I am concerned about how to reverse the process by which a fundamentalist right and a corporate elite were able to seize power in the United States.
The fancy term for what America has squandered in the past year and a half or so is legitimacy.
The only people available to change the world are the people now living in it, with all the beliefs they bring along - however retrograde those beliefs may appear to those of us who see ourselves as enlightened.
Human inertia makes the everyday environment, the furniture, as it were, appear to be a given.
Collectively, we are in thrall to media - because they deliver to us many of the psychic goods we crave, and we know no other way to live.
I don't think anyone in the media thinks strategically about society.
Americas are, for a variety of reasons, the most adept at producing the kind of entertainment that delivers easy satisfactions.
There is a fuzzy but real distinction that can and I believe should be made, between patriotism, which is attachment to a way of life, and nationalism, which is the insistence that your way of life deserves to rule over other ways of life.
A century of convulsive change leaves huge demographic gouge marks.
All I will say is that there are particular features of the American constitutional system that renders a third party futile - at best.
The genius of the economic machine is in its ability to convert these indulgences into profitability. It converts desire into attention, a grip on our eyeballs and eardrums, which in turn can be marketed to advertisers.
Sure, I've often been misrepresented - anyone frequently quoted has this experience.
Navigation is power of a limited sort - it enables us to manage the immensity of the media torrent.
I first came to think about media and politics in the late 1960s, having observed some distortions up close, but since then I wouldn't say that my personal experience has remained an important motive for my writing about media.
So every day I'm mindful as I watch the Bush crowd extend their sway into policies of every imaginable variety, and over almost every square foot of earth, that the control of the American state is a matter of urgency.
My business is the analytical framework.
I don't for the life of me understand how anybody could contemplate the results of the 2000 election in the US and say that electoral politics doesn't matter any more, and that Ralph Nader was right when he said there is no difference between the two parties.
Like Americans, people outside America want fun, want an emotional compensation for the utilitarianism and calculation that mark the rest of their lives.
My position is not that John Kerry is either Jesus Christ or the prophet Mohammad. My position is that John Kerry is the possibility of restarting politics.
As I write at the end, if we step back and face the enormity of the torrent, then we have taken the first step to imagining what we might want to do about it.
