by Tim Rutten

From The Los Angeles Times, April 9, 2008: Olympic protests’ history of futility

Poetry, as Auden famously instructed us, changes nothing — and neither, despite all the predicted turmoil in San Francisco today, do the Olympics.

and

Chinese conduct in Tibet and Sudan is reprehensible, so all this drama is cathartic in the way protests tend to be. But whether it will have much effect on China’s behavior is another question altogether. If history is any guide, the answer is no.