If there's a single theme to Obama's intellectual achievements, it's been his ability to seize upon powerful words and themes, lifting them out of their original context and reframing them to be inclusive and uplifting. Thus, Rev. Wright's fiery sermon on "The Audacity to Hope" in a racialized world becomes the title of Obama's serene meditation on the possibilities of transcending political and racial polarization. That seems to hold true more broadly. It's how Obama is able to credit the honorable motives of his opponents even as he disagrees with them. It's how Obama took the best of what Reverend Wright had to offer -- community, inspiration, rebukes for his congregation's shortcomings -- and set aside the anger and divisiveness that seemed to him relics of an earlier time.

Quite reluctantly, being generally a supporter of gun control, I have come to believe in the individual rights view of the provision. Though one can still make a respectable historical and textual argument for the collective rights view of the amendment, the weight of the argument is on the individualistic side. The words "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed" have to mean something. For the justices to pretend otherwise would cast doubts on our society's fidelity to the Constitution itself.

At the same time, a view of the amendment that cripples modern governments from keeping terribly dangerous weapons out of big cities and out of the hands of dangerous people would be a disaster in practical terms. Whatever conception the founders may have had of the amendment, they didn't have to think about situations like Virginia Tech, and they did not have inner-city gun crime. All of this argues against a simple translation of Second Amendment values from the founding era to our own. It's a reality that is implicitly recognized in the Bush administration's brief.

At its best, the storytelling itself manages to accommodate a sense of historical contingency. American independence was not inevitable.

But the bigger problem is how far the writing has to go to make Adams both more important and more virtuous than everyone around him except his wife, as if to justify his prodigious self-regard and disdain for his contemporaries. Adams didn’t “unite the states of America,” but he accomplished a hell of a lot. He was bold. He was brilliant. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t also a heel.

"Resource wars" are things that happen elsewhere. We don't usually think of our country as water poor or imagine that "resource wars" might be applied as a description to various state and local governments in the Southwest, Southeast, or upper Midwest now fighting tooth and nail for previously shared water. And yet, "war" may not be a bad metaphor for what's on the horizon. According to the National Climate Data Center, federal officials have declared 43 percent of the contiguous US to be in "moderate to extreme drought."

Certainly, you've seen the articles about what global warming might do in the future to fragile or low-lying areas of the world. Such pieces usually mention the possibility of enormous migrations of the poor and desperate. But we don't usually think about that in the "homeland."

Maybe we should.