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2 David Barstow, “One Man’s Military-Industrial-Media Complex,” New York Times, Nov. 29, 2008: 172.
3 Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif.: University of California Press, 1985), 285.
4 Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?” Monthly Review (May 1949). Rpt. In http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/Einstein.htm.
5 Cited in Glenn Greenwald, “There’s Nothing Unique About Jim Cramer,” Salon 13 (March 2009), www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/03/13/cramer.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “Message to Congress on Curbing Monopolies,” April 29, 1938. In John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project (Santa Barbara, Calif.: University of California). http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=15637.
9 Dennis C. Blair, “Far-Reaching Impact of Global Economic Crisis,” Annual Threat Assessment, Senate Armed Services Committee (March 10, 2009), 3. http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2009_hr/031009blair.pdf.
10 Quoted in James Bamford, “Big Brother Is Listening,” Atlantic (April 2006), http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200604/nsa-surveillance/4.
11 Nathan Frier, “Known Unknowns: Unconventional ‘Strategic Shocks’ in Defense Strategy Development,” U.S. Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB890.pdf.
12 George Orwell, The Collected Letters, Essays and Journalism of George Orwell. Vol, 4: In Front of Your Nose, 1945-1950. Eds. Sonia B. Orwell and Ian Angus (Boston: David R. Godine, 2000), 67.
13 Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate, trans. Robert Chandler (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 410.
Acknowledgments
This book could not have been written without Eunice. She watched and transcribed everything from professional wrestling, to reality television shows, to the scenes described in the chapter on pornography. She edited and rewrote passages. She clarified incomplete thoughts, challenged shaky assertions, and added paragraphs that always enhanced the points I was trying to make. She stayed up many nights long after I had gone to bed, reworking sections of the book. Nothing I write is published before it goes through her hands. Our marriage is a rare combination of spiritual and intellectual affinity. “She’is all States, and all Princes, I, Nothing else is,” as John Donne wrote in his poem “The Sunne Rising”:
Princes doe play us; compar’d to this,
All honor’s mimique; all wealth alchimie.
Thou, sunne, art halfe as happy’as wee,
In that the world’s contracted thus.
I am deeply indebted to The Nation Institute and the Lannan Foundation. The support of these organizations permitted me to write this book. I am especially grateful to Hamilton Fish, Ruth Baldwin, Taya Grobow, and Jonathan Schell, as well as Peggy Suttle and Katrina vanden Heuvel at The Nation magazine. Carl Bromley at Nation Books is a remarkably talented and brilliant editor, a fine writer and scholar in his own right, who helped shape and guide this book. In an age when editing seems to be a dying art, he upholds the highest standards of the craft. He loves books and ideas, and his insight and enthusiasm are infectious. It was a privilege to work with him. Michele Jacob, whom I have worked with before, handled publicity and book events with her usual efficiency. Patrick Lannan and Jo Chapman at the Lannan Foundation have been constant and steadfast supporters of my work. It was Patrick, who has done more than perhaps anyone in the country to nurture, promote, and protect great writing, who first gave me Sheldon Wolin’s Democracy Incorporated.
The Reverend Coleman Brown, my professor of religion at Colgate University and mentor, once again guided me through the writing. Coleman generously shared his profound wisdom, at once always humbling and always correct. His voice of compassion and deep insight into the human condition serve to temper the tone of my writing and pull me back from the edge of despair to remind me, and my readers, that good exists and