Thank God the Celtics won’t be hanging another championship banner at the Garden. Everything would be perfect if only Doc, Ray, Pierce, and the rest of their big-hearted team had somehow nonetheless won. The feeling of turning off the TV after the guys you were rooting for just lost the seventh game of the N.B.A. Finals: temporary desolation before “the injustice which triumphs so flagrantly in the destinies of men” (Gissing). Yeah, I still remember.

A few weeks ago I wrote a Comment on the grumbling among human-rights types about the President’s lukewarmth toward their concerns. A couple of them spoke of serious unhappiness on this topic among Egyptians—important because Cairo is still the capital of the Arab world, not to mention the city where Obama chose to give his visionary speech on Islam and the U.S. a year ago. A few days after that speech, the streets of Iran filled with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators protesting a fraudulent election and the violent crackdown that followed. A year later, Iran has fallen sullenly, depressingly quiet. We also don’t hear very much about internal political troubles in Egypt and around the Arab world. But, for what it’s worth, over the past twenty-four hours I’ve seen three strong statements from activists-in-exile—two on Egypt, one on Iran.

Yesterday, I spoke on a panel at the Jacob Blaustein Institute with two human-rights advocates and one State Department official. The latter described the Administration’s efforts on behalf of human rights in multilateral forums and bilateral talks. She defended its record as well as she could. But it’s becoming clear that, to the ordinary activists who live in places like Cairo and Tehran, the gap between Obama’s words and America’s actions has been disappointing—to say the least. And that’s worrying.

A friend from Boston (whose Celtics could win the title tonight) writes:

“The Lakers’ Achilles’ heel is their arrogance. From the top down. I can’t stand the ‘Zen master’ Phil Jackson anymore—he’s so full of himself and way too cool. After one game he ridiculed one of his own players (perhaps Artest, who had some absurd dribbling play ending nowhere) by saying with quiet disdain, ‘That was a very interesting play,’ with his slight smile. Doc [Rivers] would have said, ‘That was stupid.’ Trickle down ridicule and disdain is deadly. Kobe is dripping with it, even though he does have a legitimate grievance when his teammates don’t step up. But the reason they don’t play like a team is partly his fault—not just because he tries to take over games single-handedly but because of his attitude. When things get bad they all start turning on each other.

“Ray [Allen] is an interesting case. I love Ray—he’s my favorite player on the Celtics, mainly because of his incredible grace on the floor and his gentle personality. Here’s my theory on his switch from Game 2 (new record with 3s) to the next three games, where he now has yet to make one 3 (0 for 18)! He has obsessive-compulsive disorder (certifiably, not just the way players have their routines and superstitions). He believes in order and routine. He has the exact same pre-game practice EVERY SINGLE GAME—gets there three hours early for shooting, has a set routine for warming up, etc. The rigidity in OCD comes from the person’s attempt to control his impulses. As Ray said after his amazing performance in Game 2, ‘You can’t let yourself get too high—things change’ or something to that effect. But how could he not feel high after Game 2? How? How could he not feel great? Well, that must have been a challenge for Ray and I think he had to work overtime to rein himself in and pull back from that high. Aside from the fact that Fisher has been ALL OVER him since Game 2, in Game 3 every single 3 Ray attempted was short. Either hit the front rim or was an airball. How could that be? I think it’s because he was holding himself back, not allowing himself to let go enough to find his stroke. (If I were his coach I would have advised him to try to throw the ball five inches farther than he thought he should. I remember an amazing interview with the Orel Hershiser, who was such a smart pitcher—he said he would make just such adjustments; for instance, if he was consistently throwing outside in a given game, he would move his imagined strike zone farther inside to compensate and then throw to that.) Plus his young son with diabetes has been sick recently, which I’m sure has been distracting. In the meantime, he’s focusing more on defense as he waits out his drought, getting a few layups, and hopefully he will find himself again soon. It’s been an amazing, tension-filled, entertaining series. You recall (how could you forget) the moment when Big Baby [Glen Davis] made a great shot and started howling and drooling and Nate [Robinson] (like baby Kong) jumped on his back also howling? Well, if you look closely at the clip, Ray actually walks in front of those two as they howl and drool and he has a subtle but unmistakable look of disgust on his face—it says, ‘Control yourselves!’ ”

If Allen understands himself (or if he reads my friend’s analysis), he’ll correct for his correction, start nailing threes again, and (maybe) bring the Celtics their eighteenth title. Which sounds horrible to this almost-lifelong Laker fan, but which I’ll be rooting for tonight.

In Boston last night to give a talk at the annual fundraiser of the Political Asylum/Immigration Representation Project, or PAIR—an excellent group of lawyers who work their hearts out pro bono for people seeking political asylum, including a few I know, and wrongly detained immigrants. But the point of this post is much more important: I was checking in at my hotel when a very big, light-skinned black man in shorts and a tennis shirt walked past the front desk staring straight ahead, looking, I would say, serious. Familiar face—very familiar. Doc Rivers! The Celtics’ head coach! I had been in Boston two minutes and I was already within a few feet of the N.B.A. finals. I turned to the chatty—no, the unctuously, intrusively garrulous receptionist, no doubt trained to be that way—and asked what Doc was doing at the hotel. He clammed up like a noir desk clerk. “We can’t—we’re not allowed to say anything about Coach. Not anything.”

Who knew how big Doc Rivers is? He was a point guard. But they’re all big. That’s why.

It’s been strange, watching the series. I tried to get primed by watching some You Tube clips of classic Celtics-Lakers showdowns. For a while I thought it was working. The green jerseys of the Celtics, the Lakers’ royal blue and yellow—just like the old days, and tremors of the old feelings were still there. But after watching the first three games (Game 4 is on as I write), I knew it was no use. When you find yourself pumping your fist at Ray Allen’s eighth straight three-pointer, there’s no mistaking your feelings. I just like these Celtics better than these Lakers. I wish it were otherwise, because then I’d be truly, madly involved.

I’ve been meaning to answer this comment on my first Lakers-Celtics post, partly because it came from “avonbarksdale” (styling himself after the lead gangster from “The Wire”), partly because it sort of accused me of racism, and definitely of old-fogeyism. To the latter I plead nolo contendere. I was being a bit facetious when I said that Wilt Chamberlain’s rampant promiscuity seemed different because that was the old days. Of course athletes of all races have always been capable of thuggery. Wilt himself was the original problem player, skipping practices, disappearing at key moments of games. Bill Laimbeer of the Pistons tried to provoke a fight every game. The point I wanted to make is that, whatever the personal conduct of players, the modern N.B.A. has glorified selfishness and showboating on the court and (with exceptions) turned a blind eye to bad behavior off. Unsurprisingly, players (again, with many exceptions, and things in general improved over the past few years) conformed to the lucrative stereotype. Just look at a few minutes of a game played forty or thirty years ago compared to more recent years (though avonbarksdale is right—the average level of play is higher today). I was pointing out a pretty obvious fact. Not guilty on avonbarksdale’s first charge.

Ahem.

1969 was not a happy year in American history, but for sheer pain, nothing—not Nixon’s inauguration, not the bombing of Cambodia, not the Manson murders—could compare in my eight-year-old’s mind with the Lakers-Celtics finals. After a decade of defeats, this was the year the Lakers were finally going to end the curse of the leprechaun. But aging Boston won in seven, this time on L.A.’s home floor, with Wilt Chamberlain benched down the stretch, and in spite of the immense gallantry of my broken-nosed hero, Jerry West, who scored forty-two points in defeat, with one thigh wrapped due to a hamstring pull. It was the only time the series M.V.P. went to a player on the losing team. West’s prize car, a VW Beetle, was Celtic green. Jack Kent Cooke’s anticipatory balloons went flat in the Forum’s rafters.

A year or two later, West’s ghostwritten autobiography came out: “Mr. Clutch: The Jerry West Story.” I can still remember whole paragraphs from it, especially from the account of that Homeric ’69 series. I couldn’t get enough of West sitting in the Lakers’ locker room after the seventh game, receiving the admiring embraces of Bill Russell and John Havlicek and other Celtics, who seemed aware that they had just benefited from a cosmic injustice. That was what West and the Lakers meant to me: the inevitability, the unfairness, the almost sweet pain of loss. Because I was already becoming a political animal, I associated the Lakers’ defeat with Democratic losses from that time—Gene McCarthy, Hubert Humphrey—but the one at the Forum was by far the worst.

In 1972, the Lakers finally won a championship (without their great forward Elgin Baylor, whose moves around the hoop set the stage for Dr. J’s acrobatics, and who retired at the start of that year after thirteen seasons without a title). But it wasn’t against the Celtics, so the wound remained open.

In early 1984, I moved to Boston, the enemy’s citadel. That year was the first finals of the Bird-Magic era, and it was malevolent in its cruelty: the Lakers were eighteen seconds and one possession away from taking two straight at the Garden, when Gerald Henderson stole a James Worthy pass and sent the game into overtime. The series went to L.A. tied, but true Laker fans, with memories of 1969 still fresh, understood that it was already over. The Celtics always figured out a way to win—and they did. That year, surrounded by green gloating fans, with Johnny Most’s voice grating from everyone’s radio, and the Boston papers filled with self-righteous, borderline-racist nonsense about the Celtics’ blue-collar work ethic vs. the Lakers’ showy emptiness, I fell out of love with West’s tragic nobility and got in touch with the grown-up sports fan’s molten hatred. I hated Kevin McHale for clotheslining Kurt Rambis, I hated Danny Ainge for being a punk, I hated Robert Parrish for being dignified, I hated Cedric Maxwell for giving Worthy the choke sign, above all I hated Larry Bird for knowing how to win. And I hated Boston itself, so smug, so parochial, so mean, but never more so than during that June of 1984. The sports fan hates in order not to feel quite so defenseless against the raw pain I knew at age eight.

The Israeli raid on a flotilla bound for Gaza was worse than a crime, it was a blunder. None of the extenuating qualifications raised by its defenders matters—that the death toll was lower than on an average day in Lahore or Mosul; or that the relief ship carried (in addition to an Irish Nobel laureate, a Holocaust survivor, and a best-selling Swedish novelist) a lot of Turkish Islamists who were ready for a fight; or that Hamas is at least as much to blame for the suffering in Gaza as Israel. The point-counterpoint in blogs and U.N. deliberations misses the realm where the meaning of this raid is playing out. The purpose of the convoy was not primarily to bring aid to desperate Gazans, but to call attention to the Israeli blockade and turn world opinion overwhelmingly against it—as Greta Berlin, a leader of the Free Gaza Movement, made clear before the ships set sail. By this standard, the incident could not have gone better.

The flotilla was bait, and Israel took it—a classic triumph of civil disobedience over state power. So it doesn’t really matter that the “humanitarians” on the ship immediately resorted to violence: what the world will remember is that Israel’s first impulse was direct confrontation with civilians bringing aid, regardless of the effects on either the ship’s passengers or its own reputation. This revealed a greater moral obtuseness than firing missiles into civilian areas in the middle of a war. It’s not always the bloodiest incidents that evoke the strongest reaction and bring the most lasting consequences. No one remembers that the death toll was zero during the May, 1963, civil-rights demonstrations in Birmingham. What everyone knows is that Bull Connor brought in the K-9 units and firehoses. King and his circle got the images they badly needed, the nation recoiled, and the tide turned for the civil-rights movement.

Sunday night’s incident showed again that the most powerful force in international relations today is neither standing armies nor diplomatic councils, but public opinion as shaped by media. The presence of an Al Jazeera crew on one ship proves that the pro-Gazans understand completely the main arena in which they’re operating. The American military learned this truth slowly and the hard way in Iraq and Afghanistan. No one else cared if it was insurgents dressed as ordinary men who triggered an attack; what always shaped the world’s judgment was footage of soldiers retaliating with overwhelming firepower. (The recent WikiLeaks video is a good example; Raffi Khatchadourian has more about WikiLeaks this week in the magazine.) For years, the military would release self-justifying (and often misleading) statements that only inflamed opinion and strengthened the hand of the insurgents. Over time, American soldiers learned that they had to care what the world—especially Iraqis and Afghans—thought. They started trying harder to avoid such incidents, and, when that failed, to control their effect by owning up faster to their own responsibility.

At one time, Israelis understood counterinsurgency much better than Americans, which is why U.S. officers looked to their Israeli counterparts for advice in the early years of the Iraq war. At one time, the Israelis understood that self-interest demanded subtlety, restraint, and attention to perception. As others have pointed out, these qualities have been disappearing from Israeli strategy and tactics, and the current right-wing government seems determined to isolate and destroy itself with the unbending principle of self-defense.

One more thought, about what the incident means for Obama’s foreign policy. His national-security strategy, released last week, is a perfectly good document—almost too unobjectionable in its laundry list of goals and its lack of priorities. But Israel’s attack on the convoy shows an essential weakness in Obama’s vision of international affairs. The document has a lot to say about threats and military superiority, but its emphasis is on coöperation. Obama’s strategy of engagement is based on the notion that America, its allies, and its opponents have certain mutual interests that self-interest will lead them to identify and embrace. This notion has not been borne out with Iran, where the rulers of the Islamic Republic believe that self-interest—their own survival—depends on a climate of perpetual crisis and permanent demonization of the U.S. and Israel. And it hasn’t been borne out with Israel, which has just acted in a way that blurs self-interest into suicide.

Photograph: Early Monday, an Israeli Navy soldier stands behind a machine gun aboard a missile ship while Israeli Navy soldiers intercept the flotilla. A.P. Photo/Uriel Sinai, Pool.

Abdul Salam Zaeef, barely thirty years old, was the Afghan ambassador to Pakistan just before and after the September 11th attacks. The Taliban regime he served was so isolated that Zaeef became its youthful, thickly bearded international face while American bombs were falling on Taliban lines and Northern Alliance troops swept down toward Kabul. A few weeks after the fall of Kandahar, Zaeef disappeared in Pakistan. It turned out that Pakistani intelligence had handed him over to American agents, who held him in various prisons in Afghanistan before transferring him to Guantánamo, where he endured three years of detention without charge. At the end of 2005, after agreeing to refrain from “anti-American activities or military actions,” he was released and returned to Afghanistan. He now lives a quiet life in Kabul, and occasionally speaks to Western diplomats and reporters (including Steve Coll, for his piece in this week’s magazine) who want a read on Taliban thinking of the moment.

Earlier this year, Columbia University Press published Zaeef’s memoirs under the title “My Life with the Taliban,” translated into English by two graduates of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, who somehow manage to survive as foreigners living in Kandahar. It’s a book with an obvious interest for Americans, since so little has been published in English from the point of view of the insurgents who are the reason a hundred thousand American troops are fighting in Afghanistan. There’s no easily available Taliban equivalent of the writings of Ho Chi Minh, let alone “Mein Kampf.” Zaeef’s memoir is perhaps the best, and maybe even the only, way for readers here to begin to grasp the world view of this xenophobic and opaque movement.

In one way, it’s also a book that American readers will immediately understand: a kind of Pashtun Horatio Alger story, about a poor village boy from southern Afghanistan, the son of a holy man, who suffers deprivations, studies hard, survives the calamities of exile and war, develops intense loyalties with his brothers in arms, and, through perseverance and intelligence, rises early and fast through his country’s government to positions of great importance (which he claims never to have wanted), before suffering more calamities at the hands of his enemies—but there is no obstacle too great for Zaeef to overcome, because of his courage and unshakable piety. I’ve been reading the autobiographies of recent U.S. senators (a lot less absorbing than “My Life with the Taliban”), and the atmosphere is about the same. Zaeef’s tale has the moral simplicity and lack of reflection of rags-to-riches literature by public men, even if this narrator ends up somewhere beneath the top of the heap.

The fall of Arlen Specter and the rise of Rand Paul don’t make an overnight revolution in American politics. Instead, they continue trends that have been with us for a while: the decline of party establishments, the erosion of the center in Congress, the power of media (mainly conservative) to control the political agenda. We are seeing the rise of the politician as electronic loner, brought to power in a system that looks more like direct democracy than republican government.

The Senate used to be dominated by men like Specter. Lyndon Johnson called them “whales”—lifers, committee chairmen, able to work on both sides of the aisle and forge coalitions around specific issues, nakedly opportunistic in some of their political calculations. A few decades ago, no one minded when an eighty-year-old ran for reëlection on promises to keep bringing home the bacon. Today, with the electorate in a state of perpetual outrage, Specter’s maneuverings to hold his seat are taken as unseemly, like an old man chasing after a young thing in a skirt.

Less than a few decades ago, Republican voters would never have defied their most powerful politician—in this case, Mitch McConnell—and nominated a party outsider like Rand Paul. It’s almost certain that Paul will win in November, and when he gets to Washington he’ll make Jim Bunning seem like a dull, go-along-to-get-along insider. The prototype for Republican senators these days is no longer McConnell, and it certainly isn’t an aging centrist like Richard Lugar. It’s Jim DeMint of South Carolina, who holds office not to legislate but to blow things up, who doesn’t need to make party elders happy because he can create his own base of support by making himself irresistible to cable news. Rand Paul will up DeMint’s ante, and “the world’s greatest deliberative body” will continue its descent into mass-media hell.

Barack Obama is himself a kind of electronic loner—think of his Internet fundraising—but he’s also a product of a sober, meritocratic establishment that has fallen into widespread disrepute. His challenge from the beginning of his Presidency has been to stay ahead of the wild churn of political feeling, bring it under control, and avoid being drowned in it. No easy task, and it just got a little harder.

Harry Reid filed a cloture motion last night to end debate on financial reform. Dozens of amendments have come up for a vote, most of them relevant and substantive, some not so much—Jim DeMint of South Carolina’s border-security amendment, filed expressly to sink another amendment, by Oregon’s Ron Wyden, that would have ended the noxious senatorial privilege of placing secret holds to block nominations. Last week, from the Senate press gallery, I saw Dick Durbin of Illinois standing in the well of the chamber, arms folded, watching with the proprietary anxiety of a college basketball coach while his colleagues voted on his amendment restricting the fees banks can charge store merchants whenever a customer swipes a debit card. The amendment passed overwhelmingly and bipartisanly, with sixty-four yeas, despite furious lobbying by the financial industry. Such a tide of opposition to the powerful banks in the normally stagnant Senate would have been unthinkable two years ago. Harry Reid hopes to win final passage of the bill by the end of this week.

With so much at stake, the banks must be trying hard to improve their image, right? I got home from Washington last week to find a letter from Chase explaining its “privacy” policy: “This Policy explains what Chase does to keep information about you private and secure.” Here’s what Chase, showing all the sensitivity to public opinion of the East German politburo circa 1985, is doing to win back the hearts and minds of consumers:

Q. Is information about me shared with non-financial companies outside your family of companies?

A. Yes. We may share information about you with companies outside of our family as permitted by law, including retailers, auto dealers, auto makers, direct marketers, membership clubs and publishers….

Q. What choices do I have about information sharing and use?

A. We offer you the following three choices about sharing information that identifies you:

Choice #1—Third party sharing: You may tell us not to share information about you with non-financial companies outside of our family of companies. Even if you do tell us not to share, we may do so as required or permitted by law….

Choice #2—Affiliate sharing: You may tell us not to share the following information about you within our family of companies:

• Information from your applications to be used to determine your eligibility, such as your income


• Information from consumer credit reports, such as your credit history


• Information from sources used to verify information you provide us, such as outstanding loans or employment history

Even if you do tell us not to share, we may share other types of information within our family. For example, we may share name and address, information about transactions or balances with us, as well as survey results….

Q. What about joint accounts?

A. Each person may separately make privacy choices, and joint account holders may make privacy choices for each other. If only one joint account holder makes a privacy choice, information about the other joint account holder may be shared.

I really can’t stay mad at the big banks.