First there was Nietzsche's Zarathustra, then the agonised song to Moloch in Allen Ginsberg's Howl... It strikes me now that, long before 9/11, speaking from within the culture entirely, another Beat poet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, called America the Roman Empire of today. It strikes me because this is precisely the conclusion to which Islamists and Arab nationalists had already come by other means, exterior to America itself and seemingly less sensible to boot. The difference is - what Islamists and Arab nationalists want is to replace the Roman Empire with their own vision of imperium. Even when they do not admit it in so many words, they object not to what is there - an empire, but to who owns it - white, more or less secular Protestants and, by extension, to what it is like.

And indeed, with Americans as much as Islamists and Arab nationalists, the lure of totalitarianism is such, few since the 20th century have managed to escape it at all. Whether in religion- or race-based, military, technological, theocratic, egalitarian, Marxist or (a form of totalitarianism seldom perceived as such) even psychoanalytic guise, the drive to make everyone the same, to place everyone within the same theoretical scaffolding and see everything through the same ideational glasses, lives on past what just may be the terminal apex of western civilisation. It dogs both visions of utopia and the individual's sense of moral fulfillment.

Long after reason and science turned empires back into republics, realms into constitutional monarchies, and God (with few, always universally damned exceptions) into various kinds of more or less consumer-friendly, more or less vacuous discourse and practise, humanity seeks sameness still; it identifies Good and Right, if not directly then through the faulty mechanism of a salient majority, with All.

And it is to that faulty mechanism, to totalitarianism within a professedly non-totalitarian global order, that we should perhaps look for Evil, Wrong and the errant minority - not by pitting ourselves against the identity of its administrators, many aspects of which we share or would like to share - but through a true, humble and consistent, honest understanding of our place on earth.

This side of the line dividing the unipolar world not only by wealth and its attendant power but also by the capacity, the will, ability or initiative to produce civilisation, the salient majority turns into a blind and infinitely pliant force which, in the hands of  anti-democratic Islamists, for example, becomes an opportunistic means to power through "democratic process", in the hands of a corrupt quasi-state a brutal instrument of repression. Either the Roman Empire does not know this, or it does not care.

And whether or not we are going to let it know, not to oppose its supposed plans for the region, we should begin to ask what it means by democracy.