Consider the way the word "socialism" is being swatted around in the newspapers and on the news networks. We are told the bank bail out is socialism. The stimulus package is socialism also as is universal health care. Whenever the word socialism is used it evokes, and is usually intended to evoke, the word communism. The words belong to a lexicon of conservative boogie words, words that are called upon to channel essential American fears. Reagan was able to manipulate the word liberal into the grand tradition. The catalogue of these words reaches back to the way the word anarchist was used by the newspapers to describe Sacco and Vanzetti or the flaming wildman who shot Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo.

To the American ear the words anarchist, socialist and communist suggest something foreign. They suggest ideas cooked outside of our wholesome history by long bearded men in long black coats working devilishly, wildly in European basements where ideas are concocted in cauldrons. Liberalism, on the other hand, is as American as baseball, apple pie and Woodrow Wilson. Liberals, the feeling goes, are the Americans who through their smug naivety will sell out the real Americans to the communists, socialists and anarchists.

In the Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the tightly knit community of Salem fixates on the wild dancing that goes on in the forest outside of town. To those Puritans, nature was not the pristine paradise untainted by sin, that it is positioned as today. Back then, it was the haunt of devils and witches. Despite all of the drugs, violence and decadence going on right here in America that we read about in our newspapers and see on our TVs, we still seem as paranoic about ideas coming in from foreign lands as our ancestors were about the wild dancing in the forests.

Isn't it interesting that we don't associate the political power that wealth buys as a case of creeping European decadence?

"What is astonishing," he said, "is that this public which judges the men and events of the war solely from the newspapers, is persuaded that it forms its own opinions." So said Baron de Charlus in Proust's Time Regained.