In his book The New American Militarism—How Americans are Seduced by War, Andrew J. Bacevich says: ‘...concern[ing] my understanding of history: Before moving into a career focussed on teaching as a diplomatic historian. My graduate school mentors were scholars of great stature and enormous gifts, admirable in every way. They were also splendid teachers, and I left graduate school very much under their influence. my own abbreviated foray into serious historical scholarship bears the earmarks [sic] of their approach, ascribing to Great Men—generals, presidents, and cabinet secretaries—the status of historical prime movers.’

Bacevich continues: ‘I have now come to see that view as mistaken. What seems plausible enough when studying presidents named Wilson or Roosevelt breaks down completely when a Bush or Clinton occupies the Oval Office. Not only do present-day tendencies to elevate the president to the status of demigod whose every move is recorded, every word parsed, and every decision scrutinized for hidden meaning fly in face of republican precepts. They also betray a fundamental misunderstanding of how the world works.’

Bacevich concludes: ‘What is most striking about the most powerful man in the world is not the power he wields. It is how constrained he and his lieutenants are by forces that lie beyond their grasp and perhaps their understanding. Rather than bending history to their will, presidents and those around them are much more likely to dance to history’s tune. Only the illusions churned out by public relations apparatchiks and perpetuated by celebrity-worshipping journalists prevent us from seeing that those inhabiting the inner-sanctum of the West Wing are agents more than independent actors.’

Fu-Manchu suspects that this assessment applies to everyone. Individual human agency is limited. ‘Getting rid of a president will not make the problem go away.’ We are ruled by our culture, therefore we have to change the minds of enough individuals living within our culture in order to effect cultural-change. Perhaps one of the biggest problems for the world as whole is the cultural illiteracy endemic to the United States of America. Large swaths of the American voting population are alarmingly ignorant and disconnected from history and the world at large, which has the effect of making them easy marks for the demagogues they elect to government office. Having general knowledge that is limited or non-existent in scope, most Americans are unable to connect historical events with events current to their own time. Scholastic performance of the American voting public lags the rest of the world by a large margin, a decline that began, it seems, around 1940 with a gradual change in education from a knowledge- to a process-based system.

America has undergone a sea-change that has made the country less democratic, where ignorant foolishness prevails. Like a flock of sheep, they are shorn and easily terrorised. Of course, not everyone in America is like this, but there is a jigoistic ruck, a majority, who are easily deluded. In America there is in progress a struggle between the enlightened and the deluded. At present, delusion and ignorance is ascendant; the situation is exacerbated by fomentation of perpetual war. In 1795, James Madison said: ‘Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies. From these proceed debts and taxes. And armies, debts and taxes are known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few....No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.’ America is one of the most debt-enslaved societies where in 2005, for the first time in seventy years, the savings-rate went negative. America’s situation in 2006 is dire.