In politics, as in medicine, a cure based on a false diagnosis is almost always worthless, often worsening the condition that is supposed to be healed. The United States, today, suffers from a plethora of public ills. Most of them can be traced to the militarism and imperialism that have led to the near-collapse of our Constitutional system of checks and balances. Unfortunately, none of the remedies proposed so far by American politicians or analysts addresses the root causes of the problem.

According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, released on April 26, 2007, some 78% of Americans believe their country to be headed in the wrong direction. Only 22% think the Bush administration's policies make sense, the lowest number on this question since October 1992, when George H. W. Bush was running for a second term -- and lost. What people don't agree on are the reasons for their doubts and, above all, what the remedy -- or remedies -- ought to be.

The range of opinions on this is immense. Even though large numbers of voters vaguely suspect that the failings of the political system itself led the country into its current crisis, most evidently expect the system to perform a course correction more or less automatically. As Adam Nagourney of the New York Timesreported, by the end of March 2007, at least 280,000 American citizens had already contributed some $113.6 million to the presidential campaigns of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Mitt Romney, Rudolph Giuliani, or John McCain.

If these people actually believe a presidential election a year-and-a-half from now will significantly alter how the country is run, they have almost surely wasted their money. As Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism, puts it:"None of the Democrats vying to replace President Bush is doing so with the promise of reviving the system of check and balances.... The aim of the party out of power is not to cut the presidency down to size but to seize it, not to reduce the prerogatives of the executive branch but to regain them."

George W. Bush has, of course, flagrantly violated his oath of office, which requires him"to protect and defend the constitution," and the opposition party has been remarkably reluctant to hold him to account. Among the"high crimes and misdemeanors" that, under other political circumstances, would surely constitute the Constitutional grounds for impeachment are these: the President and his top officials pressured the Central Intelligence Agency to put together a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq's nuclear weapons that both the administration and the Agency knew to be patently dishonest. They then used this false NIE to justify an American war of aggression. After launching an invasion of Iraq, the administration unilaterally reinterpreted international and domestic law to permit the torture of prisoners held at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and at other secret locations around the world.

Nothing in the Constitution, least of all the commander-in-chief clause, allows the president to commit felonies. Nonetheless, within days after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush had signed a secret executive order authorizing a new policy of"extraordinary rendition," in which the CIA is allowed to kidnap terrorist suspects anywhere on Earth and transfer them to prisons in countries like Egypt, Syria, or Uzbekistan, where torture is a normal practice, or to secret CIA prisons outside the United States where Agency operatives themselves do the torturing.

On the home front, despite the post-9/11 congressional authorization of new surveillance powers to the administration, its officials chose to ignore these and, on its own initiative, undertook extensive spying on American citizens without obtaining the necessary judicial warrants and without reporting to Congress on this program. These actions are prima-facie violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (and subsequent revisions) and of Amendment IV of the Constitution.

These alone constitute more than adequate grounds for impeachment, while hardly scratching the surface. And yet, on the eve of the national elections of November 2006, then House Minority Leader, now Speaker, Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), pledged on the CBS News program"60 Minutes" that"impeachment is off the table." She called it"a waste of time." And six months after the Democratic Party took control of both houses of Congress, the prison at Guantánamo Bay was still open and conducting drumhead courts martial of the prisoners held there; the CIA was still using"enhanced interrogation techniques" on prisoners in foreign jails; illegal intrusions into the privacy of American citizens continued unabated; and, more than fifty years after the CIA was founded, it continues to operate under, at best, the most perfunctory congressional oversight.

Promoting Lies, Demoting Democracy

Without question, the administration's catastrophic war in Iraq is the single overarching issue that has convinced a large majority of Americans that the country is"heading in the wrong direction." But the war itself is the outcome of an imperial presidency and the abject failure of Congress to perform its Constitutional duty of oversight. Had the government been working as the authors of the Constitution intended, the war could not have occurred. Even now, the Democratic majority remains reluctant to use its power of the purse to cut off funding for the war, thereby ending the American occupation of Iraq and starting to curtail the ever-growing power of the military-industrial complex.

One major problem of the American social and political system is the failure of the press, especially television news, to inform the public about the true breadth of the unconstitutional activities of the executive branch. As Frederick A. O. Schwarz and Aziz Z. Huq, the authors of Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror, observe,"For the public to play its proper checking role at the ballot box, citizens must know what is done by the government in their names."

Instead of uncovering administration lies and manipulations, the media actively promoted them. Yet the first amendment to the Constitution protects the press precisely so it can penetrate the secrecy that is the bureaucrat's most powerful, self-protective weapon. As a result of this failure, democratic oversight of the government by an actively engaged citizenry did not -- and could not -- occur. The people of the United States became mere spectators as an array of ideological extremists, vested interests, and foreign operatives -- including domestic neoconservatives, Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi exiles, the Israeli Lobby, the petroleum and automobile industries, warmongers and profiteers allied with the military-industrial complex, and the entrenched interests of the professional military establishment -- essentially hijacked the government.

Some respected professional journalists do not see these failings as the mere result of personal turpitude but rather as deep structural and cultural problems within the American system as it exists today. In an interview with Matt Taibbi, Seymour Hersh, for forty years one of America's leading investigative reporters, put the matter this way:

"All of the institutions we thought would protect us -- particularly the press, but also the military, the bureaucracy, the Congress -- they have failed… So all the things that we expect would normally carry us through didn't. The biggest failure, I would argue, is the press, because that's the most glaring…. What can be done to fix the situation? [long pause] You'd have to fire or execute ninety percent of the editors and executives."

Veteran analyst of the press (and former presidential press secretary), Bill Moyers, considering a classic moment of media failure, concluded:"The disgraceful press reaction to Colin Powell's presentation at the United Nations [on February 5, 2003] seems like something out of Monty Python, with one key British report cited by Powell being nothing more than a student's thesis, downloaded from the Web -- with the student later threatening to charge U.S. officials with 'plagiarism.'"

As a result of such multiple failures (still ongoing), the executive branch easily misled the American public.

A Made-in-America Human Catastrophe

Of the failings mentioned by Hersh, that of the military is particularly striking, resembling as it does the failures of the Vietnam era, thirty-plus years earlier. One would have thought the high command had learned some lessons from the defeat of 1975. Instead, it once again went to war pumped up on our own propaganda -- especially the conjoined beliefs that the United States was the"indispensable nation," the"lone superpower," and the"victor" in the Cold War; and that it was a new Rome the likes of which the world had never seen, possessing as it did -- from the heavens to the remotest spot on the planet --"full spectrum dominance." The idea that the U.S. was an unquestioned military colossus athwart the world, which no power or people could effectively oppose, was hubristic nonsense certain to get the country into deep trouble -- as it did -- and bring the U.S. Army to the point of collapse, as happened in Vietnam and may well happen again in Iraq (and Afghanistan).

Instead of behaving in a professional manner, our military invaded Iraq with far too small a force; failed to respond adequately when parts of the Iraqi Army (and Baathist Party) went underground; tolerated an orgy of looting and lawlessness throughout the country; disobeyed orders and ignored international obligations (including the obligation of an occupying power to protect the facilities and treasures of the occupied country -- especially, in this case, Baghdad's National Museum and other archaeological sites of untold historic value); and incompetently fanned the flames of an insurgency against our occupation, committing numerous atrocities against unarmed Iraqi civilians.

According to Andrew Bacevich,"Next to nothing can be done to salvage Iraq. It no longer lies within the capacity of the United States to determine the outcome of events there." Our former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Chas W. Freeman, says of President Bush's recent"surge" strategy in Baghdad and al-Anbar Province:"The reinforcement of failure is a poor substitute for its correction."

Symbolically, a certain sign of the disaster to come in Iraq arrived via an April 26th posting from the courageous but anonymous Sunni woman who has, since August 2003, published the indispensable blog Baghdad Burning. Her family, she reported, was finally giving up and going into exile -- joining up to two million of her compatriots who have left the country. In her final dispatch, she wrote:

"There are moments when the injustice of having to leave your country simply because an imbecile got it into his head to invade it, is overwhelming. It is unfair that in order to survive and live normally, we have to leave our home and what remains of family and friends.... And to what?"

Retired General Barry McCaffrey, commander of the 24th Infantry Division in the first Iraq war and a consistent cheerleader for Bush strategies in the second, recently radically changed his tune. He now says,"No Iraqi government official, coalition soldier, diplomat, reporter, foreign NGO, nor contractor can walk the streets of Baghdad, nor Mosul, nor Kirkuk, nor Basra, nor Tikrit, nor Najaf, nor Ramadi, without heavily armed protection." In a different context, Gen. McCaffrey has concluded:"The U.S. Army is rapidly unraveling."

Even military failure in Iraq is still being spun into an endless web of lies and distortions by the White House, the Pentagon, military pundits, and the now-routine reporting of propagandists disguised as journalists. For example, in the first months of 2007, rising car-bomb attacks in Baghdad were making a mockery of Bush administration and Pentagon claims that the U.S. troop escalation in the capital had brought about"a dramatic drop in sectarian violence." The official response to this problem: the Pentagon simply quit including deaths from car bombings in its count of sectarian casualties. (It has never attempted to report civilian casualties publicly or accurately.) Since August 2003, there have been over 1,050 car bombings in Iraq. One study estimates that through June 2006 the death toll from these alone has been a staggering 78,000 Iraqis.

The war and occupation George W. Bush unleashed in Iraq has proved unimaginably lethal for unarmed civilians, but reporting the true levels of lethality in Iraq, or the nature of the direct American role in it was, for a long time, virtually taboo in the U.S. media. As late as October 2006, the journal of the British Medical Association, The Lancet, published a study conducted by researchers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad estimating that, since March 2003, there were some 601,027 more Iraqi deaths from violence than would have been expected without a war. The British and American governments at first dismissed the findings, claiming the research was based on faulty statistical methods -- and the American media ignored the study, played down its importance, or dismissed its figures.

On March 27, 2007, however, it was revealed that the chief scientific adviser to the British Ministry of Defense, Roy Anderson, had offered a more honest response. The methods used in the study were, he wrote," close to best practice." Another British official described them as"a tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones." Over 600,000 violent deaths in a population estimated in 2006 at 26.8 million -- that is, one in every 45 individuals -- amounts to a made-in-America human catastrophe.

One subject that the government, the military, and the news media try to avoid like the plague is the racist and murderous culture of rank-and-file American troops when operating abroad. Partly as a result of the background racism that is embedded in many Americans' mental make-up and the propaganda of American imperialism that is drummed into recruits during military training, they do not see assaults on unarmed"rag heads" or"hajis" as murder. The cult of silence on this subject began to slip only slightly in May 2007 when a report prepared by the Army's Mental Health Advisory Team was leaked to the San Diego Union-Tribune. Based on anonymous surveys and focus groups involving 1,320 soldiers and 447 Marines, the study revealed that only 56% of soldiers would report a unit member for injuring or killing an innocent noncombatant, while a mere 40% of Marines would do so. Some militarists will reply that such inhumanity to the defenseless is always inculcated into the properly trained soldier. If so, then the answer to this problem is to ensure that, in the future, there are many fewer imperialist wars of choice sponsored by the United States.

The Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex

Many other aspects of imperialism and militarism are undermining America's Constitutional system. By now, for example, the privatization of military and intelligence functions is totally out of control, beyond the law, and beyond any form of Congressional oversight. It is also incredibly lucrative for the owners and operators of so-called private military companies -- and the money to pay for their activities ultimately comes from taxpayers through government contracts. Any accounting of these funds, largely distributed to crony companies with insider connections, is chaotic at best. Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, estimates that there are 126,000 private military contractors in Iraq, more than enough to keep the war going, even if most official U.S. troops were withdrawn."From the beginning," Scahill writes,"these contractors have been a major hidden story of the war, almost uncovered in the mainstream media and absolutely central to maintaining the U.S. occupation of Iraq."

America's massive"military" budgets, still on the rise, are beginning to threaten the U.S. with bankruptcy, given that its trade and fiscal deficits already easily make it the world's largest net debtor nation. Spending on the military establishment -- sometimes mislabeled"defense spending" -- has soared to the highest levels since World War II, exceeding the budgets of the Korean and Vietnam War eras as well as President Ronald Reagan's weapons-buying binge in the 1980s. According to calculations by the National Priorities Project, a non-profit research organization that examines the local impact of federal spending policies, military spending today consumes 40% of every tax dollar.

Equally alarming, it is virtually impossible for a member of Congress or an ordinary citizen to obtain even a modest handle on the actual size of military spending or its impact on the structure and functioning of our economic system. Some $30 billion of the official Defense Department (DoD) appropriation in the current fiscal year is"black," meaning that it is allegedly going for highly classified projects. Even the open DoD budget receives only perfunctory scrutiny because members of Congress, seeking lucrative defense contracts for their districts, have mutually beneficial relationships with defense contractors and the Pentagon. President Dwight D. Eisenhower identified this phenomenon, in the draft version of his 1961 farewell address, as the"military-industrial-congressional complex." Forty-six years later, in a way even Eisenhower probably couldn't have imagined, the defense budget is beyond serious congressional oversight or control.

The DoD always tries to minimize the size of its budget by representing it as a declining percentage of the gross national product. What it never reveals is that total military spending is actually many times larger than the official appropriation for the Defense Department. For fiscal year 2006, Robert Higgs of the Independent Institute calculated national security outlays at almost a trillion dollars -- $934.9 billion to be exact -- broken down as follows (in billions of dollars):

Department of Defense: $499.4
Department of Energy (atomic weapons): $16.6
Department of State (foreign military aid): $25.3
Department of Veterans Affairs (treatment of wounded soldiers): $69.8
Department of Homeland Security (actual defense): $69.1
Department of Justice (1/3rd for the FBI): $1.9
Department of the Treasury (military retirements): $38.5
NASA (satellite launches): $7.6
Interest on war debts, 1916-present: $206.7

Totaled, the sum is larger than the combined sum spent by all other nations on military security.

This spending helps sustain the national economy and represents, essentially, a major jobs program. However, it is beginning to crowd out the civilian economy, causing stagnation in income levels. It also contributes to the hemorrhaging of manufacturing jobs to other countries. On May 1, 2007, the Center for Economic and Policy Research released a series of estimates on"the economic impact of the Iraq war and higher military spending." Its figures show, among other things, that, after an initial demand stimulus, the effect of a significant rise in military spending (as we've experienced in recent years) turns negative around the sixth year.

Sooner or later, higher military spending forces inflation and interest rates up, reducing demand in interest-sensitive sectors of the economy, notably in annual car and truck sales. Job losses follow. The non-military construction and manufacturing sectors experience the largest share of these losses. The report concludes,"Most economic models show that military spending diverts resources from productive uses, such as consumption and investment, and ultimately slows economic growth and reduces employment."

Imperial Liquidation?

Imperialism and militarism have thus begun to imperil both the financial and social well-being of our republic. What the country desperately needs is a popular movement to rebuild the Constitutional system and subject the government once again to the discipline of checks and balances. Neither the replacement of one political party by the other, nor protectionist economic policies aimed at rescuing what's left of our manufacturing economy will correct what has gone wrong. Both of these solutions fail to address the root cause of our national decline.

I believe that there is only one solution to the crisis we face. The American people must make the decision to dismantle both the empire that has been created in their name and the huge (still growing) military establishment that undergirds it. It is a task at least comparable to that undertaken by the British government when, after World War II, it liquidated the British Empire. By doing so, Britain avoided the fate of the Roman Republic -- becoming a domestic tyranny and losing its democracy, as would have been required if it had continued to try to dominate much of the world by force.

For the U.S., the decision to mount such a campaign of imperial liquidation may already come too late, given the vast and deeply entrenched interests of the military-industrial complex. To succeed, such an endeavor might virtually require a revolutionary mobilization of the American citizenry, one at least comparable to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Even to contemplate a drawing back from empire -- something so inconceivable to our pundits and newspaper editorial writers that it is simply never considered -- we must specify as clearly as possible precisely what the elected leaders and citizens of the United States would have to do. Two cardinal decisions would have to be made. First, in Iraq, we would have to initiate a firm timetable for withdrawing all our military forces and turning over the permanent military bases we have built to the Iraqis. Second, domestically, we would have to reverse federal budget priorities.

In the words of Noam Chomsky, a venerable critic of American imperialism:"Where spending is rising, as in military supplemental bills to conduct the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it would sharply decline. Where spending is steady or declining (health, education, job training, the promotion of energy conservation and renewable energy sources, veterans benefits, funding for the UN and UN peacekeeping operations, and so on), it would sharply increase. Bush's tax cuts for people with incomes over $200,000 a year would be immediately rescinded."

Such reforms would begin at once to reduce the malevolent influence of the military-industrial complex, but many other areas would require attention as well. As part of the process of de-garrisoning the planet and liquidating our empire, we would have to launch an orderly closing-up process for at least 700 of the 737 military bases we maintain (by official Pentagon count) in over 130 foreign countries on every continent except Antarctica. We should ultimately aim at closing all our imperialist enclaves, but in order to avoid isolationism and maintain a capacity to assist the United Nations in global peacekeeping operations, we should, for the time being, probably retain some 37 of them, mostly naval and air bases.

Equally important, we should rewrite all our Status of Forces Agreements -- those American-dictated"agreements" that exempt our troops based in foreign countries from local criminal laws, taxes, immigration controls, anti-pollution legislation, and anything else the American military can think of. It must be established as a matter of principle and law that American forces stationed outside the U.S. will deal with their host nations on a basis of equality, not of extraterritorial privilege.

The American approach to diplomatic relations with the rest of the world would also require a major overhaul. We would have to end our belligerent unilateralism toward other countries as well as our scofflaw behavior regarding international law. Our objective should be to strengthen the United Nations, including our respect for its majority, by working to end the Security Council veto system (and by stopping using our present right to veto). The United States needs to cease being the world's largest supplier of arms and munitions -- a lethal trade whose management should be placed under UN supervision. We should encourage the UN to begin outlawing weapons like land mines, cluster bombs, and depleted-uranium ammunition that play particularly long-term havoc with civilian populations. As part of an attempt to right the diplomatic balance, we should take some obvious steps like recognizing Cuba and ending our blockade of that island and, in the Middle East, working to equalize aid to Israel and Palestine, while attempting to broker a real solution to that disastrous situation. Our goal should be a return to leading by example -- and by sound arguments -- rather than by continual resort to unilateral armed force and repeated foreign military interventions.

In terms of the organization of the executive branch, we need to rewrite the National Security Act of 1947, taking away from the CIA all functions that involve sabotage, torture, subversion, overseas election rigging, rendition, and other forms of clandestine activity. The president should be deprived of his power to order these types of operations except with the explicit advice and consent of the Senate. The CIA should basically devote itself to the collection and analysis of foreign intelligence. We should eliminate as much secrecy as possible so that neither the CIA, nor any other comparable organization ever again becomes the president's private army.

In order to halt our economic decline and lessen our dependence on our trading partners, the U.S. must cap its trade deficits through the perfectly legal use of tariffs in accordance with World Trade Organization rules, and it must begin to guide its domestic market in accordance with a national industrial policy, just as the leading economies of the world (particularly the Japanese and Chinese ones) do as a matter of routine. Even though it may involve trampling on the vested interests of American university economics departments, there is simply no excuse for a continued reliance on an outdated doctrine of"free trade."

Normally, a proposed list of reforms like this would simply be rejected as utopian. I understand this reaction. I do want to stress, however, that failure to undertake such reforms would mean condemning the United States to the fate that befell the Roman Republic and all other empires since then. That is why I gave my book Nemesis the subtitle"The Last Days of the American Republic."

When Ronald Reagan coined the phrase"evil empire," he was referring to the Soviet Union, and I basically agreed with him that the USSR needed to be contained and checkmated. But today it is the U.S. that is widely perceived as an evil empire and world forces are gathering to stop us. The Bush administration insists that if we leave Iraq our enemies will"win" or -- even more improbably --"follow us home." I believe that, if we leave Iraq and our other imperial enclaves, we can regain the moral high ground and disavow the need for a foreign policy based on preventive war. I also believe that unless we follow this path, we will lose our democracy and then it will not matter much what else we lose. In the immortal words of Pogo,"We have met the enemy and he is us."

This article first appeared on www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, a long time editor in publishing, the author of The End of Victory Culture, and a fellow of the Nation Institute.

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Manan Ahmed: Lewis Unhinged

Graduates of the class of 2007, close your eyes.

No kidding. That's my advice in a nutshell.

Okay, take a last look around if you want, you who entered college in September 2003, when it still wasn't apparent to most Americans that our President had crash-landed on the deck of the aircraft carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln, to give his famed May Day speech declaring "major combat operations in Iraq" at an end.

Look at your world just a little longer. As on that sunny September day when you arrived here almost four years ago, it's another lovely day as you prepare to depart and, at a glance, the world -- the American world anyway -- doesn't seem that much the worse for wear. Okay, the price of a barrel of oil essentially doubled in those four years, as did the price of a gallon of gas at the pump; the Democrats retook Congress; Iraq descended into the charnel house of history, into what was already being termed back then, in a bow to the Vietnam War, the "q-word" (for quagmire); newspapers began losing young readers to the Internet as if into a black hole; and the Bush administration, touted in 2003 as the "most disciplined" in anyone's memory, has fallen into belligerent disarray; but, hey, the stock market is at a high-water mark, the Boston Red Sox are leading the American League East by 8 games, lawyers are suing, doctors are medicating, and brokers are brokering away more or less as usual.

And here you are in your serried ranks, your parents nearby, your school's president and various deans, as well as distinguished faculty, arrayed before you on this stage in impressive gowns and tasseled caps. Today is a much-awaited moment for you, the culmination of years of work, just as graduation days like this have been for those who preceded you.

The campus, this balmy afternoon, seems hardly changed from four years ago. The same gentle carpet of grass, green with spring, dotted on its distant edges with beds of tulips, surrounded the graduating class of '03 -- and probably the class of '66, the year I sat through one of these ceremonies. The dorms you slept in are behind us; the dining hall you ate so many unmemorable meals in is just over that hill, which I have no doubt you climbed grudgingly on many wind-chilled winter mornings. At least some of the classrooms you did your learning in, housed in solemn gray stone (as monuments to timeless knowledge should be), flank us. The Greek-style columns of your library with its million-plus volumes can just be glimpsed through the distant trees.

Yes, look around. All is as it should be. Everything we can see and everything we know is here -- all of it normal, all of it fit for a graduation speech. Fit for you.

In the years just after I graduated from college, the much praised (and maligned) 1960s, the young were said to believe in a single aphorism: "Never trust anyone over thirty." I must admit I never heard such a thing myself, but then, as now, the media has a way of knowing what we think better than we do. I read it, ergo it's so.

Now, I want to update the phrase for your moment which, believe me, is far worse than anything I ever imagined possible in the Sixties. On such a normally celebratory day, I wouldn't say that if I didn't urgently believe it -- and if I didn't think that, in your heart of hearts, you believed it too.

So here goes. Some graduation advice -- three pieces of it, actually -- that probably run against most of what you've been taught at this distinguished institution in these last four years:

Don't trust what you see around you.

That's right. No matter what anyone tells you, don't trust the world that's most obviously in front of you. Don't trust your own eyes. Not on a day like this, not in a country like this. Reality is elsewhere.

That's why I say, close your eyes. Go ahead. Listen to me for a while in the dark and understand that I'm not trying to blind you. I'm only suggesting that you'll be able see the world more clearly with your eyes shut tight and so graduate with a more reasonable sense of what your future job on this planet really is.

That's no easy thing to assess, if you're on this pristine campus, or in any mall in America, or, for that matter, in most parts of the city on the outskirts of which this campus stands rather than in Baghdad, or Kabul, or low-lying Bangladesh, or the melting Arctic, or some exposed Pacific atoll.

This sunny May day -- the one you are not looking at any more -- is deceptive indeed. It masks a far darker world that your generation is about to inherit on a planet two-thirds of whose inhabitants, as a group of retired admirals and generals interested in climate change recently noted, live near a coastline (that might in coming decades flood). Put another way, according to the NGO Christian Aid, one out of every seven people on the planet -- perhaps a billion in all -- might, over the next half century (essentially your post-college work lifetimes) be forced from their homes and into the kinds of desperate migrations that would make the present American debate over illegal immigration seem like a global joke.

Over the next 100 years -- the heart of your life and that of your children -- the Earth could lose its glaciers (major sources of water in places like South Asia); the Greenland ice sheet could radically melt down; and up to half this planet's wealth of species could go extinct. You could also experience the onrush -- evidently already underway -- of ever more extreme weather patterns (massive hurricanes, typhoons, monsoons, 100-year droughts, and the like), the spread of lethal diseases to new locales, and a host of other unnerving phenomena.

In other words -- and even those of you who claim to doubt the reality of global warming sense that this is so -- fifty years from now, you are likely to be living on another, poorer kind of planet. It will also be a far lonelier one. People, who have the urge to frighten, often say that we are "destroying the planet," but that is probably not accurate. The planet will undoubtedly spin on. Given a few million, or a few tens of millions, or even a few hundreds of millions of years -- the sort of time that, without our consciousness, wouldn't matter a tinker's dam -- Earth is likely to develop a future filled with life, just without us (and many of our creaturely neighbors).

The planet's future may not be in doubt, but surely ours is. New Scientist magazine has offered an estimate of 10 million years for the planet to "repair" the present "dent" made in biodiversity. I like to use the example of the pronghorn antelope, "the prairie ghost" of our West, to explain this. It's a speedy creature, capable of running at up to 60 miles per hour, at least 30 mph faster than any predator in its environment. That extra mileage might seem hard to explain unless you understand that, before the last great mammalian megafaunal die-out on this continent, some 13,000 to 16,000 years ago, there were evidently creatures (perhaps lions or dire wolves) that could power along at something close to those speeds. So, for all those thousands of years, far longer than human history from Ur to the latest disasters in Iraq, the pronghorn has had a ghostly companion. So much time in human terms and it still hasn't "registered" the loss; so much time and that niche in our environment remains empty.

Back in the ancient 1950s, a half-century-plus in the other direction, only one thing could end our world, the world I grew up in -- nuclear weapons or The Bomb (which, when that was all there was, often sported capital letters) via the Cold War superpower confrontation. The thought of a nuclear war was paralyzing and nightmare-inducing enough. Believe me, when I heard President John F. Kennedy's famous speech on October 22, 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis (aka "the most dangerous moment in human history"), I feared my world was toast -- and I wasn't alone. I always believed that the Sixties held such a powerful sense of liberation, in part, because world-annihilating possibilities were, for a few brief years, simply left behind.

Over half a century later, nuclear weapons have multiplied and proliferated (even without the other superpower in attendance), and yet they now have to queue up for attention in a jostling line of potentially world-ending perils, real and fictional; while all of you live in the peculiar sunshine of a locked-down, locked-up, Patriot-Act, homeland-security, gated-community country (of a sort no one in the 1950s could have imagined). I stand here looking out at you, your eyes closed, and I doubt I can really imagine your world, the one I'm trying to describe, or the almost unnoticed, largely unacknowledged exterminatory grid that has settled paralyzingly over consciousness in this country, that has left you able perhaps to imagine a job, a mate, even a family -- the most immediate of futures, but not a human future beyond that.

An image comes to mind. You know how bits of semi-knowledge from who knows where stick in your brain? Here's one from mine that's useful for this speech, whatever its historical accuracy. Around 1000 AD, there was a millenarian movement of peasants who, believing they saw the end days coming, built their own coffins, and, at the predicted moment, climbed into them to await their foreordained fate. To tell you the truth, I don't know what happened next. Assumedly, sooner or later they climbed out again.

But here's the point I want to make: As long as you're looking at our world through your usual lenses, I suspect you're already in our version of those coffins, even if they pass for normal daily life. Only in the dark can you begin to imagine the possible Pompeii-scapes to come, the potential for the extreme unraveling of normalcy. And only after you imagine that, can you do what those peasants undoubtedly did when they realized that the last days had not come -- not yet anyway: climb out.

If all of you were to clamber out of the coffins we've built for you, there would still be trouble ahead, but the end of times would be just that much less likely to arrive.

"Abandon hope, all ye who enter here." As you English majors already know, Dante claimed this inscription was over the entrance to Hell. Today, as you form your processional, walking like every class before you through the arch that fronts this campus, I think you should imagine that inscription over your heads, because that's the futureless world you're entering with your eyes open. My definition of hell is, in fact, futurelessness, a world in which no one can imagine their grandchildren or great-grandchildren -- and so, no one can work to build a country, a planet for them.

Now, for a second piece of advice -- probably not best given at a world-renown center of learning -- but here goes.

Believe the Hollywood previews. Believe your video games. Believe "24." Believe The Day After Tomorrow.

It's true that, despite what the screen showed in the global-warming film, The Day After Tomorrow, the Northern Hemisphere is not going to turn into an ice sheet in approximately 30 seconds; wolves, freed from the local zoo, are unlikely to roam the streets of New York City any time soon or movie stars burn books for warmth in the fireplace of the frigid New York Public Library; spy Arnold Schwarzenegger or his equivalent will not, despite True Lies, kiss Jamie Lee Curtis while an atomic bomb, handled by Arab terrorists, goes off behind them in the Florida Keys; you won't save us or the planet the way you do in first-person shooter video games; and, no, torturing à la "24" is neither good, nor even effective as an information extractor. Meanwhile, all these blimps, trains, buses, cable cars, and who knows what else hijacked by terrorists and heading toward everything we hold dear will not all arrive as the stadium blows up, the airport goes down, the White House is zapped, or the city, country, planet disappears.

Nonetheless, since my childhood, Hollywood, not religion, has been the greatest deliverer of end-time scenarios. This has been true at least since the atomic war-film-that-couldn't-be-made -- the one that would have ended not in American victory but in a planet-shaking set of explosions -- mutated into the horror and science fiction genres. Those films moved under the mushroom cloud in various futuristic settings where all sorts of monstrous, irradiated beings and alien creatures possessing strange rays did to our cities and towns what we had done to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while crowds of onscreen Americans, screaming and fleeing, were crushed or mangled, burned or consumed.

And then, of course, we all left the movie theaters or drive-ins a little shaken, a little thrilled, and life began again. However weird or warped or fantastic these films may have been, however happy the endings when the giant ants went down for the count in the sewers of Los Angeles, or the aliens were themselves zapped, or the terrorists foiled, or the monsters destroyed, these were, in essence, Hollywood's previews of our world to come.

The movie-makers knew, but only because we knew. They wanted our eyes (and our popcorn money) and so they made a beeline for the stories, the fears, that resonated most deeply in us, the ones that could be returned to profitability over and over again. Perhaps, from the beginning, what we humans had was an ability to view possible ends. Perhaps what made us human wasn't that opposable thumb, but the fact that we arrived in the world capable of imagining its termination.

Explain it as you will, Hollywood has been sending us a single riveting message over the last half-century-plus as the mushroom clouds rose, the aliens descended, the post-apocalyptic zombies feasted, the swarthy terrorists arrived, the pandemics spread, and Los Angeles or New York (the nation's pre-9/11 Sodom and Gomorrah) became a dystopian prison, or an ice palace, or a place to be zapped, or stomped by monsters, or…

Well, you of all people know the story. You've seen it again and again, your eyes open in another kind of darkness -- or you've experienced it in your own living room, while you desperately manipulated hand-held controls to save us from the mutants, zombies, terrorists, bad guys who wanted to end it all. You've watched the previews, just as al-Qaeda did, just as people all over this planet have.

And then, as most of us have for over fifty years, you left the multiplex pretending that what you just saw was simply fun, or plain-old entertainment, or plain crud, or eye-candy, the sort of thing that only puritan wackos (or academics) could wax ridiculously serious over. Whatever it was, it wasn't life, not this life anyway.

But you were wrong, I think. To get things straight, you now have to ignore much that you've been taught and you've got to attend to the essential wisdom of the most watched, but least respected, teachers on the planet. Only they can give you the real, inside dope on what's coming our way -- if, that is, you're going to lead a life that matters, if you're going to do something.

So here's a final piece of advice, possibly not the best to offer in the heart of a great university:

Don't think too much.

I look out over this audience, remembering that, when I was 21, there seemed so much that needed to be done. How could it be that, over 40 years later, there seems to be so much more -- starting with somehow ending not (as in my college days) one, but two mad frontier wars, two scenes of slaughter and carnage, Iraq and Afghanistan, in a world where frontiers no longer exist? These are wars guaranteed to kill tens of thousands more and, in the long run, to endanger us all -- and there's only you to end them. There's only you, really, to change everything. It's a terrible burden that my generation of parents should never, never have loaded on your shoulders, but understand this clearly: It's not a coffin, not by a long shot.

We failed you. I believe that and I don't even know exactly how.

If you aren't already settled in, awaiting the end times we have bequeathed you in our short-sightedness, but you think too carefully for too long about what needs to be done, all will seem hopeless. As with so many tasks that desperately need to be undertaken, those who undertake them must be, in a sense, foolhardy just because the burden looks so heavy, the path so long and twisting, the end so out of sight. It seems so much easier to lie in those made-in-America coffins and wait.

But that, of course, is the royal route to everything none of us could possibly want for our world. No one of you can save a planet of people and, if the future already seems stolen from you and the previews are so apocalyptic, then the possibility of building movements of any sort must seem dim indeed. But don't settle back quite yet and don't ponder too long. Acting is usually better.

The moment you begin to act, I suspect you will discover that there is much you might still be able to call on for support, including many in my generation who, if you're willing to trust some over-thirties (but not too much), might have a little energy and perspective still to offer. Then, there's an American can-do (even quick-fix) tradition that has been lost in recent years, in Katrina-level idiocy and incompetence. How we turned from a can-do into a can't-do (or, as I like to think, a Republican't) nation is worthy of a history or two, if people are still writing them somewhere down the line. But the Iraq War, our oil dependency, even the potentially massive effects of global warming might all respond to a new surge of can-doism, to a nation still rich enough to put its money, its best brains, and its efforts where its mealy mouth and consumer culture (and a President whose idea of sacrifice in "time of war" is a trip to Disney World) now is.

To my mind, here's your first job: With your eyes closed, try to see our world honestly for what it is and then perform a magical act: Conjure up a new set of previews -- fit for a future for which it's worth doing a great deal. To act in concert and meaningfully, you need to able to imagine yourself, fifty years from now, standing at a podium like this, speaking to a group of graduating seniors, or perhaps simply sitting with all those parents proudly watching your own child in cap and gown in -- let's hope -- a very different world with fewer coffins in sight.

Now, with those eyes still closed, take a good look at our world, the one you already know is there, but don't think too much. It's time to pass through the portals of this school that has held you these last four years, out the gate, into the streets beyond, into the world beyond, and get yourself an education. It's time to look up and read the inscription -- by now, you can surely do so with your eyes closed -- and then reformulate it. How about, for example: Abandon paralysis all ye who exit here.

I can't tell you how to act or what to do. I wouldn't even pretend to know. For that, in the dark, you, all of you, have to look into our world and then into yourselves. I suspect that, when enough of you close your eyes and begin to believe your own previews, you'll know. At least perhaps, you'll know where you want to start and, knowing, you'll act; or perhaps, not even knowing, you'll act anyway; and, in acting, hope -- because, in bad times, it's always the act that engenders hope -- and, then, in hoping you'll know.

This article first appeared on www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, a long time editor in publishing, the author of The End of Victory Culture, and a fellow of the Nation Institute.

I've written a few books about the limitations of the MSM and expect to write a few more before my number's up, but I rarely criticize the netroots in large measure because I think most of the problems manifested in their work are trivial compared to the corrective balance they offer and because the MSM narrative remains so much more powerful and so profoundly flawed that it seems simultaneously small-minded and tendentious to pick on minor mistakes by unfamous people with next-to-no influence while Bigfoot pundit poohbahs were helping Bush and company to lie us into ruinous wars and the like. (Boy, that was a long sentence.)

Even as the netroots have grown in power and influence, I still believe all of the above, which was the primary point I tried to make in response to Jon Chait here last week. It'll be a long time before Atrios is as influential as Joe Klein and an even longer time -- think infinity -- before Klein is as honest and accurate about the world as Atrios. Still, even apart from the fact that most reporting necessarily occurs in newspapers and newsweeklies, the netroots are not always right and the MSM is not always wrong. And the netroots needs to get better about recognizing these instances and correcting them, methinks. A few months ago I wrote about a case where netroots bloggers were up in arms about a Washington Post story that had allegedly been changed in order to remove the charge that Bush had lied about removing Rumsfeld right after the election. In fact, a single phone call to the author of the story demonstrated that no story had been changed; two separate stories had been confused. And yet the netroots-enabled myth proved impossible to disarm. (I don't recall any of the bloggers who expressed their outrage printing corrections in the aftermath, though I may not have seen them.)

Recently, the netroots have been up in arms over an alleged comment by Tom Edsall that David Broder represents the"voice of the people." Here again, we see a weakness of the netroots at work, which is that many bloggers lack much experience upon which to base their judgments and tend to jump on anything and everything that confirms their beliefs. Alas, anyone who knows Tom at all well knows that it is nearly impossible to determine by either his voice or his mien when he is joking. Part of his charm is the ability to make exactly this kind of joke in a perfectly deadpan manner. And I would hope that anyone who is familiar with his work would know better than to believe that he could say something so patently silly without joking. I don't doubt that the young Radar reporter who set forth the ongoing storm was honestly confused. And it is no less clear to me that it has become such a big deal on the net because it is consistent with the toxic combination of arrogance and ignorance that characterizes so much MSM punditry and, to a degree, helped cause this war. (I see, for instance, that Jim Lehrer, who is supposed to be the gold standard for high-minded accuracy, still has no idea how much opposition there was to the Iraq war at the time of the vote -- or else is really, really bad at math -- and does not think it proper for journalists to question the veracity of the president's statements. That's here and here. Let's not even mention Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs.)

But believe me, I play poker with this guy. It is impossible to tell when he's bluffing and impossible to tell when he's kidding. This time he was kidding. The fact that Edsall has jumped from the Post by way of TNR and National Journal to the Huffington Post is actually an enormous endorsement of the blogosphere as the source of serious and sophisticated newsgathering and analysis -- one that the David Broders of the world will find it increasingly impossible to kiss off. All of this mishigas over a missed joke is both misplaced and just plain silly.

But let's be clear. It's a wrong-headed misunderstanding of the kind that happens almost every day between people of good will. Compared to, say, the self-conscious crimes against both truth and democracy commonly committed by, say, William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Joe Klein, most of the casts of the Sunday shows, and yes, David Broder, it is minor-league stuff indeed. And while MSM reporters and pundits are supposed to have a higher standard of verification to what they print, I find all this means in practice, frequently, is a CYA attitude toward sourcing. In other words, so long as someone, anywhere, says anything, that makes it"true" enough to be reported, no matter how frequently that source has proven to be an unreliable liar or fantasist. At least in the case of the netroots, people are generally trying to figure out what's true, not that that always helps. (Academia's standards of truth, by the way, are far higher than that of either the average reporter or blogger; unfortunately, there are significant barriers regarding both relevance and 'communication skills.' ...