The Brain is Like a Fish. It Breathes through its Gills…

Popular accounts of how DNA works remind me of ads for sea monkeys. One is left with somewhat exaggerated expectations. At the very least, folks should be informed that the genetic material does not contain the full instructions for a living thing. Indeed, if you cast your genome upon the waters, you won’t even get icky little brine shrimp. To get a new generation, the absolute minimum requirement is quite elaborate, namely an entire cell. Omnis cellula e cellula, as Rudolf Virchow put it back in 1855. Even so elegant a molecule as deoxyribonucleic acid requires, among many other things, a whole suite of enzymes and an environment kept within fairly narrow limits of pH and temperature to do anything whatsoever.

I suppose I shouldn’t blame popularizers for promoting a misleading version of biology. They know their market; an essentially magical version of how things happen is bound to be more attractive than a complex and sometimes prosaic reality that requires real effort to comprehend. Besides, it may be a mistake to introduce real science into popular discourse. When people sense the inadequacy of the usual accounts, their skepticism generally takes a form indistinguishable from the grossest credulity, hence the enthusiasm for homeopathy, morphic resonance, Lamarckian inheritance, and various sorts of vitalism among the middlebrow. It would be nice if somebody bothered to learn some real biology before they ran off to listen to Sheldrake the Magician or some other charlatan, but that doesn’t seem to happen very often.

For the record, I’d like to point out that nothing prevents the famous, though more often postulated than sighted, intelligent layman from digging into real biology. College textbooks are often very good sources of information if you can supply your own curiosity. And there are a select group of popularizations that actually attempt to introduce their subjects instead of providing cocktail party ammunition or an intellectual pacifier. I have in mind, in particular, authors like Carl Zimmer whose book on parasitology, Parasite Rex, manages to convey the genuine weirdness of living things in a form as compulsively readable as pornography. There are also academic historians of science like Jan Sapp whose writings, perfectly accessible to a reasonably well-educated person, provide an indirect but reliable picture of the real and continuing controversies of life science. Reading Sapp’s Genesis: the Evolution of Biology (2003) is what got me thinking again about the inadequacy of the usual accounts of biology.

Everything for Everybody

When the Soviet Union went under, the market for Russian language tapes tanked. French has also suffered a steep decline as a second language—oddly, or maybe not, the new comer, outside of English, is German. That reported, one of the amazing things about the last century is how well the French have maintained their cultural importance as they have declined from a world power to at most a middling regional power. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to match up Camus, Merleau-Ponty, Aron, Sartre, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Dumezil, Bachelard, Lacan, Levi-Strauss, and Bourdieu with the corresponding American thinkers. Good luck.

The most recent French savant I’ve encountered is the philosopher Alain Badiou. I don’t know what I think about him yet. I’ve only read his brief book, St Paul, the Foundations of Universalism. If nothing else, Badiou got me to thinking about how relevant Paul is to us here in the early Imperial period. Paul is important not because of his monotheism—arguably every human belief system has a supreme entity of some sort because of the irresistible logical temptation to posit one—but because he addressed everyone, Greek and Jew, as if ethnicity doesn’t really matter. These days we’re more likely to argue about getting Supersized than circumcised; but our tepid multiculturalism, as convenient, mediocre, and indefensible as the calculated tolerance of the Romans, contrasts drastically with Paul’s genuine, if scary, universalism. Suggesting that any idea or value might hold for everybody really is impolitic—even the Bush administration wants to keep the Missionaries on a leash in Iraq—but ruling out a confrontation between faiths or convictions means that one’s religion or philosophy is merely local color like wearing a colorful sombrero or eating gravilax. I’m certainly no Christian, but, like Paul, I do believe in playing for keeps.

Big Hinges

The historian Niall, too-bad-the-Germans-didn’t-win-World War I, Ferguson has sponsored a couple of books of essays on alternative history. His “What If” books are more interesting than many others of that genre if only because the contributors identify some pretty recherché crises in human history instead of the inevitable “What if somebody had shot Hitler in 1920?” For example, Ferguson himself wrote a piece in the first What If book exploring what would have happened if Charles the First had managed to govern without calling parliament back in the 17th Century. How often I’ve found myself pondering that one!* I have a general problem with “what if” essays, however, though I certainly take Ferguson’s point that events don’t travel smoothly forward on invisible rails. I agree that the future is not determined by material or spiritual laws. But while Ferguson emphasizes decisive events, I see the great contingencies taking place over long stretches of time. I believe it was an instance of human freedom, for example, when the people of the American South decided to preserve slavery come hell or high water, even though that decision involved years of debate and struggle before it was fatally confirmed on the battlefield. Similarly, the Germans didn’t opt for unspeakable barbarism all at once. They spent the better part of the 19th Century taking the path of authoritarian nationalism, willfully coarsening their sensibilities and celebrating the manliness of brutality.

* Like many another contemporary intellectual, Ferguson seems to find Catholicism as alluring as he finds representative government otiose and dangerous. The sorrow and the pity of the English Civil War, the eventual consequence of calling parliament, seems to have been that it set the English against the Roman church. I can well understand why somebody might find the bigotry of English Protestantism unattractive—think of the strutting hatefulness of some of the Orange politicians in Northern Ireland—but why anybody wants to promote a decrepit system of superstition escapes me. Without revisiting the Kulturkampf, if I were presented with no alternatives but the Kaiser and the Pope, I’m not sure I’d prefer the Pope. Ferguson, apparently, wants both. I would very much like to understand why

And Now for the Nonfacts Behind the News

Whatever value differences lie behind people’s politics, sheer misinformation explains a great deal. If you listen to AM radio, you’ll discover that a large portion of the electorate believes:

1. The progressivity of the tax code is what makes it complicated.

2. Foreign aid is a major part of the Federal budget.

3. The health care system of the United States is second to none.

4. Millions of unwed mothers live high on the hog off welfare.

5. Affirmative action in education and business is one of the main reasons for high levels of unemployment among white men.

6. The Federal government is primarily responsible for zoning, gun control, and family law, even on a local level.

7. Judges frequently release violent criminals on technicalities. Lots of murders get off on insanity pleas.

8. Many reputable scientists doubt the truth of evolution and the reality of global warming.

9. Bill Clinton raised everybody’s income taxes.

10. Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11.

11. The liberals are in charge.

Of course people tend to believe what they want to believe—many environmentalists have gravely informed me that the cancer rate is much higher around nuclear power plants—but I suspect mere ignorance does explain a lot, even over and beyond the cultural despair, gnawing envy, and injured narcissism that feeds the anger of so many American white men. Which is a hopeful thought, really. We can work to inform. It’s harder to deal with the we-won-the-Cold-War-and-all-I-got-was-this-lousy-tee-shirt dynamic.

A Bayesian Consideration

Dullards come off badly in histories. That’s because histories focus on times of change when habitual responses to problems fail and people have to fall back on intelligence. Under more normal circumstances, stupidity has a lot going for it. It hasn’t prevailed by accident.

We often think of intelligence in terms of speed. A quick study is somebody who can learn rapidly. But learning rapidly is frequently disadvantageous in stable situations. In poker—to use the most banal possible example because it has always worked for me before—it is a disastrous mistake to learn to draw to an inside straight because on one occasion you drew the 9. Since the underlying probabilities inherent in the game don’t change, good poker players have to be careful not to learn from experience. Of course in poker one can have insight into the laws of the game because the game is an artificial system, which has been contrived for our delectation and therefore makes sense. One can understand when and why the odds are unfavorable. In real world situations, unfortunately, we can only judge probabilities a posteriori since we’re not pulling stones out of an urn or rolling fair dice and it’s quite easy to be too clever. Which may be why nature took its own sweet time in devising an animal that could survive its own intelligence.

I’m just thinking out loud in these amateur reflections, of course. What inspires me is something serious observers of the contemporary scene should be wary of, namely the triumphant advance of the Bayesian concept of probability and its application to statistical inference, economics, psychology, and many other things. The cover story of a recent issue of Nature, that grand old British science journal, featured a Bayesian analysis of how the nervous system contrives to hit a tennis ball, for example, and analogous examples turn up all over the place. It’s going retail.

Clutching at Straws that might Break the Camel's Back

In the era of liberal consensus plenty of pubic intellectuals went along received wisdom with their fingers crossed, and it wasn’t just racist Southern Democrats who defected from the New Deal coalition over the last couple of decades. I think the reverse phenomenon is occurring now. Lots of writers are supporting the new orthodoxy out of career considerations even though their temperaments and values are a poor match for conservatism. If nothing else, right wing ideas don’t offer a very inspiring prospect for an ambitious person. Free market ideology is just a hypertrophied version of a Rotary Club speech, and the notions of the religious right are literally false when they aren’t simply incoherent. A lot of folks have and will make a living as camp followers of Halliburton and Boeing, but cheer leading for empire gets old pretty fast

Time’s Forced March

In common with many others, I find it had to get interested in certain scientific controversies, not because I’m not interested in the topic in question but because the outcome that matters is not going to reflect the debating prowess of the contending researchers but the results of a long social and technical process completely out of the control of any individual. “They are going to figure that out eventually,” I think to myself, roll over, and go back to sleep. In some cases—issues related to climate change, for example—even lay people like me have a civic responsibility to make guesses based on the current state of the evidence, but for the most part, the only question is whether or not we’ll live long enough to read the answer in a textbook.

Unfortunately, complacency about the sciences, though based on a plausible induction from a couple of hundred years of historical experience, is problematic in a couple of ways. In particular, it reflects a fundamentally misleading metaphor: human action as simple physical process. Perhaps nothing is less like an advancing glacier or an onrushing swarm of army ants than scientific research, which has to be the very type specimen of free cooperative rational action in the universe. There simply is no old automatic in this particular sport. Nothing occurs without the determined efforts of very intelligent people supported by a bogglingly complicated web of institutions that themselves only persist because of the determined efforts of many other people. If you insist on a metaphor to describe the situation, science is more like a spermatozoon than a freight train. Viscosity, not inertia, rules, Stokes, not Newton. Science only advances so long as it wiggles its tail.

Thinking of scientific progress as an automatic process is not only an error from a theoretical point of view. It also underlies the attitudes of many politicians and culture critics who take the continuing fruitfulness of science for granted while working to undermine the systems that make it possible. They want the benefits of technology, especially the weapons and consumer goods, but they don’t want to pay for the underlying science and they certainly don’t want to endorse the ethical values that go along with science, for the excellent reason that free inquiry really is dangerous to established hierarchies and traditional beliefs. Some of this is undoubtedly just cynicism. Protecting industries that pollute, promoting hysteria about stem cells, engaging in denial about global warming, defunding serious space research in favor of meaningless technological stunts, introducing Creationism and Intelligent Design into pubic education—all these retail irrationalities may turn out to have an insignificant effect in the long run. But there is nothing automatic about scientific progress. If we take the batteries out of the flashlight, it isn’t going to go on shinning out of sheer habit.

Oil Alone

The government announced last week that our military mission to Georgia will continue. We have no intention of leaving Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, or Tajikistan, either; and while the State Department recently made some mild noises about the appalling civil rights situation in Uzbekistan, it is unlikely that President Islam Karimov needs to take that threat very seriously–consider the source. The Tenth Mountain Division will undoubtedly continue to bolster his regime from its Halliburton-built base in sunny Khanabad until and unless a once or future American Petropresident, hard up for useful enemy, decides to promote another one of its clients to regional Hitler, a Karimov being, as it were, the larval form of a Saddam Hussein.

Now it is perfectly true that the U.S. maintains garrisons and bases all over the place so that it would be an error to claim that our deployments are all simply a function of our national addiction to liquid fuels. In part, our presence reflects other specific, limited national interests as well as generalized imperial momentum. The domination of oil over our foreign policy is quite extraordinary, however. Which partly explains why everybody seems so determined to deny it.

I don’t doubt that a considerable range of motives lay behind the Conquest of Iraq. For example, while I expect the sentient members of the regime were well aware that Hussein had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11 and represented no plausible threat whatsoever, I can well believe that many of them were sincere about exporting Democracy. They certainly didn’t want to leave any of it lying around here. Preoccupation with Israel also played a role in maintaining a focus on the Near East. The Fundamentalist are hung up on screwy apocalyptic dreams while the Neocons, whether Jewish or not, feel a powerful affinity for the voluntarist strain in Zionism. Nevertheless, neither idealism or religious fanaticism can explain why we were willing to spent $200 billion and utterly outrage international law to squash Iraq; and we aren’t dug in in Bharain, Diego Garcia, Egypt, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., Azerbaijan, Georgian, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan out of the goodness of our heart. We are there for the oil. Unfortunately, this monomania expresses far more than the quirky fact that American politics has come to be utterly dominated by current and former oil executives. Behind the American government is an unsupportable form of life dependent on cheap gas. Bush is the blister, not the virus.

Hail, Hail, Fredonia!

I lived in Pittsburgh during the glory years of the Steelers and then moved to San Francisco a couple of months before for the first 49er Superbowl win. I recall sitting on packing case in my new apartment watching a Monday night game between the reigning champs and the 49ers. By halftime, if I remember rightly, the 49ers were ahead and I was cursing under my breath. And then I had an epiphany. I looked out the window, saw the Golden Gate Bridge, and started yelling, “Go Niners!”

Like everything else in this country, loyalty to the team is just another form of entertainment. You don’t root, root for the home team because the players or owners have anything to do with your home town or even because it is your hometown except in the most notional sense. The identity to which you swear allegiance is like a decal that can be slapped on your luggage and just as easily removed. One acquires it along with the lease the same way General Stanley got his ancestors. Hooting and screaming at the stadium along with the rest of the rented Mannerbund is another one of those civilized practices like prostitution in which a natural pleasure—baying in packs—is detached from its original biological context and made an end in itself. I have no objection. But things can get dicey when enthusiasm for genuine blood sports is cultivated artificially.

It is probably rash of me to suggest that patriotism in its modern American form is more a pastime than a virtue. After all, thoughtful people hesitate to criticize patriotism if only because they may want to urge other people to die for their country at some point. Anyhow, there was a time in our history when patriotism was more than a conditioned response to bunting and fireworks. The patriotism of the founders was fervent and sometimes distinctly adolescent but it was also rational in a way that would now be denounced as merely liberal. America was worth fighting for because it represented a really good idea. But that kind of patriotism was less a pleasure than a duty. To dwell in the City on the Hill was not to inhabit a Penthouse; and to belong to a Chosen People was not to be tapped for Skull and Bones.

Senisculus

Politics has certain advantages for middle-aged people. For example, it gives them something else to be disappointed about besides the way their own lives turned out.

A Nicomachian Footnote

Wanting to do evil is perverse, at least in comparison to doing something wrong in order to attain some natural good. It is an error not wholly dissimilar from wanting to do good, though very few people seem to notice the perversity of that.

Felt Thought

Since science and technology are often advertised as an imperial expansion of hubristic human will, it is ironic that world has become steadily less explicable the more we understand it. Instead of subjecting the Nature of Things to categories congenial to our kind, we’ve learned to operate with notions radically foreign to our experience. The sphere of the True is a zone quite as hostile and forbidding as the surface of the Moon, an environment in which we can only survive by expensive and artificial means.

On their first encounter with Kant, undergraduates often speculate about what a world might be like outside the system of the categories. A partial answer can be found in the Physics building. Thus, for example, the functional relationship that define the behavior of things don’t obviously involve the once celebrated category of causality at all, which turns out to be a pretty parochial concept, something only suitable for mobile living thing with HOX genes and therefore a front and back, mouth and ass. Just as it makes no literal sense to ascribe gender or moral qualities to inanimate objects or cosmic principles, it is at best a metaphor to think that anything besides animals ever does anything. Even the paradigm case of causality, the cue ball knocking the eight into the corner pocket, actually reinforces the point, for people had to go to a great deal of trouble to invent billiards and contrive smooth, level surfaces and perfectly round balls to provide themselves with a miniature paradise in which things work—or can be imagined to work—as we wish.

Links

I'm gradually adding links to this site. Although a couple of the links are to political sites, my intention is to focus on sites that are useful references. The Merriam-Webster site, for example, is a dictionary with an audio feature that finally taught me how to pronounce lese-majeste. The Nature and Physical Review Focus sites are the best I've found for quick news about serious science. Suggestions for additional links are hereby solicited.

On an adjoining front, I'm working on my list of the best single volume references to various fields for people who are either serious about understanding things or too vain to give up trying—probably a distinction without a difference. I've got candidates for chemistry, physics, statistics, and set theory.

Solipsism in Company

Before the colossal distraction of 9/11, the Bush administration obsessed over China, which had pretty obviously become the enemy elect for a politics absolutely dependent on having enemies. Recently, this theme has begun to surface again. I tend to be less alarmist about the Chinese myself, both because I am very mindful of the huge internal problems faced by that nation and because China has no tradition of projecting power outside of its Eurasian sphere and, in any case, will lack the military power to do so for a long time. Even on the economic front, I tend to agree with Peter Drucker that the most significant rival for the U.S. is not China but India, a nation with hundreds of millions of well-educated people, many of them English speaking; enough nuclear weapons to deter the United States; and a rough and ready but authentic democracy. Because of the on-going drag of character-based literacy, it plain costs more to educate a Chinese kid than an Indian one. One also cannot count out the Europeans and Japanese as economic if not political rivals; for their supposed great economic disadvantage, a declining birth rate, may turn out to be a huge strength if they prove to be the first societies that learn how to persist and prosper on the other side of the demographic transition. They have also begun to wean themselves from petroleum while the U.S., like an oversized baby, still wallows in the cradle endlessly screaming for the bottle.

All of this handicapping is pleasant enough, but obscures the more important fact: the likelihood that the center of gravity of history over the next century will not be in North America. Of course there is nothing intrinsically surprising about this fact, if it is a fact, and nothing untoward either. Indeed, the only plausible outcome that would leave us as the protagonist of the story would be a vast tragedy. Declining nations sometimes protest against their loss of power by using military violence to preserve a preeminence that is no longer merited by superior population, wealth, growth, creativity, or culture. The Spanish, French, and German examples are not encouraging in this regard. At any event, it is very likely we’ll have a terrible time coming to terms with a transition to a less exalted status, ignorant as we are of the world and its history, addicted as we are to national vanity, subjected as we are to non-stop flattery by cynical politicians. After all many Americans actually believe that the Soviet Union fell because a nice old guy made some stirring speeches. The notion that the Russians have their own history is too great a reach. Fog in the channel. Continent cut off.

Quote of the Day

“A perceptive observer once said that fascist Italy was run like a great newspaper, and run—what is more—by a great journalist: one idea per day, competitions, sensational stories, a clever and pervasive drawing of the reader’s attention to certain facets of social life which have expanded beyond measure, a systematic distortion of the reader’s understanding in pursuit of certain practical goals. Truth to tell, fascist regimes are regimes based on publicity.” —Walter Benjamin

The Literacy Project

People tell me they have no time to read, what with the demands of work and family. I can readily sympathize with that. I’m well aware that my own very peculiar style of life, partly chosen, partly enforced by circumstances, gives me far more time to study the world than those who, to use the inevitable expression, have a life. On the other hand, Americans, who are said to be inordinately busy, nevertheless make enough time to spend several hours a day watching television.

As the lately late Neil Postman used to say, whatever Americans are, watching television is what they do. And whatever the entertainment value of this experience, it is a lousy substitute for literacy if the object is to understand what’s going on. For that, not even Cable suffices. One requires PaperView. Indeed, several research efforts have demonstrated that television news actually makes its viewers more ignorant. The more hours of exposure to the cheesy mix of entertainment and propaganda that is television news, the less one actually knows. But I don’t think that these stultifying effects result solely from the intentions of the corporations to deceive and cheat, although thinking of Fox or NBC as being in the information business is like thinking of Frito-Lay as being in the nutrition business. The root of the problem is that the medium itself, though admittedly a good way to discover how things look, is an extremely inefficient way to convey what they mean. As demonstrated by almost any PBS talkfest, thought and video are largely immiscible. The sauce always breaks. Much as there is no negation in dreams, there are no ideas on the tube. But these observations are not widely disputed. Everybody has nice things to say about reading. There is, however, a qualitative as well as a quantitative literacy deficit. Grown up Americans don’t read grown up books.

As the ancient psychology had it, one is intelligent by contact with the intelligible. Unfortunately, the opposite also obtains. The stupid stultifies, while serious prose is a prosthetic that temporarily augments our normally feeble mental powers. It is an unremarkable aspect of the natural history of our species that a small caste does the thinking for the others, much as the queen does all the egg laying in the hive; but it is very important that the higher workers don’t shirk their responsibility to process serious ideas on a regular basis.

Civics

In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt maintained that political activity is an intrinsically valuable dimension of human life, not just an unavoidable duty or mere practical necessity. A more muscular—or visceral—celebration of politics appears in Carlin Barton’s recent Roman Honor: the Fire in the Bones. Both books look back with more or less overt nostalgia to the political culture of pre-Alexandrian Greece and pre-imperial Rome, an irony, really, since the choicer spirits of those periods became fed up with politics themselves, repelled by its mendacity, brutality, and sheer noise, and opted instead for art, philosophy, or religion. For my part, I feel I certain sympathy for those involved in this internal migration, though I don’t think that disengagement was any more moral defensible then than it is now. Besides, I don’t think the flight from the public life was motivated solely by a hatred for politics. The alternatives were simply more attractive.

It is very, very easy to mutter, “Politics, we hates it!” and turn to more rewarding pursuits, and that’s all the more the case because so many of us have rather limited expectations for the possibilities of politics. We’re not the ones who thought that it is desirable or even possible to impose a New World Order on the unwilling or bring the Millennium through cultural war. We weren’t trying to make water run uphill. We were handicapped by a certain optimism, believing that commonsense measures at home and abroad could suffice because underlying trends really weren’t unfavorable. Domestically, we saw no challenges that could not be met by pragmatic measures well within the American political tradition. Wealth, we understood, is never created by ideological formulas but by human effort and technological progress. In foreign affairs, we recognized that American hegemony would be temporary, but we believed that the inevitable relative decline of our power didn’t have to involve either military defeat or national decadence, that our time of responsible and honorable stewardship could lead to a more lawful and humane world if we could only avoid arrogance and paranoia. We thought we could have been a blessing, and that that would have been an altogether better outcome than a ten-year stint as suzerain of Uzbekistan.

On a personal level, it is hard for individuals who already possess a sense of their own identity to pursue politics with passionate intensity. Unwounded in the tender places of our self-regard, we just aren’t interested in seeking solace in the pornography of patriotism. It isn’t exactly original to point this out, but the folks who dream of Universal Dominion, Magic Fortresses, Invincible Weapons, and even War in Heaven are the weak and powerless. If you are at least partly content with your merely human, but real capabilities, fantasy politics has little appeal.

In a rational world, the important things would be playing with your kids, reading Ovid, improving your short game—anything but politics. In the real world, unfortunately, fantasy rules and therefore politics.

Furthermore

By the rules of statistical inference, the judgment of particular cases must be modified to reflect underlying probabilities. Where circumstances are abnormal, estimates must be altered. In 1980, for example, it might have been reasonable to assume that Senator Wellstone was the victim of an accidental airplane crash. In 2002, it is much more likely that he was murdered to ensure that the Republicans would regain control of the Senate—since the right controls the CIA, the FAA, and the Justice Department, the findings of official commissions aren’t relevant one way or the other to guessing what really happened. Similarly, we are justified in thinking it was the government that spread sexual innuendoes about Scott Ritter in the run up to the Second Iraq War at a time when he was correctly asserting that Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. We know, after all, that the right celebrates the heroism of those who break laws in the name of higher purposes or mere personal loyalty—the Bush administration is full of people who demonstrated their love of intrigue during earlier tours of duty under Nixon and Reagan. Why should anybody expect better of such people at a time when the Courts and the Press are in the bag?

The $64 Question Answered

Politics is about hating; and grownups understand how easy it is to become addicted to the pleasures of anger, especially during elections. Precisely because we all understand this, it’s easy to represent a perception of real danger as mere hysteria. In the current conjuncture, the pundits deploy this meme every time somebody raises their voice against the regime in Washington. Hence the numerous denunciations of Bush hating, mostly emitted by voices still squeaky from eight years of Clinton hating. But are these guys right? Is the situation of 2004 the same as the situation of 1992 with signs reversed? The short answer is No.

I’m perfectly willing to entertain the possibility that I’m wrong in everything I see about me, but at some point self-doubt is simply self-indulgent. In normal times it makes sense to hold your own beliefs lightly because in normal times politics is about ways and means, not about fundamental values. We live in a revolutionary situation. The current regime holds both international and constitutional law in contempt as a matter of policy. As every nation on earth has learned, America’s word is worthless since we do not honor treaty obligations if we find them inconvenient. The Bush administration is obviously quite willing to lie and kill for principles conveniently indistinguishable from private interests, and it certainly has no shame in manipulating a cowardly and ignorant population by fear and propaganda. The world despises us for very good reasons, and one of these days it is going to find a way to get even with us for our arrogance and unintelligent selfishness.

In retrospect it’s all going to be very clear, I’m afraid, though the increasingly anguished complaints of “hysterics” such as Chalmers Johnson, Arthur Schlesinger, Paul Krugman, George Soros, Immanuel Wallerstein, Joseph Steglitz, Kevin Phillips, and Hans Blix are unlikely to be heard for the time being by a nation of frogs who are already, if not completely boiled, at least al dente.

A Typical Medieval Empire

One of Henry the Second’s biographers referred to that monarch’s ramshackle collection of kingdoms and duchies as a “typical medieval empire.” For me, the phrase perfectly captures a certain characteristic kind of political ambition. Henry—Peter O’Toole in the movie versions—used all his considerable talents and energy to create and maintain an utterly artificial state that could not survive his departure from the scene. Indeed, the empire began to come apart even before he died, as his sullen and treacherous son, Anthony Hopkins—Richard the Lionhearted in the reality version—revolted against his helpless, senescent father. The current American Imperium certainly has a better foundation than Henry’s operation, rooted as it is in fundamental, if temporary, technological and economic advantages rather than the contrivances of a single ruthless Norman. But ours is a typical medieval empire in one important way. No Secret Name enlivens this particular Golem: it runs on batteries that cannot be recharged. The ambitions of its proconsuls and propagandists are as mediocre as the High Civilization of franchised burger joints and nail care salons to whose greater glory these thugs and pundits have, for the time being, dedicated themselves. Empire building is a failure of imagination.