I'm going to pickup the thread from the other day. We talked about history and memory. I just want to get a little closure to that. In general, who are the gatekeepers of history. Historians, of course. The educated classes in general. Part of their task is to shape our picture of the past in a way which is supportive of power interests in the present. If they don't do that, they probably will get marginalized in one way or another How about some suggestions for people in terms of decoding and deciphering the propaganda? Are there any kinds of practical techniques? It's a tough question. I actually think it's a simple question. Use your common sense. You can point to examples. When you read a headline in the Wall Streeet Journal that says "American Oil Companies Fear Loss of Jobs in the Middle East," it doesn't take a genius to figure out that "jobs" is being used to mean "profits." When you read the account of the New York tax system which says they're cutting down subsidies to mass transit, you can quickly understand that subsidies means gifts from people to themselves. What they're doing is increasing taxes. You can go on and on, case by case. But there's no trick other than just using your sense. Can you recommend some basic books for people? There are things that are helpful, like Howard Zinn's People's History, for example. It's a good start to give you a picture of the world that's different from the one you learned at school. It's very accurate. And then it's on from there. I hate to give suggestions. You just have to do what's called "triangulating." you try to look at the world from different perspectives. You're getting one perspective drilled into your head all the time, so you don't need any more of that one. But look at other ones. There are others. There are independent journals, dissident scholarly literature, all sorts of things. One of the reasons I give rich footnootes is to answer that question, because a lot of people want to know. There are things I think are instructive, but you have to decide for youself what's interesting for you.

MONDAY, 10 DECEMBER 2001 Escorts and Accompanists Explain to me please why anyone, other than for love (for neither faith nor curiosity provides the escort or the accompanist with enough reason to see the project through to its end...), would be motivated to escort or accompany anyone else? Especially if you disregard the obvious niche-occupying benefits such as the financial or the biological (think of the albatross or the remora ). (Though if one has faith in virgins versions, one can imagine an alive version of oneself has good reason to accompany a version of oneself which is not...) Augustus Leopold Egg: The Travelling Companions (1862).

I don't at all mean to sound Utopian about this, because America is still gravely disfigured by many awful cuts and slashes and abcesses. But, as the millions of Ulster Presbyterian and Celtic Catholic emigrants can tell you, a larger sky can yet work marvels as a solvent of parochial or ghetto-like differences. Because of the great roof of the Constitution, which stubbornly refuses to make any mention of any god of any kind whatsoever, and which was rightly denounced as 'godless' by its enemies and critics at the time of its promulgation, America is the most religious country in the world and the one that is furthest from any offical denomination of national faith. There have been, in one estimate that is put about by jovial Hibernian sources in the Irish-American Cultural Institute, fourteen presidents of Scots-Irish Ulster Presbyterian provenance, the greater number originatiing in Antrim though I've no intention of appealing to any local enthusiasm, and the most famous surviving political dynasty is a Catholic Irish one, and you know the rest of the story. 'No religious test' for any form of public office, pronounced the Founders. This will one day mean, not just a Catholic but even a Jewish or 'Mohammedan' president, said the detractors. As a result, quite literally any stripe of faith in the Oval Office can be visualised or imagined except, to my sorrow, a secular or agnostic one of the sort who wrote the Constitutional safeguards in the first place. Still if one has to have ironies of history, this is by no means the cruellest one. The secular State is the guarantee of religious pluralism. This apparent paradox, again, is the simplest and most elegant of political truths. excerpt above from item originally published as 'Ireland, "We Ourselves": Suffering, Faith and Redemption,' Critcal Quarterly, Spring '98, now in a collection entititled Unacknowledged Legislation.