As events transpire that are reshaping history in as profound a fashion as the 9/11 attacks many Americans appear numbed out, not sure whether to great the day with hopefulness or fear. The hope is that the Muslim world can embrace democracy from the ground up and the fear is that this will mean trouble in regards to the efficiency of administering our empire. Democracies, after all, are anything but efficient and notoriously difficult to control. Commentary by right wing pundits like Beck, Limbaugh and the rest of the pack make it clear that for them democracy is only appropriate for Americans and/or those who worship Christian America's narrow vision of history. For Republicans democracy apparently means the unhindered ability to make profits, while for the 'independent' white American male democracy extends only as far as the right to unlimited beer and Super Bowl. 

For many Americans fear is the bottom line. As a nation, we no longer know how to manage without it, a lesson carefully taught and assiduously learned over the past couple of decades. Watch this amazing BBC series called "The Power of Nightmare" to find out how it was done. While there, you may review the larger context into which the modern day horror show was crafted in 'The Century of the Self." 

Finally, my thanks to friend Val for posting the following piece by actor/playwright/essayist Wallace Shawn on my Facebook page where, strangely enough, conversations between people I know and do not know continue without cease and only one comment on the events in Egypt has been posted thus far (a joke about the Jews building the pyramids and the demonstrators tearing them down.) Here is a link to Wally Shawn's entire piece called, "Why I Call Myself a Socialist: Is the World Really a Stage?", and here is a short excerpt:

 

Wallace Shawn on the Nation Institute blog,  TomDispatch:

Around 400,000 babies are born on earth each day. Some are born irreparably damaged, casualties of the conditions in which their mothers lived -- malnutrition, polluted water, mysterious chemicals that sneak into the body and warp the genes. But the much more tragic and more horrible truth is that most of these babies are born healthy. There's nothing wrong with them. Every one of them is ready to develop into a person whose intelligence, insight, aesthetic taste, and love of other people could help to make the world a better place. Every one of them is ready to become a person who wakes up happily in the morning because they know they're going to spend the day doing work they find fascinating, work that they love. They're born with all the genetic gifts they could possibly need. Wiggling beside their mothers, they have no idea what's going to be done to them.

In the old days of the Soviet Five-Year Plans, the planners tried to determine what ought to happen to the babies born under their jurisdiction. They would calculate how many managers the economy needed, how many researchers, how many factory workers. And the Soviet leaders would organize society in an attempt to channel the right number of people into each category. In most of the world today, the invisible hand of the global market performs this function.

I've sometimes noted that many people in my generation, born during World War II, are obsessed, as I am, by the image of the trains arriving at the railroad station at Auschwitz and the way that the S.S. officers who greeted the trains would perform on the spot what was called a "selection," choosing a few of those getting off of each train to be slave laborers, who would get to live for as long as they were needed, while everyone else would be sent to the gas chambers almost immediately. And just as inexorable as were these "selections" are the determinations made by the global market when babies are born. The global market selects out a tiny group of privileged babies who are born in certain parts of certain towns in certain countries, and these babies are allowed to lead privileged lives. Some will be scientists, some will be bankers. Some will command, rule, and grow fantastically rich, and others will become more modestly paid intellectuals or teachers or artists. But all the members of this tiny group will have the chance to develop their minds and realize their talents.

As for all the other babies, the market sorts them and stamps labels onto them and hurls them violently into various pits, where an appropriate upbringing and preparation are waiting for them. If the market thinks that workers will be needed in electronics factories, a hundred thousand babies will be stamped with the label "factory worker" and thrown down into a certain particular pit. And when the moment comes when one of the babies is fully prepared and old enough to work, she'll crawl out of the pit, and she'll find herself standing at the gate of a factory in India or in China or in Mexico, and she'll stand at her workstation for 16 hours a day, she'll sleep in the factory's dormitory, she won't be allowed to speak to her fellow workers, she'll have to ask for permission to go the bathroom, she'll be subjected to the sexual whims of her boss, and she'll be breathing fumes day and night that will make her ill and lead to her death at an early age. And when she has died, one will be able to say about her that she worked, like a nurse, not to benefit herself, but to benefit others. Except that a nurse works to benefit the sick, while the factory worker will have worked to benefit the owners of her factory. She will have devoted her hours, her consideration, her energy and strength to increasing their wealth. She will have lived and died for that. And it's not that anyone sadly concluded when she was born that she lacked the talent to become, let's say, a violinist, a conductor, or perhaps another Beethoven. The reason she was sent to the factory and not to the concert hall was not that she lacked ability but that the market wanted workers, and so she was assigned to be one.