Those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it.
                                                     --George Santayana.

I don't remember debates. I don't think we spent a lot of time debating it. Maybe we did, but I don't remember.
--George W. Bush on discussions of the Vietnam War when he was an undergraduate at Yale, Washington Post, July 27, 1999***

This publication has been having great fun at the expense of George W. Bush. No doubt we’ve lost readers thereby, but the only people who can fail to see the ineptness of our current president are those who are blinded by the darkness.

Even those of us who think they can see a little are no doubt not as smart as we think we are. After all, we’re not out in the streets protesting the Florida Bush-Baker-Rehnquist coup. Here we sit hurling cyber-barbs at latter-day robber barons and their hapless puppet. Like many, we take some small comfort in the idea that, well, he’s surrounded by competent advisors.

Unfortunately, if you think about it, the difference between this attitude and that of the proverbial ostrich putting its head in the sand is negligible.

Such as it is, that’s the good news. Here comes the bad.

Ken Auletta’s new book on the Microsoft antitrust trial, World War 3.0 (surely one of the great all-time titles), has been getting mixed reviews. ("Too prolix," seems to be the main complaint.)

But the book is not without useful information. For example, from Christopher Lehmann-Haupt’s review in the New York Times:

Mr. Gates in particular felt that he was fighting for his company’s survival. (When Mr. Auletta asked him if he felt like Joseph K. in "The Trial," Mr. Gates said, "I don’t know Joseph K., sorry." When Mr. Auletta described Kafka’s novel, Mr. Gates said of Joseph K., "He sounds like my kind of guy!")

Intelligent, curious, creative: even his enemies give Bill Gates that much. Not just the richest person in the world but a person so much richer than anyone has ever been that he is in a class by himself. And this person who, as Auletta perceived, is in many ways profoundly Kafkaesque, doesn’t know who Kafka is.

The most powerful, richest nation in history has a government headed by a president for whom the past doesn’t exist and an economy led by a multibillionaire entrepreneur for whom the past is irrelevant. Vietnam? No prob. Kafka who?

Recall also the moment during the presidential campaign when a TV journalist asked Bush which book had influenced him the most. There followed a terrible three-beat pause as the candidate, with that typical what-me-worry look on his face, did not speak and the viewer had the awful sinking feeling that Bush was desperately searching for the name of a book, any book. At last he blurted out, "The Bible!" and everyone relaxed. The point is certainly not that the Bible is not a book worthy of influencing people. The point is that the most powerful person in the world finds neither credible help nor sustenance in the written records of those who came before him.

Grant that Bush is surrounded by competent advisors. Grant that Gates himself is competent. But the profound ignorance of the past, the naïve IGNORING of the past hurls us immediately into very dangerous territory far beyond questions of mere competence: the territory of sheer, idiotic stupidity.

Surely, we (meaning humanity) have got this far (however far this is) largely because we have managed to pass on important lessons from one generation to the next. Newton spoke of himself as standing on the shoulders of giants.

Apparently, in this brave new post-Cold War world and post-Old Economy world, our leaders believe that what came before is unimportant, irrelevant, trivial.

The vast, invaluable but difficult lessons from the likes of Kafka (who also stood on the shoulders of giants) and which were bought and paid for in unknowable quantities of pain are ignored.

Kafka? Sounds like my kind of guy.

At play on the lovely, iridescent, seductive surface of things, these rich and power-filled people seem to think they are free of the ancient constraints of cause and effect, the old, old tangled strands of action and reaction which limited and rewarded and punished the great and the would-be great of past millennia.

What those dead people came to call "Chaos and Old Night" our new live guys, ostrich-like, ignore.

The danger, the great danger here comes not from simple questions of competence or incompetence but from profound questions of potentially fatal ignorance.

Data continues to accumulate to indicate that our activities are having an increasingly destructive effect on the delicate environmental balance of the planet. International conferences, legislative debates, endless litigation produce only makeshift, short-term adjustments. And things continue to get worse. The global environment continues to deteriorate. (A possibly large irony: as this dangerous farce plays out, we keep getting better and better pictures of the desolate, barren ruin that is Mars, never making the possible connection: maybe Mars too was long ago a haven for life that knew no end to its greed…)

The environmental imbalance has its social parallel. While it is true that the rising tide of planetary affluence has lifted all boats, it has lifted the really big boats a lot more than the little boats. Is it now 1% of the world’s people who control 70% of the world’s wealth? The specific numbers don’t matter. What matters is the obscene imbalance, and the fact that the imbalance is increasing. Yet who is looking to the past, where the record is writ large and clear: Thus do empires collapse.

Louis Brandeis said it well: "You can have concentrated wealth, and you can have democracy, but you can’t have both at the same time."

It’s easy to poke a finger in the eye, or hurl a pie at, the likes of Gates and Dubya. They’re such big, visible targets, and their bloated shortcomings, their fatal flaws are so easy to see and to hit. But what of us, those of us far from the levers of power, wealth, and influence? How many of us are studying the past, Kafka included, looking for ways out, ways forward that do not ultimately reduce us to dust and the earth to Mars II?