At a time when liberals the world over are falling in line with the Bush Administration’s atrocious state practices that get called the “War on Terrorism,” the voice of Arundhati Roy is needed, and needed badly. Roy is unafraid to break with both liberal and left pieties, whereas most commentators shuffle their feet and avoid confronting “merely political” issues that hurt, devalue, and cheapen people’s lives. Tackling so-called “multiculturalism,” Roy speaks to the ways that a politics of “tolerance” assumes the other person is intolerable to begin with. One of Roy’s most startling images is this statement about nationalism: “Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.” Her poetic and political powers are inseparable.