July 31, 2002

Recently, I prayed for someone to die. She wasn’t an enemy. She was the beloved teenage daughter of two exceptionally fine church friends. Sarah’s frail body, once so vivacious and spry, was failing, fading away—sucked of its verve and substance by a fierce internal rapacious monster: Ewing’s sarcoma, bone cancer.

Last January President Bush announced that he was building on “a magnificent, courageous and compassionate response to terrorism” with the creation of the USA Freedom Corps, an initiative that combines the AmeriCorps, Senior Corps and Peace Corps. Then he added a new organization, the Citizens Corps, which will focus on prevention of and emergency response to terrorism. The president is calling on Americans to support him by giving at least two years or 4,000 hours of service in their lifetimes.

In a charming fantasia on how the last years of Napoleon's life might have gone, The Emperor's New Clothes—an adaptation of Simon Leys's novella The Death of Napoleon—features a Bonaparte who plots a daring escape from St. Helena. He plants a double, a sailor named Eugene Lenormand, in his place while he steals back to Paris to reclaim his power. Both figures are played with brio by Ian Holm.

Despite its state-of-the-art computer graphics and eye-catching special effects, Minority Report is basically a chase movie built on a question—one that Charles Dickens explored in A Christmas Carol. Dickens's Ebenezer Scrooge asks the visiting spirits if his foretold future of loneliness and gloom is how things "will" be, or how they "might" be. In Dickens, the answer is that Scrooge can change the late-night prophecy.