Rimbaud by Edmund White

What must be underlined is that in 1875 Rimbaud bade farewell forever to literature. He didn't write it and he didn't even read it from from now on to the end of his life. He looked back on his years of creativity (from the age of fifteen to nineteen) as shameful, a time of drunkenness, a period of homosexual scandal, of arrogance and rebellion that led to nothing. He was desperate to be a success- at anything, more or less. First he tried poetry and abandoned it when he could get no one to look at A Season in Hell. He then tried languages, which he could use as a traveler, a businessman, an interpreter. He tried to turn himself into a pianist- and gave that up quickly. He had no bona fide skills- just genius, which no one seemed to appreciate- so he turned to gunrunning, dealing in import-export, exploration, and writing about it (but in the driest possible way). Since he'd failed as a writer he rejected all bohemian values and longed for the sort of respectability and financial gain that his mother would admire...

But Rimbaud's legend has been amazingly long-lasting, self-contradictory, and widespread, far more vigorous that the posthumous reputation of Verlaine, for instance. Perhaps obscure poets (and Rimbaud invented obscurity) become more renowned than transparent ones since only the obscure need interpretation- that is their lasting appeal both to scholarly exegetes and adolescent mystics. In Rimbaud's case he also had his reputation as a teen rebel going for him- his outrageous arrogance, his photogenic looks, his extreme impertinence, his aberrant sexuality, his definitive renunciation of art at age nineteen and his sudden, bold departure for Africa.


He also had a devoted promoter in Verlaine.


To his associates in Harar, Rimbaud spoke of his years with Verlaine either not at all or scornfully. When his boss Bardey, for instance, asked him about his time in London, he dismissed it as "a period of drunkenness". And when another curious colleague in Africa asked him about his career as a poet, Rimbaud said, "Hogwash"-it was only hogwash." The word in French he used was rincure, an unusual one that comes from the word for "rinsing" and means "dishwater" or "slops" and is even used for "bad wine". Quizzed about the poets in his past, Rimbaud once told his boss that he'd known "those birds" rather well; Bardey claimed that Rimbaud once showed him a letter from Verlaine and said that he was sending his old friend a message "to leave me the hell alone"( Foutez-moi le paix!").

Verlaine, despite the contempt and lack of contact with Rimbaud, remained faithful to his genius. In 1883 he published three pamphlets called The Accursed Poets ( Les Poetes Mudits) about Rimbaud, Mallarme, and Tristan Corbiere. All three, now recognized as among the giants of their day, were unknown when Verlaine decided to write about them. The text about Rimbaud was especially courageous since it might have dredged up the scandals of the past: the trial, the imprisonment, his immoral relations with Rimbaud, the divorce. Bitter and angry and derisive towards Rimbaud in the years 1975 to 1880, Verlaine now spoke about him with affection and admiration. In the pamphlet Verlaine reproduced several of Rimbaud's poems, which many people in literary Paris were reading for the first time. They were stunned. As Edmond Lepelletier wrote, no one had very favorable memories of the boy they'd met fifteen years before. All they recalled were his beastly manners and the high opinion he had of himself: "The quotations that Verlaine gave were like a revelation." Without Verlaine's efforts Rimbaud would be just a footnote in the history of a fogotten literary movement, Zutisme.

Murdoch Comes To America by Michael Wolff

There's levels and levels of editing", Murdoch will tell me incredulously after an early tour of the Wall Street Journal's newsroom. "Every story gets edited about five times. Then it goes down to Princeton, where they put the paper to bed, there's 150 people there and they say, 'We do everything in the final edit to make sure everything is absolutely right and check the sources and stuff.' And I thought. 'Oh my God, it's a wonder anything ever gets in the paper or on time."


This has been a consistent disconnect- what American journalists think of when they think of the news and what Murdoch thinks about news. To Murdoch, even the word tabloid is misunderstood. "Tabloid" in the Murdoch context is an idea of immediacy, sharpness, efficiency, and emotion- it's news at its most visceral and powerful and entertaining. The craft, and it is a high craft, is compression. Necessary and vital compression: The tabloid tradition in Britain and Australia derives in part from newsprint rationing after the First and Second World Wars...


"Tabloid" in the modern U.S. context- to most people at the Journal , certainly- is about celebrities and gossip. It's faux news. Tabloidism is a modern journalistic illness, a virus spread most of all by Murdoch himself.


But Murdoch is, more accurately, not a modern journalist but the last representative from an era when a newspaper was its own advertisement, when it had to sell itself. Newspapers as sellers of news- as loud, unsubtle, rude instruments, as midway-type entertaiment (games of chance, horoscopes, funny pages)- were, of course, the American form too. The Hearst and Pulitzer empires were built on such papers. Any city with two or more papers fighting it out was certain to have a version of carnival news: cheaper (cheaper to produce, cheaper to buy), blunter, louder.


Then American papers- American news- turned orderly and genteel. This happened as newspapers, feeling television's competition, figured out a new business model: monopoly (largely by absorbing secondary papers). And then the big chains- Gannett, Knight Ridder, Tribune Company, Advance- replaced local owners. What's more, the American city as a working-class redoubt was transmuted into ghettos and suburban flight. The newsstand, and with it the battling urban evening newspaper, died. But a newspaper controlling its geographic position- not so much the city as its piece of the great expanding suburbs- had a monopoly on local ads. In a single-newspaper market, local advertisers often had no alternative but to advertise in the single paper. So a newspaper's best strategy was to be sedate, mannerly, uncontroversial- to offend no one, and not to call attention to the fact that it has monopolized the market, which it would certainly do if it screamed and bullied.


The dominant news voice in the United States has become a network television voice. News is now a serious, weighty, basso profundo affair, delivered by men of impeachable integrity and, relatively speaking, zero personality. News, bland news, self-important news, suddenly defined a kind of respectability and upward mobility. For the middle class, Walter Cronkite rather than Willian Randolph Hearst or a chain-smoking city editor came to represent the news...


Arriving in New York in the early seventies, Murdoch- whose papers are in markets where television news is hardly a factor, and are are still staffed by working-class reporters- is struck by one overpowering sense of the market: American news is lazy, stultifying, pickle-up-its-ass, boring. This suggests, to a man who has spent twenty years selling news in some of the most competitive news markets in the world, great opportunity.

Murdoch himself may have soured on and been disaffected with Britain, but Britain embraced his Sun. Its tone is pitch perfect. It is so spot-on that it effectively revolutionizes the form itself- in modern Britain, the tabloids become the most powerful media, breaking stories, setting the agenda, electing politicians, changing the culture. To question the form means you're standing on the sidelines. Questioning it, turning up your nose at its cultivated noxiousness, its calculated down-marketness, would make you something like an intellectual arguing against television, or a sixties parent decrying rock and roll.

The Sun and the News of the World are what he somehow hopes to bring to the United States. The size of his dream is disconcertingly huge- to be able to create a national tabloid with the success and impact of the Sun on a U.S. scale would be massive. And yet, judging by the incredibly boring newspapers in the United States, it seems almost like a no-brainer

Such sales as the Sun and the News of the World are having in the United Kingdom are dependent, however, on working class men (ideally with the same interests, i.e. soccer) who buy papers, and newstands where they can buy them. The absence of those factors in the U.S. market is an indication of how little Murdoch knows...In a car culture, in the great rolling suburbs, the only place the middle class gets to truly eyeball the cover of a periodical is in the supermarket. And all the middle-class people doing this eye-balling are women.

The Murdoch formula- his tabloid magic, his working-class insouciance, his badgering and bullying- is for men. The aggressiveness, the girls, the sports, the jokiness, the news- is for men.


Supermarkets in America do not really sell newspapers. Supermarkets sell magazines. And tabloids, aka "the tabs". In the seventies, the American tab is a magazine's newspaper hybrid- it fits into the supermarket checkout rack- that merges two publishing genres: the fanzine (with slavish attention to celebrities) and the fantastical (accounts of aliens and grotesques and deviants with only the barest pretense of being factual). Murdoch's idea of a tabloid as a media property that could become a powerful working class institution comes face to face with the American reality that a tabloid is a product that defines not only its readers' lack of standing but that of its owners. This is confounding and frustrating to him- and significantly, an entirely different business and cultural climate from any he's ever been in. He has no background in soft celebrity gossip targeted at women.

It's important to keep in mind how pre-modern Murdoch is. He's a fifties guy. A guy's guy. From an era when guys talked about guy's stuff.

Now comes the stubbornness and the relentlessness and the conviction that he can do whatever it takes. That, going forward, is the important thing. You set something in motion and then you try to control it. Doing it is what defines you. He remains committed to the tabloid model, unable to see beyond it, believing that the visceral impact of tabloidism has to prevail- and, indeed, finally will, on the Fox network and on Fox News.

Shakespeare's Wife By Germain Greer

All this, in common with most of this book, is heresy, and probably neither truer nor less true than accepted prejudice. Ann Shakespeare cannot sensibly be written out of her husband's life if only because he himself was so aware of marriage as a challenging way of life, a 'world-without-end bargain'. The Shakespeare wallahs have succeeded in creating a Bard in their own likeness, that is to say, incapable of relating to women, and have then vilified the one woman who remained true to him all his life, in order to exonerate him. There can be no doubt that Shakespeare neglected his wife, embarrassed her and even humiliated her, but attempting to justify his behavior by vilifying her is puerile. The defenders of Ann Hathaway are usually derided as sentimental when they are trying simply to be fair. It is a more insidious variety of sentimentality that wants to believe that women who are ill treated must have brought it upon themselves. The creator of Hero, Desemona, Imogen and Hermonione knew better. Ann might say like Lady Macduff:

I have done no harm
I am in this earthy world, where to do harm
Is often laudable, to do good sometime
Accounted dangerous folly. Why then, alas,
Do I put up that womanly defence
To say I have done no harm? (iv ii 75-80)

So Damn Much Money by Robert G. Kaiser

(Gerald S.J.) Cassidy agreed that the weak and poor "have less representation" in modern Washington. He also agreed that money interests can set a legislative agenda that flouts the public interest but serves their narrow purposes. He has a favorite example of this, one that brought out the old 1960's liberal that sometimes lurked beneath Cassidy's $4,000 suits: the Bankruptcy Abuse Preventiobn and Consumer Protection Act of 2005, a project of the banking and credit card industries.

Enacted in April 2005, the act made it more difficult for consumers to evade paying their debts by declaring personal bankruptcy. Consumer groups and academics argued that the law would create unfair new burdens for families forced into bankruptcy by unexpected medical expenses or the loss of a job, but proponents were not deterred. Indeed, the final version of the law forced debtors to repay their credit card debt before thet paid child support or alimony.

Cassidy thought it was "the single worst piece of legislation from a public policy point of view that passed in recent years...Here you have a group of people that are essentially unrepresented- those who might go into bankruptcy- and you have the banks, the credit card companies, driving the whole issue. They came up wih a system that essentially turns people into paupers. That it could pass with the margins it passed by [ 303-126 in the House, 74-25 in the Senate, with lots of Democratic support] is absolutely stunning. You look at the amounts of money that were spent on that, it was enormous."

The Center for Responsive Politics in Washington, an independent group that studies politics and money, calculated that the banks and credit card companies gave $40 million to the campaigns of members to promote the law over fifteen years. During the five years before the vote, the eighteen Senate Democrats who voted for the bankruptcy bill recieved, on average, $51,000 in campaign contributions from banks and credit card companies. Democratic senators who voted against th bill had recieved an average of $20,200.

In early 2008, the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) confirmed the realities with a brazen display of public pique.

Congress had just approved an emergency "stimulus package"- legislation intended to persuade voters that the government was doing something to try to head off a recession. The largest part of the package gave a tax rebate-cash- to most taxpayers in the hope that recipients would spend it and thus stimulate the economy. The home builders had pushed several ideas they thought should be included in this package, including tax breaks for builders and expanded authority for State governments to issue tax-free bonds to finance cheap home mortgages.

The Senate Finance Committee drafted a version of the stimulus legislation that included some of the home builders' ideas- gravy for themselves, obviously. But the final version of the bill dropped those provisions. The president of the NAHB then announced that its PAC would stop giving money to all politicians. BUILD-PAC was the seventh-biggest business PAC; it had given $1.5 million to candidates since the beginning of 2007 and had more than $825,000 in the bank, ready to be donated. The president's statement made clear the home builders frustration: "More needs to be done to jump-start housing and ensure the economy does not fall into recession" The suspension of political contributions "will remain until further notice."

The statement raised eyebrows all over Washington. The NAHB had broken one of the cardinal rukles of the game. "Lobbies like to pretend that congressional action and their donations arn't tied," observed Melanie Sloan, executive director of a watchdog group called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "But the home builders just confirmed that they are."

The home builders' suspension of contributions lasted just ten weeks. During that time housing legislation became a hot item in the House. The Banking Committee drafted a bill intended to stimulate the moribund industry. The NAHB announced that it had a new priority for this legislation, a $7,000 tax credit for first-time home-buyers. The House embraced this idea, including it in its housing bill. At the end of April, the NAHB resumed making political contributions. "Our message has been heard." said Ed Brady, an official of the association's PAC.

The home builders took on a challenging goal- to persuade Congress to act affirmatively on their behalf. One of the maxims of the lobbying business is that affirmative action in your own interest is always harder than blocking a proposal that helps somebody else. Managers of hedge funds and private equity funds confirmed this in 2007 and 2008.

These investment funds operate as partnerships, and pay low taxes. In 2007 Charles Rangel of New York, then the new chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, proposed a simple change in the tax code that would have raised the tax paid by hedge and equity fund managers on their earnings, from 15 to 35 percent. The 15 percent, less than most working Americans pay on their income, was based on loophole that allowed these managers to define their earnings as capita gains (normally money earned on investments held for a year or longer) rather than ordinary income. These were people who earned some of the biggest salaries paid in America. Rangel proposed, in effect, to close their loopholes.

Rarely if ever had an industry responded so dramatically to a percieved threat in Washington. The Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks these numbers, found that the hedge funds, and private equity funds, and investment firms and their associations jacked up their spending on Washington lobbying from less than $4 million in 2006 to $20 million in 2007. The same category of interests increased political contributions to candidates from $11 million to nearly $20 million from 2005-6 to 2007-8.

Rangel's plan was blocked. Its most effective opponent was the congressman's fellow Democrat from New York, Charles Schumer. He became the investment industry's leading advocate in the Senate, a role that benefited him in his job as chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which collected millions from investment company executives while Schumer staved off legislation the industry opposed.

Long before Rangel proposed the tax change, Schumer was arguing against any federal regulation of hedge funds, at a Judiciary Committee hearing in June of 2006, in particular. This episode caught Gerry Cassidy's attention and stimulated liberal instincts: "It was the damnedest thing I ever heard of...It's mind boggling that you can have a force like hedge funds in the market, have it be unregulated, and have members defending it being unregulated." If a liberal Democrat had argued in favor of deregulating an important segment of the financial markets in the 1960's or 1970's, the idea "would have been laughed out of town. Now it happens and guys run to the committeee to defend it. It's just a remarkable change...."

As Senator Bob Dole said in 1982: "Poor people don't make campaign contributions."

Masters and Johnson by Thomas Maier

Their closest aide, Dr. Robert C Kolodny, who worked for two decades with them and coauthored several books and medical articles, considered writing a biography of them and asked extensively about the origins of their partnership. Only after hours of conversation with Bill, who he considered his mentor and friend- and after comparing it with Gini's version- did Kolodny gain an understanding of what transpired.

"Bill made it very plain to her, fairly soon after she took the job, that being sexual partners was a requirement," Kolodny said. "Bill saw it as a consensual involvement. He indicated that he had been the instigator and Gini agreed with that. But Gini percieved it, as she put it, as a matter-of-fact, expected part of the job. And my suspicion is that had she not gone along with this, she might have not been employed too much later. I bet she knew that and sensed that." Bill envisioned a "blueprint", as Kolodny called it, in which his female associate would engage in sex with him, as a way of further comprehending all that they were learning through observation. He exacted this demand early in their working relationship, when Gini was still essentially a nondescript figure hired off the street. For all her [subsequent] insights, she was still [then] no more than a friendly paper-pusher with some typing skills, with whom he treated lightly until he was sure she would go along with his plans. If Gini "opted out of that", Kolodny realized she "would have been replaced".

In the late 1950's, "that early in their work together, she had made no significant contributions," Kolodny explained. The sense of Gini's invaluableness to their work arrived only after this private pact was reached. Bill believed, naively and erroneously, that his concupiscence could be contained to the lab. Despite their working dinners, Bill offered no pretense at romance. He seemed oblivious to his own wedding vows to Libby, and to Gini's courtship with Judge Noah Weinstein. No one would ever find out, he urged, if they kept this secret between themselves. "I don't think either one of them felt it was a romance," Kolodny said of their beginning. "It was pretty much pure sex".

Decades later, Gini paused for a moment when told of Kolodny's recollection, as if she'd heard an unpleasant truth. Because this version varied so much from the official version Masters and Johnson portrayed to the world, because it revealed so much more than she'd ever said before to friendly questioners, or to the version she had told her children and parents, or tried to convince herself, Gini seemed taken aback. Kolodny was Bill's friend, someone with whom she didn't always agree and often argued. The emotion in her voice revealed a longtime hurt. "Bill did it all- I didn't want him", she insisted about his subtle depredation, her normally modulated voice tinged with anger about the origin of their sexual relations. "I had a job and I wanted it."
"It might have been sexual harassment, but I hadn't really thought about it that way back then," she conceded. "He was a senior medical person."

In the late 1950's, newly hired secretaries didn't accuse the hospital's top-ranking physicians of sexual indiscretions. Many didn't say no to whispers over dinner. And if these women didn't agree to stir it up after highballs, their day jobs often abruptly ended, either by quitting or getting a pink slip at week's end. Gini had enrolled at Washington University to build up her life after two wrecked marriages and with two kids in tow. She wanted and needed to find a new life for herself through education. She said she couldn't afford to throw it away. Forced into compliance by personal circumstances and the tenor of her times, Gini didn't act offended or recalcitrant in having sex with Bill. She accepted overtures without complaint. "No- I was not comfortable with it, particularly," she insisted. "I didn't want him at all, and had no interest in him. I don't know how to explain it...I was in an emergency situation and the perks kept coming along."

The Ash Wednesday Supper

Giordano Bruno wrote this dialogue in 1583 while staying in London as the guest of Michel de Castelnau, Lord of Mauvissiere, the French King Henry III's ambassador to the Court of St. James. It is patterned after Plato's Symposium which he probably knew from its Latin translation made in the 15th century by Marsilio Ficino. The scene of action is a dinner party in Whitehall hosted by Sir Fukle Grenville, a close friend of Bruno's patron, Sir Philip Sidney.

Remarkably, Bruno made a stinging condemnation of European colonialism, before contrasting the effects of his own philosophy with the effects of capitalist greed. At the time, England had only begun its colonial explorations; Bruno was writing primarily about Spain and Portugal. He must have read the denunciations of Spanish cruelty in Mexico made by the Dominican Batolome de Las Casa- most probably in Naples, where the Dominicans knew a thing about Spanish oppression themselves.

"Now, in order for you to understand the present business and its importance, I set for you the premise to a conclusion that will easily be proven shortly: namely, that if Tipys is praised for having invented the first ships and crossed the seas with the Argonauts, if Columbus is acclaimed in our own time for being "the Tipys who uncovered new worlds", what is to be done with him who has discovered the way to climb the heavens, traverse the circumference of the stars, and leave the convex surface of the firmament at his back?

The Tipys of this world have found the way to disturb the peace of others, violate the ancestral spirits of the regions, muddle what nature had kept distinct, and for the sake of commerce redoubled the defects, and add further vice to the vices of each party, violently propagating new follies and planting unheard-of madness where it had never been before, concluding at last that the stronger are also the wiser, displaying new sciences, instruments, and arts by which to tyrannize and murder one another, so that the time will come, thanks to those actions, that by the oscillation of all things, those who have thus far endured to their misfortune will learn, and will be able to give back to us, the worst fruits of such pernicious invention."

Bruno vaingloriously ( as was typical of scholars at that time) contrasts this with his own philosophy ( termed 'The Nolan") which was a re-working of St. Augustine's idea that 'The centre of the Universe is everywhere, the circumference nowhere' , based on recent astronomical observations which were, none-the-less, still unsupported by mathematical proofs.*

"The Nolan, to cause entirely contrary effects, has released the human spirit and intellect, which were confined in the narrow prison of the turbulent atmosphere; where they scarcely had the capacity to look, as through certain holes, upon distant stars, and whose wings were clipped, so that they could not fly through the veil of these clouds and see what is really to be found above...Now behold him, who has crossed the air, penetrated the heavens, wandered among the stars, and passed beyond the margins of this world, made to vanish the imaginary walls of the first, eighth, ninth, tenth, and as many other spheres as you would like to add, according to the reports of vain astronomers and the blind visions of the vulgar philosophers; [who] thus, in the presence of all sense and reason, with the key of clever investigation has opened the cloisters of the truth, that can be opened by us, stripped naked the covered and veiled truth, given eyes to moles, enlightened the blind who could not focus their eyes to admire their own image in these many mirrors appearing on all sides, loosened the tongue of the mute who could not and dared not express their innermost feelings, healed the lame who could not make that progress with their spirits that our ignoble and dissolute flesh cannot make, and makes them no less present than if they were dwellers on the Sun, the moon, and the other known stars...These flaming bodies are the ambassadors who proclaim the glory and majesty of God, Thus we are moved to discover the infinite effect of the infinite cause, the true and living footprint of infinite vigor, and we have a teaching that tells us not to seek divinity outside ourselves, but within, more deeply inside us than we are ourselves."

* Like Thomas Hobbes, Bruno believed that "squaring the circle" would unlock the mathematic secret of the motions of the planets.

Ingrid D. Rowland; Giordano Bruno; Heretic & Philosopher; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, N.Y.,2008

[Needless-to-say, unlocking the secrets of the universe- a work still in progress- has not thoroughly dampened the enthusiasm nor much of the cruelty of modern colonialists, particularly those' who have thus far endured it to their misfortune'. But it is notable that no one suggested that a man like Albert Einstein be burned at the stake as was Bruno, though he might easily have been caught up in the exterminating regime of the Nazis.]

The National Security Ideology

"Observers preoccupied with delineating the differences between this Republican President and that Democratic one may uncover any number of small truths while missing the big ones. Identifying the big ones requires appreciation for continuity rather than change. It's not the superficial distinctions that matter but the subterranean similarities.

President Bush's critics and his dwindling band of loyalists share this conviction: that the forty-third president has broken decisively with the past, setting the United States on a revolutionary new course. Yet this is poppycock. The truth is this: Bush and those around him have reaffirmed the pre-existing fundamentals of U.S. policy, above all affirming the ideology of national security to which past administrations have long subscribed. Bush's main achievement has been to articulate that ideology with such fervor and clarity as to unmask as never before its defects and utter perversity.

Four core convictions inform this ideology of national security. In his second inaugural address, President Bush testified eloquently to each of them.

According to the first of these convictions, history has an identifiable and indisputable purpose. History, the president declared, "has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of liberty". History's abiding theme is freedom, to which humanity aspires. Reduced to its essentials, history is an epic struggle, binary in nature, between "oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right."

According to the second conviction, the United States has always embodied, and continues to embody, freedom. America has always been, and remains, freedom's chief exemplar and advocate. "From the day of our Founding," the president said, "we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth. As the self-proclaimed Land of Liberty, the United States serves as the vanguard of history. Revising, refining and perfecting their understanding of freedom, Americans constantly model its meanings for others around the world. In 1839 the journalist John L. Sullivan declared the young United States s "The Great Nation of Futurity". So it remains today. Within the confines of the United States, history's intentions are most fully revealed.

According to the third conviction, Providence summons America to ensure freedom's ultimate triumph. This, observed President Bush, "is the mission that created our Nation". The Author of Liberty has anointed the United States as the Agent of Liberty. Unique among great powers, this nation pursues interests larger than itself. When it acts, it does so on freedom's behalf and at the behest of higher authority. By invading Iraq, the United States reaffirmed and reinvigorated the nation's "great liberating tradition," as the president put it. In doing so, "we have lit a fire as well- a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power, it burns those who fight its progress, and one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world." Only cynics or those disposed toward evil cold possibly dissent from this self-evident truth.

According to the final conviction, For the American way of life to endure, freedom must prevail everywhere. Only when the light of freedom's untamed fire illuminates the world's darkest corners will America's own safety and prosperity be assured. In effect, what the United States offers to the world and what it requires of the world align precisely. Put simply "America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one" This proposition serves, of course, as an infinitely expansible grant of authority, empowering the United States to assert its influence anywhere it choses since, by definition, it acts on freedom's behalf.

The ideology of national security does not serve as an operational checklist. It imposes no specific obligations. It functions the way ideology so often does- not to divine truth or even to make sense of things, but to provide a highly elastic rationale for action. In the American context, it serves principally to legitimate the exercise of executive power. It removes constraints, conferring upon presidents and their immediate circle of advisers wide prerogatives for deciding when and how to employ power.

Nothing about this ideology, however, mandates action in support of the ideals it celebrates. It doesn't, for example, oblige the United States to do anything on behalf of the people of Zimbabwe or Burma, no matter how heavy the yoke of oppression they are obliged to bear. It certainly does not prevent American policy makers from collaborating with debased authoritarian regimes that deny basic freedoms like Hosni Mubarek's Egypt or Pervez Musharraf's Pakistan. What it does do is provide policy makers with a moral gloss that can be added to virtually any initiative by insisting that, whatever concrete interests might be at stake, the United States is also acting to advance the cause of freedom and democracy.

Postwar presidents have routinely tapped elements of this ideology as a source of authority. America's status as a force for good in a world that pits good against evil has provided a rationale for bribing foreign officials, assassinating foreign leaders, overthrowing governments, and undertaking major military interventions. George Bush did not invent this practice; he merely inherited and expanded upon it."