There is also the increasing supernaturalism and Christian religiosity on the rise in America that might be seen as a striking parallel of the embracing of mystery cults and things "Oriental" in the days of Roman empire. Our New Agers have their crystals and pyramids, our Christians--buying 100,000's of copies of the Left Behind series--have had for decades their notions of demonic and angelic forces at work in our daily lives and foreign and domestic affairs. Christianized Rome turned her back on Greek skeptical rationalism only after mystical Orientalism began to chip away first at the influence of ancient thinkers like Epicurus and Democritus, and the earlier Roman republic's own Lucretius. In our own age, fairly stoic-like rationalists from Vidal to Sam Harris point out the danger of the irrational belief that supernatural forces favor America's special world status, while our nation wallows in reckless pre-emptive wars, obsessive watching of the likes of American Idol, tabloid news in lieu of substantive journalism, "documentaries" concerning things like alien abductions, crypto-Creationism taught in public schools, and quixotic, fear-based, irrational legislation like gay marriage bans to put one in mind of the later Christianized Roman Emperor, Justinian, who stated that homosexuality was the cause of earthquakes.

I always enjoy Mr Kamiya's contributions on Salon.com (including his recent personal essay, "I'm Younger..."), and "Are We Rome?" is no exception. I wish he'd found a way to mention Gore Vidal, however, in this review, since Vidal's career to no small extent has been based--for decades before Cullen Murphy's book--on pointing out America's imperial nature, and on finding both echoes of Rome's history and differences from Rome's history in our own. Vidal's historical novel about the rise of Teddy Roosevelt and newspaper mogul Hearst (written in 1987) is entitled, "Empire." His novel about the last non-Christian emperor, "Julian," was written in 1964. It looks at the rise of both supernaturalism/mysticism and Christians' political might in the Romam empire (written in 1964), and his book "Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace" (written in 2002, before our invasion of Iraq) highlights America's decades of wars of conquest and intervention, and notes our web of military bases, one topic of Chalmers Johnson's history published in 2007, "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic."

Keillor's essay resonates with me particularly in light my viewing of the "America At A Cross Roads" series on PBS. The first episode of the "America At A Crossroads" series on is like reading a history about jihad and the history of American leaders--Clinton and W. Bush included--who had not experienced the invigoration of discovery, like what Keillor writes about, specifically relative to Islam, Islamism, Iraq, and terrorism. It's a history of the failure to understand history...and the tragic result: setting foreign policy while mired in American myopia and provincialism.

But history and historiography are tricky things, slippery things, and the older I get, the less likely I am to judge based on histories I read (or watch), including when the histories are invigorating in how they may introduce me to a new idea or change a preconception of mine. Increasingly, I encounter a history of something and am more inclined to judge the historical or journalistic project itself than the topic is covers. Histories have the benefit of hindsight. That’s why the best histories are not pat, are not smug as they attempt to inform. That's why the best ones seemingly contradict themselves at times. And because of the opinion and commentary breeding operation that is the blogosphere and online political publishing, and because of the ease with which cable channels like The History Channel can use CGI to create visually compelling though highly impressionistic depictions of the past (and use, God knows, the super-abundance of stock WWII footage that no documentary producer ever seems to bother to annotate), that is an increase, I think, in the number of horribly done histories--articles, books, and documentaries--in circulation. In general, many of these bad projects aren't history so much as they *use* history merely as a backdrop, a stage set really, in the service of low-brow entertainment ("Cue the clip of the Stuka strafing that train in Poland, or is it France, or is it Russia...who cares?") or ideology ("Churchill goooooood; Chamberlain baaaaaaad. Bush goooooood; Democrats baaaaaaad.") or both.

Will "America at a Crossroads" itself look narrow-minded or ill-informed 2, 10, or 20 years from now and itself become part of a history of discredited histories about American failures to understand history? I think that it will mostly stand the test of time, especially insofar as it looks as the history of modern jihadism and Islamism.

Time will tell us. And there's the rub. Time is the one thing each of us has so little of--time to read or examine history, time in which to act or correct actions, (including bad foreign policy!), time to consider and think before taking major action. Thus, the humility that Keillor writes about--a virtue every human should cultivate, especially in light of the history of human failings. I've come to believe that history is the grandest academic discipline, but also one of the most accessible for non-academics. We all should find some way to participate in history, which is not something dead, but an on-going, never-ending, dynamic process of interpretation, documentation, correction, discovery, speculation, and--hopefully--skepticism and even articulate self-doubt.