Navigation is power of a limited sort - it enables us to manage the immensity of the media torrent.

American movies and music deliver themes of freedom, innocence, and power that appeal to others - partly because America itself was put together out of a multiplicity of national traditions.

It's an old anarchist dream that people can take care of their own lives.

I don't think anyone in the media thinks strategically about society.

Human inertia makes the everyday environment, the furniture, as it were, appear to be a given.

Who of us does not recognize that the life we live, however larded with brave talk about values and thought and ideals, is not actually a life dedicated to immersion in the endless torrent of images, songs, sounds and stories?

Some fine day, Democrats may figure out how to get on the right side of the value divide - how to define America as a place of the common good and not a playground of the strong.