Mike Davis

Europe‘s long, hot and tragic summer begs a little North American background.

Every night the forces of occupation fan out across the sullen, cratered landscape of the defeated enemy capital. Their objectives are to uproot, engage and, hopefully, annihilate the surviving loyalists of the old regime. It is war without pity.

Imperial Washington, like Berlin in the late 1930s, has become a psychedelic capital where one megalomaniacal hallucination succeeds another. Thus in addition to creating a new geopolitical order in the Middle East, we are now told by the Pentagon's deepest thinkers that the invasion of Iraq will also inaugurate 'the most important revolution in military affairs (RMA) in 200 years'.

One icy night in 1855, the celebrated street brawler John Morrissey walked into a Broadway saloon and spat in the face of Bill 'The Butcher' Poole, the even more renowned goliath of the New York streets. Poole, who led a murderous mob of anti-Catholic 'know nothings', was the arch-foe of Morrissey and other Irish gang leaders in the pay of Tammany Hall. Morrissey tried to blow Poole's brains out with his pistol but it misfired and Butcher Bill was preparing to 'bone the Irishman's cutlet' when the police intervened.

In the early summer of 1951 a group of Inuit hunters, guiding a French anthropologist, returned to their homes in Thule in the north west of Greenland after a daring expedition to Canada's Ellesmere Island. When they had left the year before, Thule was one of the most remote communities on earth--20 igloos and a trading post established in 1910 by Greenland's national hero, Knud Rasmussen, to provide a base for his famed ethnographic explorations.

'On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.'
(H L Mencken, 1920)