Transition Atmosphere

Watching President-Elect Obama, at his first press conference, I noticed him repeatedly striking a note of thorough, cautious deliberateness. For instance, at one point, he said, ``obviously, how we approach and deal with a country like Iran is not something that we should, you know, simply do in a knee-jerk fashion. I think we've got to think it through.'' And, a little later: ``I'm proud of the choice of chief of staff, because we thought it through. And I think it's very important, in all these key positions, both in the economic team and the national security team, to -- to get it right and not to be so rushed that you end up making mistakes.'' Imagining his team combing through the files of the Bush Administration, I found myself recalling Ursula Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest. There's a scene there (when I dug up my old paperback, I found it on page 64) in which the reckless, violent cowboys of an Earth colony suddenly find themselves talking to an emissary from a more civilized planet:

``He looked about at the purple colonel, the flowering majors, the livid captains, the cringing specialists. Contempt came into his face. `You have not thought things through,' he said. By his standards, it was a brutal insult.''

I think Washington may have that atmosphere for a few months . . .