History is a Nightmare
"History is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake,” said Stephen Dedalus, haunted by the role of religion and rule of a colonial power in Joyce's Ireland.
Lately I’ve been having similar dreams, watching the tape loop when I want it to fast-forward, living in history that I want to leave behind. History is like Freddy Krueger, and the curse of interesting times is upon us. History may repeat itself as tragedy or farce—or in the case of US economic policy, both—but it doesn’t repeat exactly. That’s part of its dreamlike nature.
In the United States we have dreamed up a new Great Awakening, one of those periodic episodes in our history where religious fervor permeates the popular culture and drives public policy. This time around, it happens that our President is the head cheerleader for muscular Christianity, and his Attorney General would have been at home in any of the three previous "Awakenings" going back a few hundred years.
And finally we are getting the New World Order dreamed of by Bush's dad: might makes right. The New World Order is that we will be ordering the world. It’s enough to breed nostalgia for another phrase from the giddy end of the Cold War, The End of History. The architects of our foreign policy might argue that they will help bring about Fukuyama’s triumphalist dream by going into Iraq to confront the legacies of the Ottomans and the Brits and our own pro-Saddam past and the half-measures of Bush I. That would be a nice outcome, but achieving it would truly be making history.
And meanwhile the jihadist threat, as real as 9/11 whether or not it can be tied to Iraq, is proudly grounded in the era of the Caliphs. If this is an awakening from history, it is a rude one.
Local Conditions
Sunny and 71 degrees. Lisa and I ate lunch outdoors at Undercurrent, with Luna leashed to my chair. The Bradford pear tree outside my office window is budding. Spring starts early in North Carolina.
5:00:27 PM 
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