The journalistic and popular cultures draw ever nearer together,
and what unites them is the imaginative flight—by now a
milk-run—to the top of Mount Olympus from where they look down
like gods upon the petty struggles of lesser beings and keen
“Give Peace a Chance,” the simple-minded anthem of their kind.
“Lord, what fools these mortals be” it seems to the gentle and
pacific spirits who have been the tutelary deities to our
intellectuals and artists and those who wish to emulate them
since the 1960s. Up until the end of the Cold War there was some
natural check upon their good-hearted naïveté in the form of a
palpable threat from a powerful enemy, but for the last decade
the world has obliged our hippie moralists by looking (if you
don’t look too closely into its darker corners) like the kind of
world where peace and happiness are to be had just by wishing for
them.

Little wonder, then, that the recent detention by Chinese
authorities of an American spy plane which had been forced to
make
a landing on Chinese soil brought out the worst
qualities—which is to say sanctimoniousness and
self-righteousness—
of the American media. How easy the
international crisis seemed to the editorialists of The New York
Times, for example, who noted with spectacular but not untypical
unhelpfulness:

The aftermath of Sunday’s midair collision of an American spy
plane and a Chinese jet fighter is following a tired but
dangerous cold-war script that