It is starting to become clear to me that under all this talk of war with Iraq is that American old messiah-complex rearing its head again. I suppose it's part of the inflation syndrome from which we have been suffering for, what?, a hundred years, two hundred years? Something in the national psyche appears to believe itself so morally right that it is simply forced to make everything else right everywhere. This Administration, for instance, will not rest, it seems, until, as Harper's observed a few months ago, the whole world looks like a suburb in Connecticut.

What I'm seeing in this cry for war is a Grand Scheme to reconfigure the entire Middle East as a group of democratic states -- perhaps even eventually a European-style alliance -- that would be a socially orderly and economically responsible entity. Grandiosity is one of the qualities of personality inflation. This is the high road, of course...I can also see the oil interests, and after them the fast-food and soda pop multinationals, and then the entertainment moguls licking their chops and moving in.

Naturally, all this is midguided. Mandela comes out today and says that the United States has 'no moral authority' to police the world -- moral authority. ''If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. They don't care for human beings,'' he said. Well, it's a bit much, but there it is.

At some point we will have to stop trying to drive civilization so much, and just be good neighbors. That seems unlikely, given the American missionary zeal, rooted maybe in the Protestant ethic, to make little Americans of everyone on the planet.

Apparently the connection between Bush's State of the Union Address the other night and the movie 'Wag the Dog' has been noted, sorta, by Iraq: an editorial in Al-Thawra, the Baath Party's newspaper in Baghdad, is calling the Address 'a Hollywood farce.' Can the televised image of a young woman running from the bombed ruins of an Albanian village carrying a cat be far behind?

This is the first entry on this blog. I have been wanting to do this for some time, now -- actually since the Event of 11 September 2001. Now, it appears, it is a reality. Readers here will have my observations on what I see happening in the world, from this small corner of it, just off the grid.

To begin with, Mike and I decided to not listen to (we couldn't watch, because none of the regular TV stations here carried it) Bush's State of the Union Address last night. Instead, we watched 'Wag the Dog,' which neither of us had seen. It's one of those prophetic films...and a fine counterpart, I think, to what was going on in TVLand in the States. Mike fell asleep around the time the young woman actress, playing an Albanian peasant, was being directed on how to run from her bombed-out village carrying a cat. I stayed awake. I particularly liked the idea of killing off the movie producer (Dustin Hoffman, looking alarmingly short) at the end: he was an appropriate casualty of the war with Albania.