United States

In Miami, several retired U.S. officials remember the early 1960s, when the CIA recruited thousands of Cuban exiles to try and destroy the Cuban revolution.

By 2012, college professors will stare into the glazed eyes of their students as they refer to non existent weapons of mass destruction and routine torture of suspected terrorists. Like the Vietnam War (an estimated 4 million Vietnamese and 55,000 plus American casualties) and Watergate, these scandals occurred, in students’ minds, sometime after the Greco-Roman era.

Way back in 1973, White House staffers broke into Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate office complex. In 1969, Seymour Hersh had revealed a story covered-up by the Pentagon. U.S.

“Jesus Lives” screamed the giant billboard on I-80, some 20 miles east of Lovelock, Nevada. At the bottom of the sign appears the sponsor: adsforGod.org, an “organization whose only purpose is to advertise for The only True Living God whose only begotten Son is Jesus The Christ.”

From the car, driving through dramatic mountain scenery in Wyoming and into Nevada, I saw mountains covered with snow, sagebrush and clouds. No people, cars, trucks or houses appeared on the horizon.

The medical dictionary defines crisis as “the turning point of a disease for better or worse.” Doctors with cool heads understand their procedures may produce recovery or death for their patients. The mainstream economic crisis “experts,” however, have offered Washington politicians a less than helpful way of responding to catastrophe: panic and denial.