If everyone wanted to emulate the American Way, there would be more democracy by now.

What everyone wants is the American standard of living. They're trying to find out whether it's really necessary to have messy democracy in order to get there. China's making a run at it -- they have yet to figure out that one doesn't get a lot of innovation out of people who are afraid to even think, let alone voice, a new idea. But the circuit to this light bulb will be completed eventually.

The deal is, everyone thinks they have the perfect right to voice their ideas. It's those other people's ideas that need to be controlled. Accepting the sacred right to be told off is another thing that takes getting used to, especially by oligarchs and plutocrats.

Democracy is a lot of work. It doesn't take hold easily in societies based on authoritarian rule that don't tolerate dissent. Dissent is the heart of democracy.

As to the effect of news: We had Matthew Brady and his students, and the telegraph, to tell us about the massacres. It didn't matter then, because we had a less inclusive understanding of humanity. It begins to matter now because of our stage of societal maturity.

The social cloth from which the politics of this country is cut is based on people going to war over not being told how to be. It can be traced all the way back to the English Civil War, which was one of the last gasps of ecclesiastical political power in our tradition. (The American Pilgrims came from the same time and neighborhood as Oliver Cromwell.) The European continent was about (as a whole) 100 years behind that leading edge, and the rest of the world is still struggling with whether it's OK to be told how to be.

Wars over the right to think for one's self have an odd effect: with every gain in liberty for one minority group, another minority group begins to think, "Why not us?" So we have Puritans fighting for their religious rights, followed by their grandchildren fighting for their political rights, followed by their grandchildren fighting for emancipation of a subject race, followed by their grandchildren fighting for economic rights of labor, followed by their grandchildren fighting for women's suffrage. We've come a long way, baby.

Other nations are still struggling with the religion thing.

The Middle East is sociologically where we were about 400 years ago, except we had muskets and they have Uzis. (yipes!) People say their culture is medieval. It's not. It's coming into that dangerous, glorious, violent stage we called the Renaissance. Europe rose, and England, as its Renaissance drew to a close, turned to the greater world.

What happens in the Middle East will be up to them, even though some people in Washington seem to think they can tell the Middle Easterners how to be. Their next step to maturity is much like ours was -- religious conficts as people begin to question whether they want to be told how to be. It's further complicated by the long, humiliating period of colonial rule, and by the even longer history of Empire in the area which colors their thinking. We only had one Empire to fight. They have had several, and now they have us.