Vulgar Imperialism; A Conspiracy Story

An old story on the new crisis

The literary marketplace is a perfectly functioning laissez-faire economy. This circumstance sustains a certain dilemma for writers. It is not accidental that most of us fail. Getting into print is easier than it used to be. "Word Processing", that oddly pedantic moniker, and "Desk Top Publishing" are weapons in every writer's arsenal. But the market's forces are formidable, and writers generally don't understand imperialism. Like much of the economic expansionism since the Industrial Revolution, media conquests are bloodless, at least initially. I should have been a better student of history. But even before computers and the Internet, I made a foray into publishing, despite an encounter I had with a man who tried to tell me why it wouldn't work. His fears seemed mostly nonsense to me.

He felt he was under some kind of malevolent surveillance "If I thought I was being punished," he would say, grinding his teeth, but then he would trail off before explaining the dread he very evidently felt. John Savaranno was the name he used, admitting to anybody who bothered to talk with him that it wasn't his real name. "Savaranno is a town in Italy," he said.

He didn't look Italian. With sandy hair swept to one side and high aristocratic forehead, he looked more like a Scot or a Brit. He had been living in homeless shelters at least part of the time, but he didn't appear to be an alcoholic. He had let himself go, but not irretrievably.  The clergyman friend who had introduced me to him said John had once made a very large financial contribution to the church. The Presbyterian Church pastored by my friend owned the house I shared with several other people at the time. My friend was returning a favor by finding John a place to stay for a while. It was clear that John was caught in a cul de sac, but I couldn't then imagine who it was he felt threatened him or monitored his activities. Now I know that he was personally involved with, had apparently been born of, the families. My problem is generic, but he had affronted one of the kingpins of the regime.

While I showed John the house, he asked what I did. I was then driving a truck in Seattle. "I deliver appliances," I said. He was still trying to calm down. To keep the conversation going, I added, "It's not a bad job. Five or six evenings a week I can earn a hundred bucks in a few hours, after salesmen have wrangled all day with the customers." I had plenty of time for my real work, learning to write. He dismissed all this with wave of his hand. The gesture seemed that of a man accustomed to more privilege than his present situation.

"Well, you probably sleep pretty well at night," he conceded. He still hadn't taken off his wool coat. The winter rain outside was unpleasant, but even in the house he was always cold. We could talk, when he wasn't pacing around, but he couldn't understand what kept me going. He considered my income paltry. It was enough that I could contemplate starting a magazine, but that idea, when he had probed enough to get it out of me, made him laugh. "You think you can make money in publishing?" He queried.

"Money isn't the issue," I answered idealistically. But he seemed not to have heard.

"I know people in publishing," he said. "I'd sooner be related to a bunch of criminals. They are criminals!"

"There's a lot of tripe being published," I said, "But nobody says you have to read it."

"You have no idea," he said, jabbing an index finger in my direction. "It's insidious! The people who run the business have an agenda that isn't going to be understood until it's too late." He stopped. Paranoia was apparently gnawing at him again. The way his jaw clenched and his lips tightened, it seemed he might attack me. But the battle was internal. Whatever he was thinking involved someone else. When the flush in his face subsided, he said to no one in particular, "Probably I shouldn't have told the old globalist what I thought of him. He didn't care what anybody thought. He didn't have to! And he's been dead for years. But for the others, it was proof I was disloyal."

I thought about the things he said while I made my deliveries. He clearly had an aristocratic perspective alien to mine. Doing anything for money seemed incomprehensible to him. "People with money," he would begin, then withdraw into his thoughts. In his calmer moments, he seemed as though he were trying to find a way to help me. "They were born to it," he finally said. Apparently he concluded nothing he had to offer could give me any idea of how the world works. This discussion began several times, before he elaborated. From the beginning it was clear that, to him, my efforts were irrelevant, even if money wasn't my main objective.

Once when the conversation faltered, I asked if he minded if I put on a recording. He frowned irritably until I handed him the album, then he seemed mildly interested. "Cavallaria Rusticana", he said, and translated, "That's The Country Horseman, isn't it?" Close enough. So he did know a little Italian. My taste for opera apparently wasn't going to shorten his stay. The other people in the house, by then, were getting a little tired of him. He was always turning up the thermostat. One night I came back from my usual jousting in traffic, and it must have been ninety degrees in the house. When I put the vinyl LP on the turntable, and the overture began filling the room, his demons seemed to relent in the melancholy brilliance of the strings. As if it brought back something from the past, he sighed and said, "That's real music, isn't it!" He had apparently been hoping not to be subjected to the music that was currently popular.

A little more than a year later I published the first edition of my magazine on the performing arts in Seattle. The idea was to puff local arts organizations and insert more serious pieces between advertising displays that appealed to the opera/symphony crowd and theater enthusiasts. Advertising sold pretty well, even while the magazine was still in pasteup, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that I enjoyed talking to business people downtown in order to sell it. After the first issue there was a flurry of interest. Since it was intended to be a quarterly publication, all I needed to do was repeat my efforts every three months. The printer was enthusiastic after he got paid. Amazingly enough, almost everybody paid me for the advertising. While still working nights delivering appliances, I started gearing up to write or solicit articles and photographs for the next issue. The opera and symphony organizations were considering my requests to do distribution of the magazine and subscription drives among their patrons. A few people at the local arts commission were startled that I had, almost single handedly, produced something that looked better than the pamphlet they were putting out with a full time office staff and government funding. A combination of things made progress toward the second issue seem more and more unmanageable. The periodicals distributors, I think, finally finished me. They would put my magazine in the racks at supermarkets and news stands for six or seven thousand dollars per release, to draw against sales, of course.

Under-capitalization kills most of the new businesses that start up each year. This is well known and ignored by those who start businesses on the strength of the American dream. I had time to recover financially, and there were only a few people who said I had given up too easily. Of course, I had no real comprehension of how most publications are created and sustained by foundations or media conglomerates. My writing professors had told me I had talent, and I had a strong enough back to earn the money to get myself into print. But, after all, the arts are an area of indulgence in which artists have been able to thrive only through patronage for centuries. My delivery services were still in demand. It wasn't long until I bought two more trucks and hired some help. I could write from my desk while I dispatched drivers by phone. The business started doing pretty well.

It was the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission that made a Republican of me. Everything about my business was regulated by the state. The materials I transported, for whom I transported them, where I delivered them, and what I could charge were all subject to audits and inspections by various officials, and penalties were provided where I failed to comply. The prescribed rates made it easy to underbid. Had it been legal, I would have quickly acquired more contracts than I did. Since I was a new entrant in the competition, it seemed onerous to me that I had to justify every new service and route to a board composed of state officials and over the objections of the representatives of companies long established in the industry. This was a legacy of Roosevelt era regulations that made it possible for trucking companies to start up and subsist. Transportation was a utility. In the thirties, it had been in the public interest to protect tenuous enterprises. Now what they needed was competition from people like me. Well, it was only money. There was enough of it going through my books that I could live on what was left after submitting the forms and paying the bills every quarter.

More than the aggravations of the trucking business, it bothered me that there were few publishers who bought anything resembling what I was turning out. The ones who did used established literary heavyweights or re-issued old books. I thought of trying science fiction, but I couldn't get interested enough to read much of it. I went back to my essays and conventional fiction. Occasionally I sent off manuscripts to various publishers, once in a while getting an interested reply. Getting married helped my state of mind, if not my writing. But my wife couldn't understand why I spent so many hours on something that was obviously doing us no tangible good. Five years later it was still doing us no tangible good, though I had, at her urging, gone back to school and finished my degree. My mother-in-law said when I graduated, "Well, I guess the next step is forward, isn't it?"

In fact, the next step turned out to be oblique. I started a bookstore. State regulations on motor transportation seemed so arcane and protective of established interests that I was ready to try something else. I couldn't give up the trucking business, but before long I was able to pay for my office space on the revenues of the bookshop. By this time my wife was drunk nearly every day. The divorce dragged on for years. She accused me of tax evasion and wrote to IRS. If I ended up in jail, maybe then I would have time to write!

It wasn’t my wife’s fault that I couldn’t get going. The business of writing is tough, but I only wanted to make as much money writing as the average college graduate does driving a bus. I had honed my skills for about fifteen years by that time. I tried to read samples of the various genres that were selling best in my bookshop - soap operas, crime thrillers, and espionage - but I might as well have watched television. I was living a soap opera, considering murder against divorce, and the newspaper was more interesting than fictional intrigue. This was during the Reagan era, about the time he proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars, depending on your perception of the feasibility of a missile defense system that was intended to obviate the Mutually-Assured- Destruction doctrine. Milton Friedman's Free to Choose was flying off my bookshelves as Reaganomics started kicking in. I swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. Strange, though, that Reagan's SDI, which even on the drawing boards helped end the cold war, was a massive government program driven by science and technology on a scale that wasn't even conceivable through private enterprise.

The espionage books I sold were often variations on the James Bond theme - the CIA and Her Majesty's Secret Service subverting the Red menace in time to avert a nuclear holocaust. John Savaranno had provided a different take on British intrigue. He could have written a book. "You don't know what they're doing to this country!" He had said. "World War II was one of their projects. It got a little out of hand, and Hitler, whom they financed to thwart the Germans, could have set them back a hundred years." His story was one of subterfuge going back many generations, but it involved a modern propaganda machine that he said had occupied two floors at Rockefeller Center while an assortment of British spooks, forgers, and artificers of radio and the press worked at getting us into World War II. "Hitler's continental havoc might just as well do to the Americans what it was intended to do to European contenders," he speculated.

My generation was not exempt in this ongoing covert operation. He claimed LSD was something cooked up and hyped in a subversion aimed at the most ambitious baby boomers. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll were going to subdue the American economy for years to come, as college graduates cut their hair and jived through industry and government. Call them a thousand points of vulnerability. If this were the operation, Bill Clinton seems to have worked out extremely well. In this view, the ferment that began on university campuses was not a spontaneous outbreak of juvenile moralism in revolt against the draft, but a movement orchestrated by its financial backers. Long before Newt Gingrich was able to wage a Republican revolution on the basis of a culture war, John told me, "Divide and conquer! That's their main strategy."

"Strategy?" I wondered. "So what is their objective?" It hadn't come to mind yet to ask whom they were.

"The plantation!" He said. He hadn't shaved for several days, and the ire of his words made the tendons stand out in his neck. "You, pick cotton! People are herds of cattle to them." The Antebellum South was an ideal economy from the perspective of an international business elite. It kept raw materials cheap for export and indigenous industry was strangled in the cradle. I began to suspect the environmental movement was financed for some similar reason.

After the trucking business was sold to pay off my ex-wife, it became apparent that the bookstore wasn't making enough money to stand on its own. I sold it too and got a job as a medical assistant. I sank another ten years into my sea of unpublished manuscripts while the Soviet Empire devolved and the Berlin Wall came down. The Russian economy became an experiment in free enterprise. It was going to work - wasn't it? - if the bureaucratic oligarchy, now an oligarchy of organized crime, could be controlled. But who was going to control them in absence of a legitimate state? Germany remained a recalcitrant heavyweight in the European market. Could the German Mark be finessed into Eurocurrency? I had my own currency crisis. Real estate prices in Seattle were pushing rent into the stratosphere. On my wages, I could pay the bills only because I had salvaged the house from my divorce.

It was becoming more obvious that I was not a going to be a literary entrepreneur. My product was in oversupply and dirt cheap. Publishing conglomerates paid millions for books that weren't worth the paper on which they were ejaculated, and a few writers lived like the billionaire industrialists in their novels. The situation for writers in general was that among any throng of craftsmen applying for a few jobs. A book is the ultimate value added commodity. While writers are reduced to shoveling paper fiber into railroad cars, the agents of distant and unapproachable manufacturers sell books in the writers' locale. Sooner or later there isn't even grunt work for the shovelers around home. I had trouble being published in my church's bulletin, because the articles, even there, came from an organization back east.

Competition, interestingly enough, is diminished in this scenario. Choice and quality are also diminished. Readers are free to choose the trash from one mass media conveyor or another. When Walt Whitman printed and sold Leaves of Grass, there were not aisles of glitzy paperbacks in every thoroughfare. Now, four media conglomerates dominate publishing. The Pope seems to be the only one raising his voice against consumerism and the vulgarity of the market. Where was the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission when I needed it? But how are you going to regulate publishing? Put a tariff on out-of-state books? May as well resign to John Jay's maxim: "Those who own the world ought to govern it."

I used to like to read George Gilder. It was indeed inspiring how quantum mechanics on the atomic scale showed that the universe is not fundamentally material, and that ideas, not raw materials or even capital, are the basis of productivity and wealth in the information age. Anybody could be a Bill Gates. That Bill Gates is the son of a powerful corporate attorney in Seattle makes little difference to the theory. But even Bill Gates may not be invulnerable. If you can't keep them down on the farm through the power of the market, or control ideas by bankrolling publishing, there are more expedient means. As my old interlocutor would say, "Divide and conquer!"

Hasn't it ever seemed strange what the culture war in this country has done to the Democratic Party? The constituencies of nut-case academics, sex fiends, and environmentalist druids in what is becoming the party of the jackass seem a little too bizarre. An aging New Left now marches in lock step with guys at the AFL-CIO who wouldn't talk to them for ten years after the Vietnam War. Union bosses are cozy with feminists at NARAL and NOW. What's going on? If you try to follow the money, it leads to public employees unions, the American Bar Association, and foundations, many of them seemingly under the control of lunatics.

Start with the unions. That the labor unions made so little noise about NAFTA is strange enough, but the public employees unions seem bent on self immolation. Does the American Education Association enhance prospects for continuation of its statist revenues by putting the imprimatur on books like Heather's Two Mommies or promulgating revisionist history in a vein that would embarrass propagandists of the old Soviet order?

Then, the bar associations. Trial lawyers make big money on product liability and medical malpractice suits, but it's really a stretch to think they support the ACLU and imperil neighborhoods just to recycle killers profitably through the system. This leaves a bunch of low profile foundations and PACs as the likely source of ideas, or at least the financial backing for ideas, that seem guaranteed to alienate the people who have been the mainstay of the party of FDR, JFK, the labor unions, and Rostenkowski's political machine.

"The counterculture has failed," Newt Gingrich used to say. It hasn't failed at all! It has been the best thing that could have happened to the Republican Party. Marxists are still holding out in American universities, and Democrats have embraced moral and ideological outrages. It gives some credibility to the proposition that stupid ideas are abetted by a cadre of propagandists in order to encourage flight to a conservatism that preserves everything decent and patriotic, if we will just swallow an economic platform along with it, one that had been discredited by history and common sense until it was revived by money flowing into think tanks and publications on the Right. The free-trade party liners lose only a few sheep to the likes of Buchanan and Perot, but trade practices that Japanese protectionists got from us have been working pretty well for them for most of the later half of this century. Would you rather be a Japanese farmer or an American farmer today? Similar practices historically kept foreign competition out of American markets until our industries could compete. Lincoln imposed a 50% tariff on steel imports and printed Greenbacks instead of bowing to the bankers.

George Gilder makes a noble effort in dialogue with the Pope's encyclical, Centesimus Annus, to justify market ideology against the contentious American Catholic Bishops, otherwise known as the fifth column of the Democratic Party. But he is barking up the wrong bureaucratic hierarchy. The bird he's pointing at is a decoy - a diversionary socialism that everybody knows is not viable. The public sector largess of the past thirty years hasn't ended poverty among the poorest Americans or improved education, as is obvious to anybody who isn't employed in civil services. But incentives for scientific research and development on a scale like that of Kennedy's Space Program or Reagan's SDI are the only thing that can conceivably increase the carrying capacity of the earth and support its burgeoning populations. How is that to happen without economic policy that discriminates between loans for infrastructure, research, and development, as opposed to those that build gambling casinos and produce more cinematic execrations of the sort agitating the stew?

Economic regulation along these lines antedates rocket science by about two hundred years. Protectionist trade practices both international and domestic have been used extensively since the colonial era. National banking made a remarkably good servant of financial entities who would be a master race. Now, American high technology can compete in a global economy, but for most of the Southern Hemisphere basic infrastructure, much less industry and technology, will not develop unless comparatively cheap manufactured goods from outside are surcharged or tariffed, providing needed capital and limiting international competition in developing countries, a methodology that will promote domestic trade and enhance international competition in the long term.

Gilder argues with a straight face that capitalism promotes family values. Only in a family, he observes, can a child grow to maturity and be educated in the skills necessary for participation in advanced information economies. There's no need to quibble with that. But can you give me a better analogy than the family for nation states that protect their new enterprises, nurturing them until they can compete in a world of multinational conglomerates, predatory trade practices like dumping, and currency speculation, not to mention hyper-inflation in a stock market that forces even a company like Boeing to lay off twenty five thousand employees in a swoop? Despite orders into the next decade, the performance of the aerospace giant's stock isn't as spectacular as that of Amazon.com, the Internet phenomenon that doesn't manufacture anything and runs continuously in the red. Oh, George! You are a funding member of the Discovery Institute, an organization that has been promoting books and research that discredit Darwin's theory of evolution. The probability of an advanced industrial economy coming about by chance, or through the offices of an invisible hand, is about equivalent to that of the mammalian eyeball having evolved from a one-celled, light-sensitive organism. And social Darwinism is, of course, amoral.

"Why do you think they killed Lincoln?" John had asked me. "Or Kennedy!"

"All right," I finally asked, "Who are they?"

The financiers, Eastern-establishment families, and British banking interests he described are now familiar culprits. They're the Wall Street-London cabal in conspiracy theories on the far Right and the multinational corporations in Left-wing rants we've heard since the 1960s.

So they're taking over. Couldn't they at least do a little better subsidizing the arts! They do have to be careful with Mozart. The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni contain sentiments that were exploited in the French Revolution. I can still afford to go to the opera, once in a while. Usually I have to wait at the box office before a performance to scavenge the tickets of subscribers who telephone when they can't attend, so an organization struggling on endowment funds can re-sell their tickets to late comers like me. Usually a newspaper keeps me occupied until something happens in the box office.

Last time I waited like this, I had plenty to read. The impeachment of President Clinton had moved to the Senate. A party-line vote was going to make it impossible to get the two-thirds majority to convict him, and strangely, his approval rating in the polls remained at high levels. I voted against the baby-boomer-in-chief twice, and his latest escapades had confirmed a feeling I'd had that he was going to be an embarrassment to my generation more damaging than anything Bush or Bob Dole could possibly do. But this thing was really out on the fringe. Henry Hyde couldn't help but appear the puritanical school board moralist from the 1950s. With people like James Carville rushing to the president's defense, you'd think people would turn on him, but a population of graduates of Woodstock couldn't help themselves. It had become mainly an occasion for cynical humor, especially among people going to a performance of Don Giovanni. The virtuosity of the most indefatigable Leporello would be exhausted singing a catalogue aria of Clinton's seductions.

Sometimes the seats obtained in my last ditch efforts can be the best in the house. This evening I ended up at the rail of the balcony, right in the center of the boxes. It was prime turf, something equivalent to the box Lincoln must have occupied on his last night at Ford's Theater. While the orchestra tuned and patrons found their places, a recognizable person seated himself at my elbow. He didn't seem know me, but I could remember this man, if I thought about it for a moment. He must have been about seventy and looked fit. His complexion was suntanned, and his hair, which had grayed, was immaculately groomed. He seemed too composed, a man who obviously traveled - you don't get a suntan in Seattle in January - out for an evening at the opera. He was alone, but not self-conscious. He said good evening with a cordiality that betrayed no remnant of the morbid obsessions that seemed to belong with this face. It had been twenty years, at least, but I remembered now why he seemed familiar but dramatically changed. This was John Savaranno, or whoever he really was. Apparently his connections to power had turned out to be beneficial, not malign, and the families were smiling on him again.

I said hello and looked into his eyes intently.

It kept him engaged. Noticing my newspaper, he said, "That fellow has the right idea, you know."

It took a moment to get his point. I had been reading an article about the Pope's North American tour. "He has a way of getting to the right questions," I said.

"More than that," my old interrogator continued. "Who else do you hear talking about capital controls right now?"

I thought about that for a moment.

He added, "He's going to run into trouble pushing for debt relief."

"I suppose American and European banks aren't going to be able to walk away, given the magnitude of Third World debt," I said.

"Emerging Markets," he replied scornfully, apparently in reference to my dated usage of "Third World". "They're called Emerging Markets now!"

I thought for moment. Developing Nations, Third World, Emerging Markets. "Whatever they're called, we've been hearing for a long time that their debt problem is really our problem. So, what do you think chances are of the Pope and the Anglican bishops being taken seriously on the Jubilee-year debt cancellation they're talking about?"

"It's too late," he said. "The whole thing is starting to burn. Everything depends on what the United States does now. The defaults - Russia, and Brazil - are just the beginning. And Greenspan is pouring gasoline on the fire." He was looking at me as I had him earlier.

Most of these scenarios, over time, proved wrong or were, anyway, delayed. The end is not yet. I changed the subject. "How do you manage to look so robust? Have you been wintering in California?"

"I live much of the year in the Solomon Islands," he answered. He seemed glad to evade, for the moment, the potentialities we had been discussing.

"Is it your work that takes you there?"

He looked at me as he had in my old residence when we talked long ago. Work was still incomprehensible to him.

I might have heard him out, in what I assumed would be something like the impending governmental collapse that James Davidson and his London cohort, Lord Rees Mogg, have been using to sell their books - the coming era of the "sovereign individual" and so forth. But he stopped me after my last leading question. "Do we let the Emerging Markets submerge? The potential of the debt situation to bring down the banks seems to leave no preferential option for the poor, as the Pope calls it."

"This is no time for gloom," he said. "We're here to enjoy ourselves." He gave me a cautious pat on the arm. There might have been a glimmer of recognition in his eyes.

During the overture, I thought of how I might remind him of our conversations twenty years or more ago. It wasn't surprising that he didn't recognize me. A bad marriage and writing for rejection slips for so long had, no doubt, taken a toll. I wasn't alone in my frustrations. Local singers I knew couldn't get a role with this opera company, because New York agents obligate the company to take the new talent they represent in exchange for congenial terms on established artists under their management. Government funding legitimizes Seattle Opera, among other well-connected organizations, in applying for grants from industry and the foundations. It leads to a veritable arts monopoly in the city. It isn't surprising that Mr. Jenkins, the general director, argues both that National-Endowment funds are a very small percentage of the revenues raised by the opera, and that they are, nonetheless, essential. A million dollars just isn't what it used to be.

The man next to me, who had no visible means of support, apparently lived very well. Who had been pursuing him back then? He seemed able to enjoy the performance. He even laughed occasionally. What of his old revulsion for the imperialists' agenda?

During the first intermission I pointed out to him, in the newspaper, remarks the Pope had made in St. Louis. "What do you think he was driving at here? When he started talking about the Confederacy?"

He took the paper out of my hands and read intently for a moment. He looked up to answer, and I could see the old ire pumping blood into his face. It must have been that I was one of the few people, over the years, who had heard him out in his conspiracy rant, that enabled him to remember me. I could see recognition dawn. He paused while people milled behind him. A mummer rose from the boxes in the spacious theater toward the chandeliers. "We have had this conversation before, haven't we!"

"I'm glad things have gone well for you," I said.

"And have you made a million in the publishing business?" He asked, not unkindly, but not really expecting an answer. He fell back with a sigh, momentarily, in his seat, but then leaned toward me again and began, "If you have read any history, you know the Articles of the Confederacy would have made the United States a floating carcass to be dismembered by sharks. What do you think libertarian fools mean when they talk about economic freedom? Freedom from what?"

"A certain degree of autonomy is good, isn't it? 'The powers not explicitly granted,'" I recited, "'are retained by the states.' We seem to have gone to the opposite extreme."

"There are abuses," he impatiently conceded, "But banks and corporations are merging into greater powers than governments. The politicians they can't buy, are swept away."

"It seems it would have been cheaper to buy Clinton," I said cynically.

He erupted again. "Is it an accident that the President of the United States is impeached when the debt crisis is staring him in the face? The global economy is the contrivance of those who want global economic hegemony. The state is the only entity left standing in their way. If the president doesn't lead in writing off debt and reorganizing banking on old terms, and the Malthusians prevail against development, libertarians are going to get their way, and it is going to look a lot like feudalism!"

I guess we weren't going to be able to enjoy ourselves. Believing in progress was becoming easier through seeing it abandoned. "I follow you up to a point," I said, "But I can't see that Bill Clinton has the backbone to fight them. He seems pretty adept at getting in front of whatever parade is already underway."

"I'll tell you this," he said, "Clinton may be compromised in many ways, but he isn't dumb enough to believe his own press releases. There are going to be things that will have to be done. But when the impeachment is over, he will encounter more diversions. They'll find something. Filegate will be revived, or they'll attack him on technology transfers. Clinton, we know, is a politician, but Al Gore is their man!"

The lights went down and the second act began. Of all Mozart's musical dramas this gem, with murder in the first act, and a plot centered on sexual obsession, seemed a most fitting accompaniment to a world careening toward financial holocaust on a joyride that uses the technology that could save us mainly for amusement or exploitation. My mind wandered. I wasn't seeing much of the play. Mozart's music told his story with or without the actors on the stage, or the attention of a few in the audience.

The second intermission came in what seemed like minutes. The lights flared, making me wonder where I had been. I stood with those around me, thinking I didn't feel so well. A stretch would help. In this section of seats one was likely to encounter important people. It was not surprising when the general director of the opera company came past our box. He immediately recognized my accomplice the conspiracy buff. Smiling broadly, he reached to shake his hand. "Good evening Mr. Luce," he said.

My legs were unsteady as I seated myself or fell. Now I was sure I wasn't feeling very well. Everything around me seemed to be red - the upholstery of the seats, the carpet, and the huge curtain draped in the proscenium arch. The chandeliers glittered with hot light, and the radiation fell on me.

Conservatives note a pervasive bias in the media, a seemingly contemptuous slant to the disparagement of their values. Many observers have wondered why this should be the case when the publishing enterprises, television networks, recording studios, film production facilities, and fiber optics networks are owned by financial entities that presumably have a stake in domestic tranquility, even family values as George Gilder would say. Names that come to mind in connection with media empires are often those of wealthy conservatives.  Rupert Murdock is not what you'd call a left-winger. On the boards of directors of newspapers and major television networks are representatives whose interests seem the antithesis of left wing cant. Merrill-Lynch owns the largest interest in Associated Press. The major stockholders of the three largest broadcast networks are Chase Manhattan, JP Morgan, and Citibank. Four oil companies mainly fund PBS, otherwise known as the Petroleum Broadcasting System. Are these entities that should tilt media bias against American traditional values? Against business and the work ethic?!

The culture war may be an operation directed from London and Wall Street or from hell. It hasn't failed. When the global debt crisis breaks the banks and the factions of Western democracies riot, it will be a libertarian triumph. Financial re-organization on the basis of the Pope's moral imperative or any other will be impossible for people who have forgotten the premises upon which legitimate government is based. Moral judgment will continue to be subordinated to the preferences of the financial elite. Already the media by which ideas are conveyed are controlled by those who own the world. They will begin to govern the world when the state is gutted of the ideas that make it an entity powerful enough to stand in their way.