Happy 250th birthday, USA. The defining image in my lifetime of American culture is the hooded man at Abu Ghraib pris...

Happy 250th birthday, USA. The defining image in my lifetime of American culture is the hooded man at Abu Ghraib prison. Well, you’re still young and “finding a place to be/ in the early days of a better civilization,” as Dennis Lee’s poem put it. Here’s to the next 250. It’ll improve; it has to.