The journalistic and popular cultures draw ever nearer together, and what unites them is the imaginative flight—by now a milk-run—to the top of Mount Olympus from where they look down like gods upon the petty struggles of lesser beings and keen “Give Peace a Chance,” the simple-minded anthem of their kind. “Lord, what fools these mortals be” it seems to the gentle and pacific spirits who have been the tutelary deities to our intellectuals and artists and those who wish to emulate them since the 1960s. Up until the end of the Cold War there was some natural check upon their good-hearted naïveté in the form of a palpable threat from a powerful enemy, but for the last decade the world has obliged our hippie moralists by looking (if you don’t look too closely into its darker corners) like the kind of world where peace and happiness are to be had just by wishing for them.

Little wonder, then, that the re ...

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