Now, the Middle Ages have held a fascination for me ever since childhood—a fascination expressed by my obsessions with fencing and riding, as well as my less-acceptable-in-polite-well-educated-and-sane-company hobbies of strapping on armor and beating my friends senseless with swords and jousting on horseback. I am, in short, what happens to that fat, geeky kid who sat alone in the cafeteria reading his Dungeons & Dragons books after he grows up, gets contact lenses, and gets in shape. Coupled with this, however, I've always had a profound sense of curiosity about the workings of the world, and if the way things are has been inevitable. In other words, what makes the world tick, and if we don't like it, can we take it apart and put it back together again? These tendencies are not very good ones if you're my parents and you'd prefer your kitchen appliances weren't destroyed, but they are helpful in scholarship.

Thus, my Fulbright project. I've always felt oppressed by time: Why do I have to get up for school so early? Why do I have to sit in this cubicle for eight to eleven hours a day? Why is the bar closing when it's only 4 AM? I'm not the only one to ask these questions: In fact, how work-time has come to be organized has been a major topic since people started questioning the Industrial Revolution. Overwhelmingly, the consensus has been that time-work discipline (which has vaguely been held to have something to do with Newton's idea of time as an independent variable) emerged as a result of increasing urbanization in the thirteenth century. In my investigations, I found that medieval people organized their work time according to the ringing of their local churches' bells. Thus, my task: To investigate how, exactly, Frère Jacques knew it was time to sound the matins. The question has more than academic interest: Philosophers from the University of Paris used medieval thinking on time to lay the groundwork for the Scientific Revolution's transformation of human society. . . a process that would ultimately result, seven hundred years later, in my alarm clock so rudely informing me it was time for another day of sitting alone in the cafeteria.

My research is proceeding apace. I'm not always sure exactly where it's going, but it's proceeding. The staff at the Bibliothéque Nationale have at least gotten to know me, as I found out when no less than five of them asked if I had found my laptop power cord after I had accidentally left it there overnight. My satisfactions are threefold: I've found reference to an officer known as a matricularus who was in charge of tending the monastery's clock in some early 13th century records; I accidentally stumbled upon a previously unknown copy of the oldest Italian work on fencing; and I'm pretty sure I'm the only person in the Occidental Manuscripts room at BN Richelieu blasting the Pixies' Doolittle on his iPod. (This last item has nothing to do with medieval history, but I do like the Pixies, and, honestly, sitting alone at a desk all day gets kind of lonely.)

Overall, I've become convinced of several things: The ringing of the church bells, while sometimes organized by mechanical clocks, was not by any means rationalized in anything we could call a "scientific" manner. Rather, we have to look at the ringing of church bells as more of a socially agreed-upon signal than anything like Taylor and the Gilbreths' time-management. On the other hand, medieval people both ascribed great moral value to time-management and taking precise measurements of the transit of the constellations and various heavenly bodies. It is this, in turn, that influenced the Scholastic philosophers. We therefore can't speak of any one unified medieval (or Western) idea of time, but rather a variety of conversations, each of which was dominant at various points in history.

Unfortunately, the division of work time also means that the BN isn't always open, which means I have to find other ways of occupying my evenings. So what have I been doing with myself? The first thing I've learned in France is that no matter where you go, you bring yourself with you. I've taken the opportunity to work on my skills: I've been bucked off French horses, skewered at the oldest continually-operated fencing salle in Paris, working on my French (I can now order lunch!), and, to complement my interest in historical swordsmanship, begun learning stick fighting. But being a nerd in France is somewhat difficult; for starters, the French don't have a concept for the nerd. Alienation is unknown here—all they have is ennui. Everyone has had the same friends and tight social network since they were children. People stop by one another's apartments unannounced with bottles of wine when they're not even trying to sleep with you. Online dating is unknown.

In fact, the French have respect for intellectuals: The supermodel-cum-pop-star who's currently dating the president had a kid with a philosopher for crying out loud. Ergo, while they may think that the Middle Ages were the "bad old days" (thanks to the legacy of the Revolution, medieval romanticism á la Sir Walter Scott never quite took root in France), people love to hear about my thése, and the more pretentious references to Marxist theory and dismissals of how mondalisation has dissolved the lines between work-time and private time I can work in, the better. Now, if I could figure out exactly how to transform these conversations into making these people stop by my apartment with bottles of wine, I might be having more fun...

Never mind the fact that every man, woman, child, dog, and cow in France hates Sarko and is glad to point and laugh now that he and his wife publicly admit their marriage is over: Lagarde's opinion begs the question: Is the American way the best way? Do we want our economic paradigm to be set by billing-happy lawyers? And how did English get to be the language of capitalism, anyway?

Lagarde's position implies the United States has some sort of cultural superiority that translates to a market superiority—which is, of course, its own justification. I beg to differ on both counts. France isn't perfect—the educational system, for instance, is insanely narrow and essentially makes you decide what you're going to do for the rest of your life at the age of 14, and their maternity leave could be better—but they do have little things like a national health-care system. Their idea of "family values" is actually spending time with their families, not spending hours and hours sitting in a car to go at the office to work for hours and hours more. This past week, there was a grève, or general strike, of railway workers who were protesting Sarkozy trying "reform" (or "Americanize"). As much as the strike inconvenienced everyone, do American employees who are getting screwed over (like air-traffic controllers) have any similar remedy?

What's more, I don't see the French economy hurting from working 35-hour weeks. The French system works: People live close to their jobs, they buy food raised by small farmers (who, unlike agribusiness, are sacred in France) in from small family-owned stores, do a lot of walking, and use their ample leisure to go on vacation in the countryside and spend their French-earned Euros on French-made products.

The American way is not the only way, and even if one may point to Excel spreadsheets that say it's more "efficient," human happiness can not be measured quantitatively. The imposition of the "American" way of global capitalism, in fact, makes us all poorer. The demise of the Soviet Union France may, as Cohn points out, find itself leading the left-wing socialist vanguard, but I say this is all for the good. The opposing voice is a necessary thing. (And it's not likely we're going to have a French Red Dawn.) After all, who wants to live in a monocultural gulag of endless hours at the office, sport-utility vehicles, and Wal-Mart-brand processed cheese?

Who is Craig Roberts Stapleton, you ask? Well, he's allegedly the American ambassador to France. You'd never know it, though. The guy couldn't speak a word of French. Heck, he couldn't even pronounce the speech that had been translated for him. Granted, my French is horrible, but I know that if I had been appointed the goddamned American ambassador, I'd have taken a crash course to at least learn to pronounce my speeches.

What's Stapleton's main qualification for the office? He's a Harvard man from Connecticut who had been a co-owner of the Texas Rangers with Dubbya from 1989 to 1998. This is a man from the business world who didn't hold a single public appointment until his buddy was appointed President by the Supreme Court. It's very big-minded of Bush to appoint Harvard types as well as Yale men, but do you think he might, say, appoint someone who could, say, further the country's interests? But then, what do you expect from the guy who asked Jacques Chirac's aide to please speak to his boss in English?

With arrogant assholes like this in charge, no wonder the world hates us and we're losing the war in Iraq.

The ship is a world in itself: It's as tall as an eighteen-story building (fifteen stories of that above the waterline) and weighs 154,000 tons. The future-Nordic architecture (lots of wood, lots of modernist art, some surprisingly good) is like some floating Fritz Lang film: You can start at the top and tour the chapel where you can talk to God, the pilot house where the captain steers the ship, walk down to the state-of-the-art gym, the rock-climbing wall, the artificial wave pool for surfing, the deck of pools (including cantilevered hot tubs); take a glass elevator through the bowels of the ship down to the ice rink and casino; and then go into the "no access area" and take a staircases down beneath the waterline to where the workers live.

As much as the ship personifies excess afloat, it's is even more fascinating if you see analyze it as a system: You put in fossil fuels and enormous amounts of food-and what comes out is a lot of shit and a shitload of profit.

The Liberty (and the cruise industry in general) mirrors the world economy to an uncanny degree. The First World is represented by the vacationers themselves. They've got all sorts-retirees, fat bourgeois families with annoying kids in tow, attractive young couples. They're of all colors and from all nations; if you have the money, you're welcome to come aboard. This is because the system of this self-contained world is set up to do two things: To squeeze as much money out of the passengers as possible and to stuff them as full of calories as cattle at a feedlot. You can literally eat 24 hours a day, seven days a week in everywhere from the ongoing buffet to the three massive dining rooms. None of the food is particularly good-in true McWorld style, there's nothing that hasn't been bought in bulk and canned, preserved, or frozen-but there sure is a lot of it.

The shipboard economy is based on a magnetic swipecard that does the job of a room key, ID card, and wallet. It's linked to a credit card (in fact you have to settle your bill in cash or plastic or they won't let you off the ship) and can be used everywhere from the bars, the onboard shopping mall, the art auctions, and the restaurants. Even with the constant all-you-can-eat buffet, there's a plethora of places to buy food: a Ben and Jerry's, a pizza place, and, of course, about a dozen bars. And, of course, if you have too much money, there's the casino-there was a sign saying they paid out something like two million dollars over the course of the voyage, so you can imagine the amount of cash 4,000 passengers pumped into it.

The Third World exists only to serve the First, and the pecking order of the employees mirrored. Black people from the Caribbean were on the bottom, literally, taking care of cabins and making drinks. Waiters were brown from South America and South Asia and Southeast Asia. Your job status, and presumably pay, directly correlated to how well you speak English. At the bottom were the servants, who work for the (mandatory) tips. At the top of the hierarchy were the white people of northern European ancestry, from the captain (Norwegian) to the multinational cast of the shows, whose most onerous task was having to dance and celebrate at pre-scheduled times and generally maintain the scary Stepford-wife persona of a Human Resources employee.

Don't get me wrong: No one looked like they were being exploited. Everyone serves six-month contracts with two months off. Royal Caribbean goes to great lengths (especially after the $27 million judgment against them in for polluting in the late '90s) and seems like a lovely company to work for-if you don't mind your workplace being your home and prison and having to fit into a happy smiley world of customer service 24-7. Most of the workers are friendly and eager to talk to you-especially about how much they miss their families and how working on a cruise ships was really their best job option.

The ports of call mirror this world of joyful consumerism. The shore excursions planned for San Juan and St. Martin are banal in the extreme, mainly centered around shopping or siphoning money into other companies partnered with Royal Caribbean. (I, of course, am perfectly capable of walking around the former, and finding the nude beaches in the latter, on my own.) The big difference was the day spent at Royal Caribbean's private resort of Labadee, Haiti, which the crew, captain, and promotional literature are careful to refer to as being simply "on the island of Hispanola." This is more than just semantics: You get to drink tropical drinks, snorkel, and sunbathe on a completely Royal Caribbean-controlled resort on a peninsula leased from the Haitian government, protected by a security fence, and never know that you're actually in the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. The natives are reduced to a token presence of drummers, drinks servers, security guards, and bric-a-brac vendors.

But the thing is, as horrifyingly Baudrillardian as that sounds, it's not. You see, this wasn't my first cruise-I had been to Labadee on another cruise (also not one I'd paid for) ten years earlier. The previous time, I had taken a jet-ski tour around the area and been horrified by what I had seen-skeletal men in rags paddling boats in fished-out waters, accompanied by naked kids suffering from kwashiorkor. This time, I took another tour and saw a village that actually had electricity and cell phone service. Royal Caribbean employs more people than they have to, and that, together with direct aid and allowing people to sell their trinkets and beads, has made a world of difference.

I really want to condemn the cruise industry. However, in the end, this sort of global capitalism does wind up making the people of the third world happier, healthier, and more prosperous. It's just not the sort of happiness that we spoiled intellectual children of the First World would go for.

The next morning, I presented myself at the consulate's passport department (which is around the corner from where the Web site says it is because of construction) 20 minutes early for my 9:45 appointment, only to find a crowd pressing against the doors akin to that mobbing the US embassy in Saigon during the troop withdrawal at the end of the war. Most of them didn't have appointments and I did, but it availed me naught: The guard who came to fetch the chosen inside did so in a voice that I can only say did not match his considerable girth. I can only describe this fellow as a "people person." Apparently, I'm supposed to understand his instructions on how to proceed through the metal detector by his grunting in Morse code. I am also apparently supposed to be a graduate of Hogwart's School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, as how I'm supposed to empty my pockets of foreign materials and then walk through a metal detector a room devoid of tables or other surfaces to place said objects without the aid of magical powers eludes me.

The actual room where one obtains visas is plastered with warnings that anyone losing their temper at the clerks will be barred for life from France, the EU, or any former colony thereof. There is a reason for this.

My first stop, after panicked attempt to find my passport, which had somehow migrated from my document folder to my shoulder bag, was the cashier. This, at least, made eminent sense: Since France is a socialist country, you pay first. She asked for my form filled out in black and/or blue pen, in French, in capital letters, and my passport photos, which, as it turned out, were not acceptable, as they have to show BOTH ears and not just one. (I should point out that my ears are pretty similar.) You also have to show her your chest so that she can make sure you're not Jean Valjean. After I put my shirt back on, she gave me the address of a drug store a block away on Madison Avenue where a professional wedding photographer who was an expert in European passport photos charged me an arm and a leg for some snapshots that would fufill the stringent requirements of the Fifth Republic. (Apparently, the Greeks are even stricter: You can't have any shadow behind you, and you have to pose like Myron's discobolus. Apparently, they'll be going to retinal scans in the next few years, and so you'll have to pluck out your eyes like Oedipus.)

The cashier had given me a receipt that acted as a get-in-free-past-the-ogre-at-the-gates card, even though the latter still didn't seem to understand the need to hold my cell phone and keys while I sauntered through the metal detector, I got back upstairs relatively hassle-free. (The good news is because of the grant I have received to go to the Land of the Cheeses, I didn't have to pay the usual fee for the receipt.) While the clerk at the next window flirted with the cute female Oberlin film student he was "inspecting" ("Oh, so you go to France to study film! What is your favorite director?" "Oh, there are so many... I'd have to say Godot..."), my bureaucrat was apparently trained by the Vichy regime. Naturally, the first question he asked me was "Parlez-vous francais?" to which I replied, "Oui, but I don't feel like embarassing myself today."

Having established myself as not sufficiently savoiring how to faire, he proceeded to request every document I had and then some: Another passport photo, another form filled out in black and/or blue pen, in French, in capital letters, and one of the two letters from my grant-issuing agency that assured the reader I had a reasonable income, medical insurance, and knew the difference between a Beaujolais and a Burgundy. But neither these, nor my unkempt state and vaguely socialist leanings, nor the twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was, were enough proof of my status as a student: Apparently, I also needed my last "diploma," which, I hesitate to mention, is from 1998 and which I didn't, in any case, have with me. I therefore passed along the color Xerox of my school ID, which, according to the consulate's very own Web site, is sufficient proof of my student status. He reluctantly accepted this, but only after Xeroxing my grant acceptance letter (which by this point had mysteriously become decorated with phone numbers, coffee rings, doodles of the Eiffel tower, and a crepe recipe) and placing it in my dossier. After stamping a bunch of things with Official-Looking Stamps, he decided to keep my passport, which I had to return for at 3:30 that afternoon.

Shrugging my shoulders with Gallic resignation, I did the only thing I could do: I had lunch for four hours.

Paris, I'm ready for you!

Evolution Revolution

If we follow the line of Weber's reasoning of religion-as-social-credit to its logical conclusion, the true nature of many of our current political debates, such as the teaching of evolution in public schools, is suddenly made clear.

When examined objectively, the first thing about American evangelical Christianity that stands out is the functionally benign nature of most of its beliefs. In day-to-day life, it does not matter if we descended from hairless apes, were formed from Play-Doh by a senior citizen in the sky, or were ejaculated by the Egyptian sun-god. Unlike, say, the worship of Kali, mainstream evangelical Christianity does not require the murder of unsuspecting travelers. Unlike members of Jim Jones' People's Temple, believers do not remove themselves from society. Unlike the Anabaptists of Münster, they do not practice polygamy or seek to expel nonbelievers from their towns (unless, of course, they publicly call community mores into question, as Mona Dobrich did). For all that their idea of cosmic history was disproved in the eighteenth century, people who hold to the Biblical account of creation (to cite one example of evangelical belief) go to work, shop at Wal-Mart, and eat nachos at Applebee's just as effectively as atheists do.

To continue with the example, trying to argue against the idea of the Biblical creation on the basis of rational argument is useless, for those who continue to perpetuate creationism do not do so because of rational conviction. Rather, the creationist meme serves some utility beyond the obvious, namely: It serves to identify a community of believers to one another. In other words, it is a social truth rather than being a scientific truth. The primary purpose of creationism, much like Jesus fish bumper stickers, is to identify members of the religious community to one another. It is, in other words, what Emile Durkheim, the French thinker who with Weber deserves the title of "founder of sociology," would have interpreted as a totem, a banner for a community to rally about.

To Durkeim, as it would later be to Lévi-Strauss, the tendency towards dichotomy is at the core of human thought. (It is in the context of this idea that Derrida's "deconstruction" must be understood, and, according to evolutionary psychologists such as Steven Pinker and Donald Brown, may even be hardwired into how we understand reality. We are programmed, in other words, to see the world in sets of opposites.) This is seen most dramatically in the division of human endeavors into the profane, that is the everyday, and the sacred. The totem is the physical embodiment of the sacred; the cult of the totem is what defines the community. However, while for Durkheim's Australian aborigines, totems were physical objects such as churingas and other fetishes, for American evangelical Christians, they are emblematic ideas such as creationism. Whether or not the Earth is six thousand years old does not matter; what matters is that the community agrees that it is.

The same totemic argument that applies to creationism arguably applies to school prayer, "obscenity," sex education, or even the words "Jesus Christ" as they are understood amongst American Christians. Rather than referring to the historical rabbi who lived 2,000 years ago, the words "Jesus Christ" refer to membership in the community of belief. Saying "I have Jesus in my heart" is the functional equivalent of, say, embracing the Wolf totem. It marks those who adhere to it as co-believers in the sacred, members of the same tribe. George W. Bush proclaiming his acceptance of Jesus has made him a good man, far from being hypocritical, it, if understood on its own terms, is a deeply sincere action. He, in effect, was declaring himself-despite his privileged origins-to be fundamentally the same as soccer moms from the Midwest and small business owners from the South.

So why has there been such an upsurge in religious feeling in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries? Nixon or Eisenhower never had to invoke their personal relationships with Christ. Why have Americans felt the need to create these communities of faith?

One possible explanation, of course, is the events of September 11, 2001. There is nothing that creates a sense of community more than an external threat, and in a time of stress, the "imagined community" becomes more homogeneous-which is to say religiously consolidated. Outsiders-atheists, Muslims, the French-become increasingly regarded as suspicious, while the community rallies around its own totems. Seen in this light, suddenly all the posters being sold at truck stops of Jesus weeping over the ruins of the World Trade Center make a frightening amount of sense.

However, even a cursory examination of history shows that this tendency in American life long preceded 9/11. The intrusion of right-wing religiosity into politics came not from the rural South, but from the privileged suburbs, where middle-class organizational skill and fundraising ability combined with grass-roots feeling to form a potent cultural force. As Lisa McGirr argues in her Suburban Warriors, the birth of the New Right, which culminated in the Reagan Revolution's conflation of laissez-faire economics, legislated morality, Old Testament patriarchy, and the struggle against the Evil Empire, began in wealthy, privileged enclaves such as Orange County, California, in the 1960s.

McGirr makes a compelling case for the rise of the New Right as a contradictory blend of traditional Western libertarianism, belief in self-sufficiency and property rights with economic dependence on defense spending and a deeply-held belief in the importance of the family. These memes served an evolutionary purpose in a frontier society, but which are somewhat atavistic in suburban developments. Hostility to outside interference makes a certain amount of sense when an ad-hoc local government and the freedom to scratch out a primitive living are all that one requires or expects; it makes less sense when one works for a salary, pays income tax, and relies on federal funding for utilities, roads, schools, firefighting, and law enforcement.

These feelings were magnified by having passed from the triumph of World War II and the economic boom of the postwar period into the defeat of miasma of the 1970s. Many Americans felt their traditional mode of life is being destroyed. The shift to a corporatist, service-based economy has provoked a gender crisis. The old constructions of difference-the dichotomies between sacred and profane, domestic and public, male and female-have broken down. This has been reflected in the meta-narrative of the last three decades of infotainment, as American men unmanned the economic downturn and women who would prefer to be homemakers rather than co-wage earners have taken refuge in Dirty Harry, Rambo, Martha Stewart, George W. Bush landing on an aircraft carrier to proclaim "mission accomplished." The brilliance of the New Right's strategy is combining all of these anxieties into one cause: "Stick with us and we'll stand tall, provide for our families, and kick some ass."

The whole "gay marriage" debate provides an excellent case study for this phenomenon. Just as homosexuality was equated with having Communist sympathies in the 1950s, gays once again find themselves playing the canaries in the coal mine of our collective anxieties. In a world where marriage is becoming more a legal recognition of mutual affection and less an economic necessity, a prerequisite to raising children, or a religious sacrament, same-sex couples see no reason that they should not have the same legal rights as any Russian mail-order bride. The subtext to conservative objections to this movement is not so much an objection to homosexuality per se, but a rejection of the ongoing redefinition of marriage and family life-a change that is, at its root, economically driven.

It appears, then, that the tenets of American evangelical Christianity have become a rallying point because they have become identified with the idea of the authentic, autochthonic community. The fact that these goals-the dismantling of the social welfare state and the maintenance of the military-industrial welfare state, laissez-faire liberalism yoked together with paternalistic morals-policing-have nothing to do with Christianity is not important; what matters is that these policies materially benefit the community that identifies with these symbols. Opposition to gay marriage, abortion, and immigration merely provide a convenient focus for this particular political community, whose interests are then cynically exploited for votes by politicians.

Thus, we return to the real significance of what happened to the Dobriches. The people of Georgetown were not "ignorant, shallow bigots"—unless one wants to call a large part of America by these labels. They were, rather, frighteningly ordinary. Behind what seemed like narrow-minded bigotry was the anxiety three decades of uncertainty. To them, the values the public community represents, and the political and economic interests of that community, were synonymous with the religious community. The persecution the Dobriches experienced was, in effect, the displaced anxiety of the modern world.

If progressives are to make any headway in changing the face of American politics, we must understand the engine driving religious support the conservative political machine. Rather than shrilly repeating our positions as if their inherent logic was a given, we must rather make Americans see that that the values we represent are their own, and that the restoration of a progressive, New Deal system is in the best interests of themselves and their families. Hopefully, by addressing the root causes that drive voters to the standards of conservative Christianity-the irrelevance of the military-industrial complex, the economic rot of the heartland, the empty values of a consumer society-we can appeal to the community of faith, thereby outflanking and, ultimately, defeating the enemy.

Unlike many commentators who have criticized the Dobriches' neighbors' "ignorant, shallow attitude," "bigotry," and general sense of entitlement to Christian hegemony, I was less outraged by their case than I was perplexed. Delaware is, after all, not the Deep South. No barefoot urchins out of a Faulkner novel march along its rural roads; no attack dogs savaged civil rights activists on its city streets; backyard pools are more common than fishin' holes. The state governor, Ruth Ann Minner, is a Democrat, as are both senators, and though the one state Representative, Mike Castle, is a Republican, he's voted against the party line on repealing restrictions on stem-cell research, torturing "enemy combatants," and giving Federal courts jurisdiction on the Terri Schiavo case. If anything, therefore, one would expect Georgetown, located in Sussex County, home of the gay and lesbian vacation mecca Rehoboth Beach, to be more accepting than the norm. Why, then, do its denizens seem to equate Christianity with good citizenship, with social integration, with patriotism itself?

A century ago, the German sociologist Max Weber asked much the same question about the United States as a whole. Though he is better known for marrying Calvin and capitalism with his (now somewhat dated) bon mot on the "Protestant work ethic," Weber's lesser-known essay, "Churches and Sects in North America," has not only held up rather well over the past century, it should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the power of religion in U.S. culture. "Churches," Weber argued, are distinct from "sects" in that the former, like the Lutheran church that dominated religious life in Germany, are all-inclusive and compulsory, while the latter are voluntary associations of those who feel themselves to be the spiritual elite.

Yet, for all of this, Weber saw membership in a Protestant sect as one of the most powerful political and social forces in the modern world. The "proof" of an individual's salvation, and the basis for his admission to a sect, was the external performance of morality, sobriety, and thrift. "This proof," Weber wrote, "became the exclusive foundation for the social cohesion of the congregation. And the great mass of social formations, which have penetrated every corner of American life, are constituted according to the schema of the 'sect.' " Conversely-and here is where Weber speaks directly to the Delaware case-an individual bereft of a sect (or who belongs to a different one, as the Dobriches did) is rootless, ostracized, alien. To profess religion is to be integrated into the community; to do otherwise is to be the Other.

In Weber's Europe, religion was not only structurally different from American sects, it was also functionally different. "The question concerning church affiliation. . . is on par with the Homeric question regarding place of birth and parentage, as a German nose and throat specialist, who had opened a practice in Cincinnati, discovered," he wrote. "On asking his first patient what was ailing him, the very first thing the man said, to the utter astonishment of the doctor, was: I am from the Second Baptist Church in X Street." Weber's deutsche doctor's astonishment at his patient's incongruous utterance is certainly understandable-at least until one comprehends the real meaning, which is that the physician needn't worry about his fee. In Weber's Germany, private religion was for the individual conscience, and the true public religion was the cult of imperialistic nationalism. Social credit derived from coming from a good family, no matter whether one's father had risen from the Junker squireocracy or descended from the purple of commerce. Just as modern college students are besieged by credit card offers, a student at Heidelberg found more than enough people willing to extend him credit after he had tasted blood in an elite dueling fraternity and "won his colors" (and perhaps a few facial scars)-a sure sign of a bright future.

Conversely, in America, a land of vast distances settled by dislocated immigrants, where a man could come from anywhere to do anything and where the aristocratic schmiss that was the lingering kiss of the schläger duel meant no more than having been kicked in the face by a mule, social credit came from church membership. In America, Weber wrote, one does not ask if someone goes to church, but rather to which church they belong. Membership in a church "of good repute" was essential for any business venture. "As far as I am concerned, everyone can believe what he likes, but if I discover that a client doesn't go to church, then I wouldn't trust him to pay me fifty cents," a traveling salesman said to Weber in Oklahoma. "Why pay me, if he doesn't believe in anything?" A man in a church is a man integrated into society; a man without a church is rootless. People in the past were no less cynical about politicians than we are now, but they could be assured that they would serve local interests and not loot the public treasury if they had been vetted by a sober congregation and admitted into the spiritual elite.

Weber's ideas about "sects" hit me like a bolt from above. Like most over-educated, ocean-hopping, politically liberal urban dwellers, organized religion has always been slightly embarrassing to me. Jewish members of my social circle tiptoe shame-faced past the Lubavitch mitzvah tank, order sushi on Yom Kippur, and decry circumcision as male genital mutilation. Catholics are more likely to be found chanting to Vishnu in yoga class than lighting candles to the Virgin, and Hindus cheerfully trade recipes for beef stroganoff. Unlike many of my friends, though, I don't characterize religious people as deluded, ignorant, or, in the Delaware case, inherently bigoted. As a historian of the Middle Ages, I am forced on a daily basis to consider how religion can both bind a society together and tear it apart. I know that faith is a force to be reckoned with-and while I may not believe in religion, I certainly do believe in religious people.

Moreover, it's clear to me that the collective willful ignorance of religion so prevalent amongst liberal intellectuals-the dismissal of faith and the faithful as an awkward cultural atavism-is our great blind spot, the fatal flaw of an ideology that is otherwise eager to embrace anything different from itself in the name of cultural relativism. The idea that religion is a concrete evil to be stridently fought tooth and nail-the approach taken by the don of atheism, Oxford behavioral scientist Richard Dawkins-is likewise the wrong tack. As Weber saw a century ago, without understanding how religion works in this country, and its effects on our political life, we can not understand how American society works-and therefore, we can certainly not hope to change the status quo.

Manifest Destiny

In my liberal agnosticism, I thought for a long time that the true character of American religious polity was best described by the 1534 Münster rebellion. In one of the more colorful events of the Reformation, an apocalyptically-tinged, paranoid sect of Anabaptists (so-called for their practice of re-baptizing converts as adults) seized the city and expelled all unbelievers. Their religious mania quickly spread to the execution of "heretics," mandatory polygamy, and the belief in the immanent descent of the Heavenly Jerusalem. The government response at Münster in 1534 was the same as it was in Waco, Texas in 1993: Lutheran and Catholic leaders united to begin an eighteen-month siege that ended with the storming of the city and the massacre of most of the surviving Anabaptists. Münster, I thought, illustrated the essential character of Protestant evangelicalism-the constitutional need for absolute political supremacy in order to found a "city on a hill" and the inability to accept anything less than absolute conformity to the faith. These ideas had been imported to this continent with the Puritans, and they have remained with us ever since in the tenets of the Baptist church.

What Weber understood, though, is that while much of America may call itself Baptist, our religious makeup is equally tinged with Methodism. Beginning as an eighteenth-century revival movement within the Church of England led by John Wesley and his friends, Methodism was the greatest religious movement the English-speaking world had seen since the Restoration of 1660 had installed moderate Anglicanism as the British state church. However, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Methodism represented a paradox: Simultaneously ecstatic and sober, traditional and charismatic, working-class and elite, revolutionary and insistent that it was merely a movement within the Church of England, it challenged contemporary ideas of how religion fit into the political landscape.

The essential religious divisions in post-Napoleonic Europe were between the conservative order that upheld monarchy, centrally-controlled economies, and the state church (the anti-Dreyfusards in France, for instance, published in Jesuit newspapers); liberal laissez-faire parliamentarians such as Weber who embraced Darwin and Adam Smith and quietly disparaged religion; and avant-garde socialists who saw all religion as "opium for the people." Yet the very fact that national churches had been a political reality in Europe since the sixteenth century meant that they were for the most part, under the radar, more likely to be dismissed than actively attacked. Even in Sweden, the country that American liberals most often hold up as an atheist, socialist paradise, the Lutheran church only automatically stopped enrolling newborns in 1996, and didn't separate from the government until 2000. While Upton Sinclair may have written that "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag, carrying a cross," fascism came to Germany precisely because of liberal thinkers like Max Weber, who was in favor of what J. L. Talmon called "totalitarian democracy" because he thought it would advance the cause of the German volk more efficiently than the Kaiser and his conservative order ever could.

Early America, on the other hand, was a land ill-served by the clergy of the established church. Methodist circuit riders, filling the vacuum with charismatic preaching, were eager to create communities out of scattered settlements—and the people were eager to have them. Peer-led, based on community acclamation, and ultimately democratic, the Methodist message appealed to everyone from Yankee industrialists to working men, farmers to shopkeepers, and slave-owners to African-Americans; it also sparked the mass religious movements of the First, Second, and Third Great Awakenings. Naturally, the Methodist dichotomy between ecstatic revelation and hard work, thrift, and sobriety could not stand, and the movement separated into separate strands, both respectable, such as the United Methodist Church attended by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, and popular, such as the Pentecostal churches that embrace speaking in tongues and snake-handling.

As widely variant as the beliefs and practices of the Methodist-derived sects might be, one Methodist-derived idea that has infused all of American religious life is the idea of instantaneous conversion. We are all familiar with the script from George W. Bush's 2000 election campaign and any number of ironically-perused Chick tracts: Having hit mental, physical, and spiritual rock-bottom, terrified of an eternity spent in the flames of hell, a despairing sinner begs Jesus to come into his or her heart. Suddenly everything is illuminated; the sinner feels himself to be saved; and all sins are forgiven. This trope is not only a powerful incentive-it is also an eminently capitalist one in which unproductive behaviors are exchanged for a life of hard-working productivity and social credit in the bosom of the community. It is the spiritual equivalent of declaring bankruptcy: All bad credit is forgiven.

The implication of this cultural script is that anybody can join the community; all it takes is a simple act of will and the performance of conversion. (I mean "performance" here in the linguistic sense, in J. L. Austin's sense of phrases that are also actions, such as "I christen this ship the Queen Elizabeth" or "I pronounce you husband and wife.") Unlike early Methodism, in which God had to touch the individual, in modern conversion it is the individual who reaches out to God. Unlike Puritanism's stringent entry requirements, there is no need to prove oneself one of the elite; one can be an alcoholic, a drug addict, an unwed mother, or a homosexual. However, by entering the Church, one is reborn into the community. (The caveat, of course, is that one must continue behaving in a godly manner and fighting against one's anti-social impulses.)

The implications of the Methodist instantaneous conversion are, if anything, even more chilling than the elitist Puritan "city on a hill." If salvation is only open to God's elect, then the "city on the hill," in order to exist in a non-chiliastic world, will always need to compromise and make a place for the imperfect members of society. Methodist conversion, on the other hand, is manifest destiny incarnate. Everyone can be part of the congregation of the faithful; all that is necessary is the desire to join. Even Mexicans (the cultural and ethnic boogeyman of the moment) can become part of the community—that is, "Americanized"—by accepting Jesus in evangelical fashion. (And, indeed, much current evangelical missionary activity is Spanish-language).

Thus, there is no conceivable argument not to join. With salvation democratically open to all, excuses dissolve before the weight of community opinion. If one is in a milieu where the vast majority of people believe, the pressure to conform to social expectations is extreme. To deny the community's will is to do more than brand oneself as irredeemably Other; it's to brand oneself a sinner and worthy of community scorn. Thus the comment one made to Mona Dobrich about her eleven-year-old son: "If you want people to stop calling him 'Jew Boy,' you tell him to give his heart to Jesus."

Because of its evangelical nature, American religion has condemned itself to perpetual jihad against all those who believe differently. When Georgetown businessman Kenneth R. Stevens told a Times reporter that mandatory Christianity was Georgetown's "way of life," he was telling a deeper truth than he may have realized. The First Amendment aside, America is a Christian nation, just as to be a Swede is to be a Lutheran or to be Italian is to be Catholic. The difference is that, ostensibly cordoned off from the official governance by the First Amendment, never having its "establishment" questioned or been subjected to a Civil Constitution of the Clergy or kulturkampf, religion's ubiquity in American polity has remained unchallenged. With no establishment of religion, there has been no religious establishment to be attacked by radicals or discredited for supporting a government that had led the nation into a national calamity such as World War I.

For Part 2, click here

The fact is, loans are a necessity for paying for college nowadays, and a college degree is the de facto doorkeeper to a middle-class lifestyle. However, the average private college costs an average of $22,218. What’s more, the amount of scholarships available—especially to Joe Suburban Teenager—is nowhere near the demand. Accordingly, the amount of student loan debt in this country is immense—$477 billion. (Contrast this, however, with $5.6 billion a month for the Iraq war.)

In most every other industrialized country, higher education is at least partially paid for by the government (though this is changing with the current laissez-faire turn in Europe). In America, though, we don’t have a parliamentary system that, for good or ill, factors in everyone’s needs: We have lobbyists, and student loan corporations pay handsomely for representation in Washington. Accordingly, student loan lenders enjoy some of the most favorable conditions in the industry. Thanks to a bill signed by Clinton in 1997, student loan debt, unlike consumer debt, can never be discharged. They can even take payments out of your social security—and this holds true both for the wholly inadequate subsidized federal loans and for the private loans most students wind up having to get. What we essentially have is a system where a small number of companies are siphoning off a lifetime’s wages in exchange for fronting the opportunity to earn them in the first place—a postindustrial version of debtor’s prison.

These have a very real effect on people’s lives. While not everyone is so unfortunate as to be saddled with debt, those with high loans wind up paying in interest what they would otherwise be investing in the economy—or their own further education. Student loans put a dent in home buyers’ ability to qualify for reasonable mortgages. Bureaucratic cock-ups ruin people’s credit. In the end, it seems to be more sensible to go to a lower-tier state school—or even bypass college entirely—than to follow the “traditional” middle-class pursuit of high educational achievement. Furthermore, for those saddled with student loan debt, monthly payments make it more difficult to get married, buy a house, and raise children. “Family values,” my ass.

But the government isn’t the only one who’s been bought. . The schools have payola found themselves immersed in the midst of a payola scandal. To quote Generation Debt author Anya Kamenetz, “Lenders and schools have/had deals whereby schools would push students to a certain lender or lenders in exchange for kickbacks from the lenders.”

The fact is that the student loan industry hasn’t been playing by the rules for years—and in the end, this makes us all poorer as the middle class’s money is sucked into the coffers of a few corporations. The way out of it is to put more pressure on politicians than the lobbyists do to get candidates to promise to change the system. Increase subsidized loans. Lower interest rates. And take the private lenders out back and shoot them. In the wake of the payola scandal, , the Democratic-led House has already set an example by passing the College Cost Reduction Act of 2007, funded by reducing subsidies to student-loan companies. We’d like to see the Senate—and the presidential candidates—follow suit.

NIXON

ON FEAR VS. LOVE:

People react to fear, not love - they don't teach that in Sunday School, but it's true."

ON ETHICS:

"Publicly, we say one thing....Actually, we do another."

ON JEWS:

But by God, they're exceptions. But Bob, generally speaking, you can't trust the bastards. (Referring to Jews to Bob Haldeman)

The Jews are irreligious, atheistic, immoral bunch of bastards.... The lawyers in government are damn Jews.

You can never put, John, any person who is a Jew on a civil rights kind of case, or freedom of the press kind of case, and get even a ten percent chance. . . . Basically, who the hell are these people that stole the papers? It's too bad. I'm sorry. I was hoping one of them would be a gentile.

"You know, it's a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob? What is the matter with them? I suppose it is because most of them are psychiatrists."
- May 26, 1971 (White House Tapes released March, 2002)

What about the rich Jews? The IRS is full of Jews, Bob.
-14th of September 1971

JEWS VS. BLACKS:

NIXON: Jewish families are close, but there's this strange malignancy that seems to creep among them — radicalism. I can imagine how the fact that Ellsberg is in this must really tear a fella like Henry to pieces — or Garment. Just like the Rosenbergs and all that. It just has to kill them. I feel horrible about it.
ZIEGLER: Could make up an English name.
HALDEMAN: - Rosenstein could change his name. - _[general laughter]
ZIEGLER: It is right. It's always an "Ellsberg.'
NIXON: Every one's a Jew. Ellsberg's a Jew. Halperin's a Jew.
HALDEMAN: Gelb's a Jew.
NIXON: But there are [unclear] — Hiss was not a Jew. Very interesting thing. So few of those who engage in espionage — are Negroes. - In fact, very few of them become Communists. If they do, they like, they get into Angela Davis — they're more the capitalist type. And they throw bombs and this and that. But the Negroes. — have you ever noticed? - Any Negro spies?
HALDEMAN: Not intellectual enough, not smart enough - not smart enough to be spies.
NIXON: The Jews — the Jews are, are born spies. You notice how many of them are just in up to their necks?
HALDEMAN: A basic deviousness.

ON HIS CRITICS:

N: I think we can destroy him [John Dean] -- we must destroy him.
Haig: Have to.
N: We never can allow this to happen - even if I was guilty as hell, but I'm not (unintelligible). I was dragged into this, son of a bitch, because of stupid people. Well-intentioned stupid people.
Haig: That's something entirely different. Here we've got a vicious little coward who's trying to protect his ass at any cost.
N: And therefore he's got to be destroyed.
-May 8, 1973

ON MEXICANS VS. BLACKS:

"I have the greatest affection for them [blacks], but I know they're not going to make it for 500 years. They aren't. You know it, too. The Mexicans are a different cup of tea. They have a heritage. At the present time they steal, they're dishonest, but they do have some concept of family life. They don't live like a bunch of dogs, which the Negroes do live like.'

ON BLACKS:

"The second point is that coming out - coming back and saying that black Americans aren't as good as black Africans - most of them, basically, are just out of the trees.  Now, let's face it, they are."
-Richard Nixon to Donald Rumsfeld July 11, 1971 (White House Tapes)

"You have to face the fact that whole problem [welfare] is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to...'
President Richard Nixon
-Alone In the White House, p. 110

ON INDIANS:

"The Indians are bastards anyway," Kissinger told the president.
"They are starting a war there."
"While she [Gandhi] was a bitch, we got what we wanted too," Kissinger said.
"She will not be able to go home and say that the United States
didn't give her a warm reception and therefore in despair she's
got to go to war."
"We really slobbered over the old witch," Nixon told Kissinger
-White House Tapes,  Nov. 5, 1971

ON GREEKS:

"I don't want to see this country to go that way. You know what happened to the Greeks.
Homosexuality destroyed them. Sure, Aristotle was a homo, we all know that, so was Socrates."
-May 26, 1971 (White House Tapes)

ON ITALIANS:

"They're not like us. They smell different, they look different, they act different.  The trouble is, you can't find one that's honest.'
Richard Nixion to John Ehrlichman
-White House Tapes


GEORGE W. BUSH

ON FREEDOM AND POWER:

"There ought to be limits to freedom."
- May 26, 1999

"If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator."
-CNN transcript from 12/18/2000 (photo-op with Congressional leaders)

"You don't get everything you want. A dictatorship would be a lot easier."
-Governing Magazine July, 1998

"A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's no question about it."
-Business Week, July 30, 2001

"This is an impressive crowd: the Haves and the Have-mores. Some people call you the elite - I call you my base.'
- at the Al Smith Dinner, New York, October 20, 2000.

"When you're the president's son and you've got unlimited access combined with some credentials from a prior campaign, in Washington, D.C., people tend to respect that. I mean, access is power. And I can find my dad and talk to him any time of the day."'
- August, 1992

ON AMERICA'S SECURITY:

"I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority."
- George W. Bush, 3/13/2002

"People don't need to worry about security."
- February 23, 2006, on his Administration approving the sale of six major U.S. shipping ports to the United Arab Emirates. Two of the hijackers involved in the September 11, 2001, attacks came from the Persian Gulf country, and most of the money for the plot was funneled through the banking center of Dubai. Dubai was a key transfer point for illicit nuclear technology sales to North Korea, Iran and Libya that were led by Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan.

ON BLACKS:

"Do you have blacks, too?'
-to Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso


DICK CHENEY

ON HAVING PRINCIPLES:

"Principle is OK up to a certain point, but principle doesn't do any good if you lose."
- Dick Cheney, White House Chief of Staff, 1976.

"We also have to work the dark side, if you will. We have to spend time in the shadows. It's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal."
- September 16, 2001

AS A ROLE MODEL FOR AMERICA'S CHILDREN:

"Go fuck yourself."
- On June 22, 2004 Leahy and Vice President Dick Cheney participated in the US Senate class photo. During this time, Cheney upbraided Leahy for Leahy's recent excoriations of Cheney over Halliburton's alleged war profiteering. The discussion ended with Cheney telling Leahy to "... go fuck yourself" and giving Leahy the middle finger.

ON CIVIL RIGHTS:

In 1986, Cheney voted against a sense-of-the-House resolution calling on the white-controlled government in South Africa to free Mandela. (He eventually was released in 1990.) Cheney also opposed economic sanctions against South Africa. He voted against measures that sought to ensure the application of a variety of US civil rights laws.
- Michael Kranish, Boston Globe, p. A13 Jul 26, 2000

ON THE THREAT OF SADDAM HUSSEIN:

"The question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not very damned many.'
-to the Discovery Institute after the first Gulf War, on August 14, 1992, when he was Secretary of Defense.

"Saddam Hussein's offensive military capability, his capacity to threaten his neighbors, has been virtually eliminated.'
- April 29, 1991, at the Soref Symposium talking about the First Gulf War.

DONALD RUMSFELD

ON LYING:

"Don't quote me on this, okay? I don't want to be quoted on this, so don't quote me - Sometimes the truth is so precious, it must be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies."
- U.S. Department of Defense, News Briefing, September 25, 2001

ON THE SANCTITY OF HUMAN LIFE:

"Have you killed anyone yet?"
- to General Charles Holland

ON BLACKS:

This July 22, 1971, conversation (National Archives) lasted about an hour and focused on Rumsfeld's future in the Nixon administration. At the time, the 39-year-old Rumsfeld was counselor to the president.
Nixon: "It doesn't help. It hurts with the blacks, and it doesn't help with the rednecks because the rednecks don't think any Negroes are any good."
Rumsfeld: "Yes."
Nixon: "Black Americans aren't as good as black Africans. Most of them are basically out of the trees ... Now, my point is, if we say that, they [Nixon opponents] say, 'Well, by God.' Well, ah, even the Southerners say, 'Well, our n--ger is [unintelligible].' Hell, that's the way they talk!"
Rumsfeld: "That's right."
Nixon: "I can hear 'em."
Rumsfeld: "I know."
Nixon: "It's like when our black athletes, I mean the Olympics, are running against the other black athletes, the Southerner may not like the black but he's for that black athlete."
Rumsfeld: "That's right."
Nixon: "Right?"
Rumsfeld: "That's for sure."

CONDOLEEZA RICE:

Rice has served on the board of directors for the Chevron Corporation, the Charles Schwab Corporation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Transamerica Corporation, Hewlett Packard, The Carnegie Corporation, The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, The Rand Corporation, and KQED, public broadcasting for San Francisco.
She was also on the Board of Trustees of the University of Notre Dame, the International Advisory Council of J.P. Morgan, and the San Francisco Symphony Board of Governors.
She also headed Chevron's committee on public policy until she resigned on January 15, 2001, to become National Security Advisor to President George W. Bush. Chevron honored Rice by naming an oil tanker Condoleezza Rice after her, but controversy led to its being renamed Altair Voyager.[9][10][11]

SCOOTER LIBBY:

In 1996, Libby wrote a novel titled "The Apprentice,' which has recently gained new attention. A New Yorker columnist reprinted passages describing extremely graphic scenes of pedophilia, bestiality, rape and incest. One particular scene describes the rape of a young girl by a bear. These scenes are too lurid to be posted on this site, however, you can read the New Yorker article via this link:

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/051107ta_talk_collins


KARL ROVE:

ON THE OUTING OF A CIA AGENT:

"Wilson's wife is fair game.'
- to Chris Matthews, July 21, 2003, one week after the "outing' of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson (reported in ABC News Original Report, 10-1-2003)

Rove also did work during those years for clients other than politicians. From 1991 to 1996, he advised tobacco giant Phillip Morris, ultimately earning $3,000 a month via a consulting contract. In a deposition, Rove testified that he severed the tie in 1996 because he felt awkward "about balancing that responsibility with his role as Bush's top political advisor" at a time when Bush was governor of Texas and Texas was suing the tobacco industry.

Allegations of conflict of interest
In March 2001, Rove met with executives from Intel, successfully advocating a merger between a Dutch company and an Intel company supplier. Rove owned $100,000 in Intel stock at the time but had been advised by Fred Fielding, the White House's transition counsel, to defer selling the stock in January to obtain ethics panel approval. Rove offered no advice on the merger which needed to be approved by a joint Pentagon-Treasury Department panel since it would give a foreign company access to military sensitive technology. [36] In June 2001, Rove met with two pharmaceutical industry lobbyists. At the time, Rove held almost $250,000 in drug industry stocks. On 30 June 2001, Rove divested his stocks in 23 companies, which included more than $100,000 in each of Enron, Boeing, General Electric, and Pfizer. On 30 June 2001, the White House admitted that Rove was involved in administration energy policy meetings, while at the same time holding stock in energy companies including Enron.