It is dispiriting that so soon after its decisive repudiation at the polls the ideology that brought the world to its knees is once again gaining traction in the US. The ugly side of America is once again rearing its repulsive head, what with Palin becoming an influential commentator on current affairs (!!!) and Massachusetts of all places handing Ted Kennedy's senate seat to a Republican. And it is astonishing that the spearhead of this attack is rabid opposition to government interference in the economy, a process started by Bush himself face to face with the ruins left behind by his stewardship and one moreover that under Obama was able to steady the keel of the foundering vessel of state. All problems have not been solved for sure, with unemployment still a major vexation. But the American economy is once again roaring ahead according to the latest figures, and besides one can imagine with horror what the consequences would have been of a continuation of extremist Republicanism.

The explanation for this can only be one that is valid for human affairs in general, namely that human beings regardless of geographic or cultural boundaries are swayed much more by ideas that have been lodged in their minds through generations of ideological tutelage rather than by a sober evaluation of empirical facts. This blind commitment is in many cases outright suicidal. The average American for instance seems to be persuaded that Saddam was responsible for 9/11 and that the invasion of Iraq enhanced the security of their country. Both of these claims are of course patently false: the occupation of Iraq actually delivered that territory into the hands of Al Qaeda while at the same time enhancing decisively the regional power of Iran. After 2003 America was in a much worse geostrategic and security position, if only because its actions in Mesopotamia could be portrayed as an attack on the Muslim world as a whole, while at the same time seeming to validate all the cookie arguments of anti-American extremists in the West itself. The mere assumption of power by Obama was of itself a decisive antidote to these tendencies. But then again the average right-wing American seems to believe that Saddam and Obama are the same person simply because of the president's middle name. Again during the massive right-wing assault against Obama's health care plans during last summer there were people intoxicated by Palin's nonsense about "death panels" and the like screaming "don't you dare touch my Medicare", forgetting that Medicare is a government program passed by Democrats quite similar to what the present administration is trying to introduce. This delusional state of mind cannot unfortunately be mended by any conceivable rational means, at least in the medium term. People just cling to fancies calibrated to their mentality and promising some kind of salvation that never comes about. But no matter. The important thing is believing in what you want to believe regardless of whatever evidence might be adduced against it.

To be fair this propensity to self-deception is not a monopoly of the American people. It is ingrained in all cultures and societies, as previously stated. But the point is that the human race in its totality is in much greater peril from the delusions of the American populace or those of the downtrodden Muslim masses for that matter, compared to the delusions for instance of certain Balkan peoples that they are the direct biological descendants of Pericles or Alexander.

On a related matter, it does no good at all to Tony Blair and his fame to add insult to injury as his did the other day before the Chilcot inquiry on Iraq. To declare that even if he had known that Saddam did not possess any WMD (he actually did know, but for the sake of the argument let us assume that he did not) he would still have gone ahead with the invasion smacks of egregious callousness especially in the presence of the relatives of those who died in this misguided and criminal enterprise. It would have been much more decent to admit that since Bush was determined to invade anyway, he decided to go along in the hope of restraining the wildest excesses of American power. I believe this is the real reason that he did it, and one might sympathize with the conundrum he was in. The British regime in Basra was after all a much more politic affair compared to the American imperial (and incompetent) administration in Baghdad. Tony Blair was a great premier for the UK domestically. But this will be unfortunately forgotten, for he has chosen to stake his reputation on the most sordid and botched enterprise of his term of office. In this there is a precise parallel in American political history: it is called Lyndon Johnson.

History is not the word history and its cognates repeated over and over again.

History is about real experiences of real individuals as well as about real occurrences, events and situations. It is about an infinity of factors intersecting and intermingling, in order to bring about dynamic trends that cannot be foretold by any kind of neat and rounded theory. The historian and the historically-minded, i.e. civilized, individual is, thus, above all committed to becoming acquainted, from as close quarters as possible, with this inexhaustible ground of objective and subjective reality, upon which any theorizing must be erected. Given the immensity of its object of reference, as well as the natural limitations of the human faculties that ought to be employed in its investigation, any theoretic utterance about historical tendencies, mutual influences, causal concatenations and the like must of necessity be tentative. It is put forward in order to be drastically revised or overthrown. We possess no synoptic (that is all seeing) view of the past, i.e one that collects together in one inclusive tableau as it were all the essential elements and relations that composed the texture of past life. And as to future realities there is no possible knowledge.

Faced with this situation we must be prepared to be rudely tested and disappointed when we bring our cherished conceptions and beliefs about what happened in history and what it meant face to face with the raw data of historical experience as they emerge from the primary labor of delving into the remnants of extinguished life. Luckily for those who prefer to cling to ready-made inherited opinion the greatest part of the record has been erased. This is indubitable fact, which seems prima facie to to justify those who claim that the only possible criterion of truth we possess in reference to "was eigentlich gewesen ist" is only the psychological and existential needs of today's social actors. But this view is too facile and hasty in its craftiness. For to begin with, whatever the social requirements of today we cannot be under any circumstances justified in constructing any theoretical view whatsoever about that portion of past reality which is for us irrevocably expunged. What is lost is lost, and nobody can base any plausible anthropological speculation on it. So, to sidetrack the issue of historical knowledge towards the gaps in the factual record constitutes evasion pure and simple, whose ulterior motive is precisely the construction of fantastic accounts of human life that cannot be tested against experience -because there are no data for this kind of test, you see. A circumstance, nevertheless, which does not prevent those who put forward these intellectual fancies from claiming that they are somehow true, or -if they cannot bring themselves to utter such a swear word- at least correct in some undefinable way. The real point of the dispute, however, is not this. It concerns, rather, the theories that can be erected upon the admittedly meager and deficient factual record that we do possess about what transpired in the past and about how people thought back then about their circumstances of life. It is here that the perversity of absolute ideology shows its true colors. For it treats even the existing and acknowledged facts on a par with the non-existent ones, and even proceeds to baptize them as non-existent if they do not square with its theoretical predilections.

Blumenberg argued that as against the "absolutism of reality" the only sensible reaction of erect man is myth. But this is a myth that assumes the absolute existence of a real world that subsists in and of itself and is in no way a fiction of the human head. Mythic man is beholden to nature, and his myths are the first inchoate attempts to divine its laws and limn its structural outlines. This tight fit between religion and natural necessity was adequately described by Burkert. Modern ideological myth, on the contrary, flows from the exact opposite assumption, namely that the real is an arbitrary construct of the mind and that we should revere the great myth makers that out of the pure spontaneity of their creative imagination were able to stitch together inspiring accounts of life treading on thin air so to speak. It would, consequently, be highly impudent to spoil the mystagogy by inquiring as to what exactly are the real historical referents of this high flown talk.

History as sacred myth, a sacredness which may even presuppose the vanishing of God, is the ingenious ploy of this theoretical priapism, which dissolves human actuality, the actuality of work, desire and suffering, into a bundle of words, mere constellations of "signs" deliberately robbed of all meaning to boot. This is a cult of pure history without humanity and without human beings, a bacchanal of abstractions, the narcissistic self-embrace of an empty self.

Heavily historical societies, whose educational and cultural substructure has however rotted away, are especially prone to this cheap affectation. Lacking the intellectual wherewithal, and the moral stamina, to stare historical experience in the face, they resort to the histrionics of a tedious rhetoric egged on by the gurus of deep-sounding obfuscation, the high priests of turgid logorrhoea.

The most telling characteristic of terminally dysfunctional polities is the perversion of language, as Thucydides explained long ago.

So, how do you cope in a place where all sorts of evil, mean-spirited and patently worthless individuals mouth the right words? Where the most socially iniquitous policies, privileging a few select minorities at the expense of the commonweal, are dubbed "socialism"? Where all sorts of prescriptive droits de seigneur, extorted through blackmail and violence by strategically situated groups with the correct political coloration and ties to power, are sanctified as "workers rights" at the same time as the vast majority of working people are strangled in order to maintain this discriminatory order? Where departments of state are given the fanciful names of "ministry of social solidarity" at the same time as the health service that they are supposed to administer has gone to the dogs? Where "business enterprise" means the privilege, granted by "bribe-devouring magistrates" (δωροφάγους βασιλήας, to remember good old Hesiod) to sell to the government useless products and services and/or those that are needed at a hundred times the normal price? Reactionary feudalism masquerading as "the social state".

Well, cope you do not. Your option is to migrate to another universe. If that does not work, you give thanks, to God or to whomever, that at least you were not born in Haiti. Beyond that you simply refuse to see and hear. You migrate to an inner space and try to build it up to a fortress named personal integrity.

This is no solution, certainly. The cacophony of malignant passions bent upon destroying the common good and interest for the sake of sordid egotism does penetrate through the cracks.

Worst of all, you keep hoping...Your antennae are still somehow turned towards that external spectacle of self-satisfied debauchery and callousness, because you grew up at a time when words did have their proper meaning more or less attached to them; at a time when to be public minded and care about the improvement of society carried with it a steep price in terms of private comfort and profit and was not a ticket to a hub of power from where to suck the marrow from society's bones. You are still looking for a ray of light in this abyss. The illusions of youth never really die. And what is more important they should not be described as dead to the young people. For if they perceive them as such, then their only option is to join the orgy of destruction, to become efficient exterminators themselves.

It has finally come to the point that any sane person could have easily predicted. But sanity of course has been long eclipsed in the very place where it was once -long, long centuries ago- defined and cultivated to unprecedented and unsurpassed depths and heights. The denizens of this place prefer to dwell in their cherished cloud-cuckoo-lands that bear no relation to reality -least of all their own.

They are not to blame. Ruthless and worthless elites of all stripes lulled them to stupefaction, draining all spirit and all moral fiber out of them. Language was debased, education trashed and cultivation rendered the butt of perverse jokes. More often than not those displaying their own superior lights have been the deadliest enemies of the humble and sincere quest for truth.

They are not to blame -except that they themselves gave those elites the warrant to demolish and cheered them on as they torched the ruins of the temple.