of two Allied powers bifurcating the peninsula, the Soviet Union. When shall the Kremlin apologize for Stalin's having primed and outfitted Kim Il Sung? Well, who's even inquired? It may irk, that the Japanese people can be reluctant to acknowledge their own modern history, but it shouldn't puzzle.

There is more to Japan's trials than acknowledgment — there is a matter of inheritance. Japan has been rather imaginatively personified, which is necessary for all indefinite condemnations, one such from a Korean speaking for a group that seeks redress for the plight of comfort women. How a Liberal Democratic Party boss recently minimized fact — "We need to research the issue further" — was reproachable. But the response from the Korean? "Another attempt by the Japanese government to distort the past and hide their crimes."

There it is, Japan as a living being, forswearing an oath. Did the many islands rise up and subordinate their neighbors? No? What happened to the government responsible for the terrible, Pacific empire? It was annulled and replaced by way of constitution a year later, during the supersession of the culture around it. Japan, as a nation, continued, altered. And the bereaved, or the plain angry, or the opportunistic, have only an increasing number of Japanese to consent to be in one or another way answerable for what they didn't actually do. Heredity, then, is all that incriminates; but politically it is enough. The apology from Shinzo Abe, or from one of the prime ministers following, won't be the last.

Yesterday was an office holiday, and I had scheduled for the afternoon a car wash for the PT Cruiser I have been leasing since 2003 — which was inspected this morning and returned to the dealer three hours ago. The trip should only have taken half an hour, but I returned ninety minutes later and, too, having made an unforeseen expenditure.

I paid for full service, a thorough vacuuming and scrubbing of the car's interior and an unpiloted trip through an automated car wash. Within fifteen minutes of paying I could, from a hallway inside the establishment, see my Cruiser rolling slowly forward through a soapy mist, then rotating brushes, then a series of rinsing hoses and blow-driers. One crewman drove my vehicle from the end of the conveyor outside, right up to the driveway onto the main road, where he was joined by three others with gloves and rags to finish the cleaning.

After about a minute, he motioned to me. "Sir?" I prepared my receipt — one of three — and was mid-sentence in inquiring which one to return when he said, "You have a flat tire." The interjection leaving my mouth had something to do with scatological apotheosis, as there was my right-rear tire, deflated. I have only driven on a flat tire once but, somewhat like, I suppose, childbirth, once is enough for a distinct memory. During the drive to the car wash, the car had not handled as if it were on three wheels. I told the crewman this.

Could someone fetch a pump? I asked. The crewman answered yes, and went one further without my noticing by quietly informing his manager, who in turn paged the owner. Word came back that the owner would be out in a moment, and his employees were to change the tire for me. Did I have a spare? Of course; and thank you, Lord. I have changed a flat once but again, once is quite enough — however, there isn't anything to be gained by refusing help from men who by their very work are going to be more deft than you.

The owner arrived just as the spare began to drop from the underside of the Cruiser's hatchback. No explanation necessary for the neat, burly man: We'll change it for you. The owner himself squatted and began unscrewing lug nuts. Three of them came off as he regarded the tire, frowning. He turned to the crewman fitting an industrial jack beneath the car: Let's give the pump a try before we go through all of this trouble. The fellow with the jack and the owner wedded a hose to tire and air compressor: ten seconds, nothing; twenty seconds, nothing. At thirty, the crewman slapped the tire twice and gave his boss the kind of look that compels one to do what the owner did next, which was to nod, "Let's change the tire."

As the spare was fixed on the wheel, the owner bent forward, held the flat tire between his hands and rolled it slowly, examining the tread. Could he see any ruptures? I asked. He shook his head, continued to roll and look down. "It's the valve stem," he said, finally, straightening himself. "Shouldn't cost you more than a couple bucks." He pointed immediately eastward. "Take this next door to Dean. He'll get you all fixed up."

The spare was on, the tools pulled away. I removed my glove and thanked the owner. He smiled slightly and deferred to the crewman who had, as he said, completed "most of the work." I duly thanked the other, and made the quick left into an old gas station and garage to seek out Dean.

Dean works at Joe's, and if I am not mistaken, owns Joe's. Did Joe leave? Is Joe a Betty Crocker or Remington Steele? I didn't ask, but stuck to script: Next door, car wash, flat, valve stem. Dean was genial — disarming, uncharacteristically so for those of us who believe we know, through one or two mechanics, all mechanics. He took the keys and, steering the Cruiser into his shop, began working.

The administrative assistant, in her forties, kindly and pretty, made several efforts at small talk before finally engaging me biographically. I don't care to be a bore, and strictly answer questions when chatted up by strangers; but she succeeded in nurturing a conversation that lasted twenty, twenty-five minutes, or however long it took Dean to finish. Dean walked into the office. The assistant and Dean were caught in an odd conflict of interest — Dean's confidence in his performance led him to simply tell me that my car was done, then the assistant asked me to clarify a statement I had made about writing a second before Dean came in, and then I decided to stick to business first and asked Dean what he had done to mend the tires.

Then I answered the question. Dean overheard. Policy and politics, really? I qualified that by remarking that politics is inevitably polemic, though there ought be some intellectual etiquette. No yellow journalism, then, chuckled Dean. Well — I was fair to Nancy Pelosi with my little facetious parody last week, wasn't I? — OK, not too much. From there the conversation was between me and Dean, as in fact this mechanic spent a lot of time thinking about the country, and matters of national importance, and the way in which a mechanic might properly inform himself.

What to do with the news networks? Dean asked, grinning. He didn't want to hear about the erstwhile Playboy model, now an erstwhile lady, more than once — certainly not "every five minutes." Stay away from cable during the day, I replied. Ah but, he said, even at night, it can be a lot of useless broadcasting. Right — that is why, I announced, I find my news on the internet. Can it be trusted? The potential for disinformation is greater, I observed, but if one knows its sources, primary sources, then Yes. It used to be, Dean said — accurately — that the internet was overwhelmed with nonsense. I agreed, but online communities have come to ensure honesty, or at least disclosure of one's sympathies.

Ten minutes passed as Dean and I talked. Term limits, federal spending, congressional earmarks — on that last one, I said, the telecommunication networks had scored largely, at least compared to what they could manage before. A group of internet doyens, bloggers, under the name Porkbusters, made something of civil agitation by exhorting House and Senate majorities to restrain their conditioned tendencies to shunt one district's money to another district with not as much, like, say, the ones that elected each of them. I have said, and hold, that Porkbusters can't change Washington like term limits will, but the effort was an accomplishment like none before.

Dean, from what and how he spoke, would be center-right; and maybe the rest of his staff, and maybe those at the car wash, too. There was among them no evident animosity for the country, or the government, and if so the only distrust of the state a naturally American one — accepting that from politics some sentiments, and sediments, are inextricable. Where are they learning what they know or think they know? What about the capital, or the war?

Given some news coverage today, a little the day before and probably tomorrow, is a group like Porkbusters — called the Victory Caucus. The Caucus is devised to "Deliver the perspectives and news on the war effort which the mainstream media neglects to help the American public understand the nature of our conflict and its true progress," and "Provide tools and infrastructure to help citizens who are committed to victory organize into a recognized and influential caucus." It is run mostly by those on the right, but I could tell you that without looking, having deduced on my own that the only rational conversations — for or against the war — are being held on the right.

The Caucus is an attempt to popularly puncture, or tap, or otherwise influence a circuit between corrupt journalism and a political establishment that has come to believe that all knowledge is drawn from said journalism, all reality a projection thereof. Polls here and there still contend that the American spirit isn't pacifist or defeatist but vexed about the fronts; however, vexed because the public is interested in winning wars. How about a channel between the soldiers and allies facing the enemy — and the man, or the mechanic, who would act in one way were he to know other than what he has, through an honorable benefit of the doubt, resigned himself to accept?

When I said "Porkbusters," Dean laughed out loud because he liked the name. From what he told me, I will presume he liked the big idea, too. The tire service and the insight were well worth twenty-one fifty.

The junior senator from Illinois will run for President of the United States. Before and after Barack Obama declared, intimations were made in news and opinion columns that character's content would be less germane to a candidacy than that of melanin. Elevating skin color to the "primary determinant of human traits and capacities" is ex vi termini racism, and the ease, or even imperative, with which it has been done, even by the senator himself, baffles.

Two years ago, Paula Zahn told Obama that she was "fascinated" by his choice of "black" as a qualification of nationality. Obama replied that he was proud of his heritage. His favorite anecdote, though, was rather about the reduction of the person on a city sidewalk. "[T]he cab driver doesn't go by and say, 'Hey, there's a mixed-race guy.' They [sic] say, 'There's a black guy.'"

How to parse this? Is he a member of a congenital ordination, or a victim, or a martyr? Obama continued and told Zahn that he has learned Negro spirituals and goes to church. Did he need to be black to do this? Barack Obama, some of the people who write or talk about him, and some taxi drivers define Barack Obama firstly, or mostly, as black. Others believe appearance and imputations thereof to be the least significant matters about the senator, and I am one of them.

Of larger importance is Obama's practiced and often belletristic rhetoric. Elaborate use of the English language is not a feature of modern statesmanship, so this attracts attention. I noticed this ability to elegantly say nothing, or something false, during Obama's address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention. "And John Kerry believes," he orated, on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, "that in a dangerous world, war must be an option, but it should never be the first option." The only two options left are diplomatic exaction, which President Bush endeavored to do for several months; and capitulation, which Obama suggests should have happened four years ago, and espouses now.

But the correctio phrase promises a fourth way, and whatever that might be is footnoted, so Obama can go on to the figuration. When he maintained that "We have real enemies in the world," and that "these enemies must be found," the tacit subject was al Qaeda, yet the statement can be read, comically, as a circumlocution of foreign affairs. "The people I meet," their stories set in anaphoric pathos from the same speech, "don't expect government to solve all their problems." Except — what? "[W]ith just a slight change in priorities, we can make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life."

While the ideas to which Obama subscribes aren't pronounced, they are more relevant to a voter's decision. One commentator placed the senator relatively, "in the Democratic center" — which would be, absolutely, far left — and a survey of his presidential platform shows no signal difference from that of John Kerry, or Al Gore; or John Edwards, or Hillary Clinton. For those who see action abroad as American trespass, somehow necessary but ever to be conducted with self-reproach; who like socialized medicine and athletic, even vindictive, regulation of commerce; strange and perfunctory invocations of God; any one of these current or one-time senators will do.

Enthusiasts, of course, will be tempted to select the man who looks and talks propitiously, and then Barack Obama is again valued for minor qualities. When the senator said, at his campaign proclamation, "In the face of war, you believe there can be peace. In the face of despair, you believe there can be hope," what was the listener told, substantively, other than this man's fondness for antithesis?

Andrew Ferguson wrote for the Weekly Standard a review of Obama's authorship, comprising two books: a memoir written before politics and a political manifest written after. The second book Ferguson called "infinitely weaker," unction supplanting the guilelessness of the first one. While it is hard to accept inferiority beyond measure without a book going to print not proofread, or missing pages or words altogether, Ferguson's imprecision on that point was balanced by the reasonable regret that "we have lost a writer and gained another politician. It's not a fair trade."

Obama's declaration for executive office came on Saturday. On Sunday, he rebutted criticism from Australia's prime minister, John Howard. Obama was "wrong," Howard said, to call for retreat, as it would "encourage those who want to completely destabilize and destroy Iraq." It is known that the enemy delighted in the Democratic win and in its own words anticipates, from the new majority, a hurried entreaty.

"I think it's flattering that one of George Bush's allies on the other side of the world started attacking me the day after I announced," said Obama, then in the next sentence disparaged Canberra's military commitment and challenged Howard to undertake what the senator would have the United States renounce. This the day after the senator spoke, using paradox, of salad days in Springfield, when he "learned to disagree without being disagreeable." Color, clever distinction, statecraft? Most obvious about Barack Obama is that he has been made — or has made himself, for exertion in American politics — insufferably prosaic, and no uncommon politician.

We used to have diversions, before science brought us the temporary divestment from reality. The favored term for maintaining a suspension of disbelief in an electronic projection is immersion, though the word denotes plunging in so as to be covered; or becoming engrossed. Last March, video game developer Bethesda Softworks released the fourth title of its Elder Scrolls series, Oblivion, a refinement of techniques in fooling the eye and ear and mind — and confounding one's sense of time — with interactions on a TV or computer screen.

I write hereon assuming that the reader either has some understanding of fantasy themes popularized by J.R.R. Tolkien and others; and their application in modern Western literature, drama and games; as well as video games themselves; or else, if some reasoning of what follows isn't tacit, that unfamiliar meanings or concepts can be sought and clarified elsewhere.

Oblivion is at its simplest a normal fantasy role-playing game. A single player creates an identity, a character, whose actions he will control in an anthological mise-en-scene: part Arthurian legend, part European folk tale, part Greek mythology. Characters can be one of three traditional archetypes (warrior, rogue, magician) and one of several races (four breeds of man, three strains of elf, the loutish orc, or an upright and civilized lizard- or cat-man).

Gameplay follows the adventurer's lot. As hinterlands are traversed, haunted or savage ruins and other subterranea entered and conquered, treasures captured, fellow imperial subjects aided or bested; the strength and abilities, and fame and fortune of a character are increased and enlarged. Quests emerge from the environment — conversations, serendipity — and are either vignettes, with one or two accomplishments required for completion, or are segmented and develop into storylines, one of the latter central to Oblivion's plot. There are scores of challenges found across a large and varied countryside.

Until August of last year, that is all I knew of the game or its predecessors: big, open-ended, and fun. Does Bethesda realize how commonplace Oblivion's features appear to the unacquainted because the magnitude of them is, without having been experienced, incredible?

One can see pastoral photographs from the game, but that doesn't impart the encounter of sixteen square miles of navigable, fecund wilderness — mountains, forests, rivers. Nor is the dynamic simulation of natural light, be it morning or noonday or evening or night, appreciable without being able to, say, crane the neck of one's character and lose the crest of a hill in the sun's glare. Matter and objects are rendered so to be convincing on a fine, inch-for-inch scale. Exploring one of Oblivion's ancient temples, fortresses, caverns and mines takes between fifteen and forty-five minutes; and there are over 200 total sites.

Some of the enormity is by implication, though grand in itself. So while Oblivion's capital city is populated by only ten score inhabitants, each citizen has a name, a face, an occupation and a reasonably distinct temperament. Anthropometry must fascinate somebody at Bethesda — players can manipulate their character's facial dimensions before starting out, results weighted by race, dimorphism and one's aesthetic judgment. I spent nearly an hour sculpting the face of my own character, an alabaster, high-cheekboned little enchantress. And that was the primary stage of customization.

Oblivion was promoted and welcomed as a game in which one was lost for hours, each next step of an adventure reported as having a strong dilatory effect on one's sense of closure. I resisted this by playing regularly, for just a few hours at a time. Six months later, if only once or twice a week, I make time for a short session. Most quests have been fulfilled, but there are several dozen forbidden places still undisturbed.

An excellent game, of course, isn't a perfect game. Functionally, Oblivion is very stable. The bugs which persist are not numerous, and they are minor; and some of them are comedic. As a game approaches a tangible and complex constructed reality, however — never reaching verisimilitude, surely not this year — shortcomings and oversights seem more noticeable than in a game borne of less ambition. Oblivion does this and this and this, yes; but what about this? One remedy is administered through the version available on the personal computer. Altering or inserting code, with Bethesda's encouragement, players make available modifications, or "mods," which often add game content, but may also adjust the calculus of Oblivion to match a preference or reflect an opinion.

Myself, I am limited to the original game and whatever Bethesda reserves for owners of the Xbox 360 console. Which is not to say I haven't thought about how Oblivion isn't as strong as it might be; I have, but shall do no more than write about it.

The milieu of Oblivion is complicated; too much so, maybe. It is a melange that, without studying the series' history, is probably from accumulation; multifarious in design but really anachronistic. Now, studies of medieval urbanity, architecture, economics and agriculture will always be buttressed by speculation, on one hand. And on the other, Oblivion isn't a period piece, so modern elements serving the convenience of players aren't unwarranted.

But then you plod down one of the several cities' streets — it's lined with houses closest to an Elizabethan style, behind curbs of what looks like Portland cement — while enclosed in chain mail armor, iron longsword slung from the hip, passing storefronts that retail food, goods and arms of the broader Middle Ages. Miscellany of arcana, magic and alchemy and artifacts, are vended; and vendors talk nearly as they would today.

What about an open market? Barter? What lord of sound mind would allow a blacksmith to work and sell materiel privately? A thaumaturge might offer his knowledge for a price, but then, wouldn't he, as at least prescribed by fairy tale, do it through tutelage, and out of sight — rather than, as in one example from Oblivion, unravel a catalog of sorceries inside a place called Edgar's Discount Spells, like a kind of esoterica a la carte?

Out of practicability and perhaps a bit of deference, Bethesda laid out underground structures a little bit like tabletop Dungeons and Dragons: passageways, rooms filled with monsters. Most of the time this doesn't seem too illogical, and in a few special instances the designers imaginatively set one kind of beast (say, goblins) against another (the angry dead whose presence the troop of goblins fatally overlooked). Wood nymphs, minotaurs, ogres and scorpion-men wandering around a crumbling great hall, not at all consanguine and yet minding the others' presence, inaptly make for a costume party.

The artificial intelligence governing the behavior of allies works to confirm Oblivion as a solitary endeavor. In the course of some quests, men of action join a character. In battle, each one sprints for the nearest enemy. Outnumbered, they are quickly cut down; in numbers, a cohort encircles a target, preventing players from engaging an enemy themselves without risking harm to their brothers. Athwart what seems natural — a swordsman would run and try to kill his opponent as quickly as possible — is what is enjoyable, and the theater suggests that the most interesting melee is one where combatants are paired off, and duels begin and end in turn.

How many weapons, pieces of armor, jewels, adornments, and curios are in Oblivion? Hundreds. After a sufficient number of hours, however, the game's classification is rather easily exposed in terms of rows and columns. A gold ring is a gold ring — is a gold ring, and what remains in monetary value is lost in variation. Is a random, a fractal, generator of the physicality of a thing impossible? Bethesda could take that same gold ring and show the player engravings, inlaid stones, other marks; that vary slightly or considerably from a second gold ring. Two rings, or two swords, or two of whatever might be worth the same coinage; one, through nuance and attendant sentimentality, priceless to a player. And curiosity about what another unique object looked like would inspire adventuring that sameness couldn't.

Inspiration, while playing Oblivion, is yet in ample supply. We have some one hundred-odd visitations for the snitching of antiquities left to go, my enchantress and me.