Everyone remembers the whitewashing scene in “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” But how many recall the scene that precedes it? Having escaped from Aunt Polly, Tom is “playing hooky” and teaching himself to whistle when he spies a “newcomer” in his village — a newcomer with “a citified air.” Their conversation unfolds like this:

“I can lick you!”

“I’d like to see you try it.”

“Well, I can do it.”

“No you can’t, either.”

After that, the encounter deteriorates further (“Can! Can’t!”) until finally the two boys are wrestling in the dirt. Tom wins the battle — the citified newcomer is made to shout “Nuff!” — but returns home late and is thus commanded to whitewash the famous fence.

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Historical amnesia is at once the most endearing and the most frustrating of American qualities. On the one hand, it means that — F. Scott Fitzgerald notwithstanding — there really are second acts in American lives. People can move somewhere else, reinvent themselves, start again.

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Thank you, WikiLeaks.

I didn’t think it was possible, but Julian Assange has done it: By releasing 92,000 pages of intelligence documents relating to the Afghanistan war onto the laptops of an unsuspecting public, the proprietor of WikiLeaks has made an iron-clad case for the mainstream media. If you were under the impression that we no longer need news organizations, editors or reporters with more than 10 minutes’ experience, think again. The notion that the Internet can replace traditional newsgathering has been revealed as a myth.

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I’ve listened to Sarah Palin’s “Mama Grizzlies” video. I’ve watched the Tea Party movement evolve from a joke into a political force. I’ve read up on the primary candidates who want to take back government, take down government, burn down Washington.

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I was awed by the complexity of “l’affaire Bettencourt” the first time it was explained to me, with much rolling of eyes, in Paris in April. It seemed even more improbable in June, when a gleeful French politician regaled me with more gory details. But sometime last week, when this story — now a full-blown French political scandal, involving cash bribes, a rich widow and a double-crossing butler — suddenly threatened to engulf the president of France, I decided to focus harder.

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KRAKOW, POLAND –  A riot of golden curlicues embellished the theater boxes; in the plush velvet seats below, ambassadors in saris crowded against activists in crumpled suits. It was standing-room only on Saturday for Hillary Clinton’s speech at the 10th anniversary meeting of the Community of Democracies, and the American secretary of state had the crowd behind her. First she paid compliments to her predecessor Madeleine Albright, who co-founded the organization a decade ago with Poland’s then-foreign minister, Bronislaw Geremek.

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Along with many other things, the spy novel did not survive the end of the Cold War. There are still thrillers, of course, but it isn’t the same: James Bond has become just another action hero, and John Le Carre had turned into yet another British writer who doesn’t like George Bush. When communism collapsed, the dead-letter drops, the invisible ink and the microfilm concealed in hollowed-out pumpkins mostly disappeared from fiction, too.

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Here is why I love the World Cup: Every four years it creates a perfectly controlled environment in which national characteristics are suddenly illuminated and easily compared. There is none of the chaos of the Olympics, with its confusing mixture of sports and its nationally biased television transmissions. With only one sport and one tournament, everybody has to watch at the same time and everybody has the same conversation. This year, that conversation is about fumbled saves, bad penalty calls — and the vuvuzela.

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In the Gulf of Mexico, plumes of black oil are gushing into the ocean, coating the wings of seabirds, poisoning shellfish, sending tar balls rolling onto white Florida beaches. It is an ecological disaster. It is a economic nightmare. And there is absolutely nothing that the American president can do about it. Nothing at all.

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BERLIN - Last week the president of Germany quit his job. Just like that. “I declare my resignation from the office of president,” said Horst Koehler, “with immediate effect.” And he walked away.

Koehler was, he said, merely responding to criticism: He had been widely attacked for remarks he made during a trip to Afghanistan last month, so much so that he felt he could not continue. The German president is a ceremonial figurehead, elected by parliament, and in theory he is not supposed to say anything contentious. Having been accused of violating this convention, he quit.

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