All the essential elements of governance in the Bush era come together in the Blackwater episode.

The heavy use of private armies — “corporate warriors” is the term used by Brookings Institution expert Peter Singer — helps to hide the initial and catastrophic decision to limit the number of American troops deployed far below what many military experts said was necessary to pacify post-invasion Iraq. Secrecy, another administration hallmark, prevented even the Congressional Research Service from getting a definitive count of the number of private contractors taxpayers support. “The executive branch either has not kept sufficient records to produce or has been unwilling to present basic, accurate information on the companies employed under US government contracts and subcontracts in Iraq,” the researchers reported in July.

Add the odor of political cronyism: Blackwater’s founder, Erik Prince, has deep ties to the Republican Party and conservative religious organizations. He was a Republican congressional aide and briefly an intern in the White House of President George H.W. Bush.

Who has done more damage to the lives of the American people? Personally, I worry more about the next bad decision Bush is going to make than I worry about a potential Osama bin Laden organized terrorist attack.

Cartoon scandals have become the refrain of that mostly imaginary clash of civilizations both sides’ fanatics like to promote as make-work for their ideologues, their under-employed suicide-murderers and oversexed neocons. It wouldn’t be so bad if cartoon wars were just that—wars over words and drawings, using words and, if you like, boycotts in return. But governments are meddling, people are getting jailed, or killed, or encouraged to kill. So: should we silence the offending cartoonists and be done with it? Might as well ask if we should do the same to the billion-odd people supposedly taking offense at the drawings. Martin Amis once said that “being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of the culture.” He meant western culture. Turns out it’s the one addiction, other than freebasing fundamentalism, that East and West share most in this miserably unenlightened new century.

We have more information at our fingertips than ever before in human history, yet we’re also isolated from each other in our digital, allegorical caves. Expressing dissent is easily done, but committing yourself to actually resist the powers that be takes a sacrifice most people are unwilling to make. Antiwar organizers know this frustration all too well. Getting people to realize that a difference can be made through protesting is hard enough, but encouraging them to do more than that is damn near impossible. Apathy reigns supreme, and rather than use the internet as a means to change reality, we view it as reality itself.

At the core of the rot that is destroying the American Republic are the many false narratives that have replaced the nation's real history. The Right has proved adept at creating these alluring story lines and selling them through a vast and sophisticated media apparatus, while the mainstream press goes silent or plays along.

One of my pet peeves about political reporting is the fact that some of my journalistic colleagues seem to want to be in another business – namely, theater criticism. Instead of telling us what candidates are actually saying – and whether it’s true or false, sensible or silly – they tell us how it went over, and how they think it affects the horse race. During the 2004 campaign I went through two months’ worth of TV news from the major broadcast and cable networks to see what voters had been told about the Bush and Kerry health care plans; what I found, and wrote about, were several stories on how the plans were playing, but not one story about what was actually in the plans.