The only good thing to emerge from that tragic war – one that I covered and one that I backed to the hilt until the very last day – was that it ruined LBJ’s prospects of running for a second term. It cost 58,000 American lives, and close to two million Vietnamese ones – north and south – and made celebrities out of opportunists like Jane Fonda’s husband, Tom Hayden, clowns like Abbie Hoffman, and professional busybodies like Daniel Ellsberg. It took Uncle Sam a generation to recover from the trauma of the Vietnamese debacle.

So here at last is Taki’s way to save the planet without pain. But before we begin, a warning: don’t try doing it all at once. Melting glaciers, violent hurricanes, flash floods, terrible droughts, the threat to polar bears in the shrinking Arctic Sea ice, and the real possibility of fires in the Amazon rainforest cannot be reversed overnight. The unmentionables want us to believe that climate change is liberal propaganda, but unlike WMD in Iraq, climate change is real and very scary. Although Miami and Palm Beach are places I wouldn’t visit even if I were sober, none of us would like to see them capsize under rising water. So here we go.

All governments are monopolies of organized force, inherently unjustifiable. And once accepted, they are bound to get out of control sooner or later. No, there is no longer a Right or a Left. Bush’s mammoth expansion of government power and spending makes LBJ look like Robert Taft, the last true conservative—and peace lover, I might add. Labels are for fools.

OK, 2007 is upon us, and the end of history, as in Francis Fukuyama’s fearless forecast of 1990, has turned out to be full of you-know-what. In fact, never in seven centuries, give or take a few, has this planet of ours been in more turmoil. Fukuyama is a great scholar, and he meant well, but what he got wrong was religious fervour and human nature. Basically, the urge to control one another’s behaviour. Better yet, the incompatibility of Islamic beliefs and liberal democracy. Let’s begin with Iraq…

To West Point, where sitting in the midst of the corps of cadets on a soft autumn evening watching a football game evokes memories of the America I used to know as a schoolboy. The soldier ethic — i.e., the virtues of the past — is everywhere. Courtesy, formality, self-restraint, good manners and not a small amount of very attractive female soldiers, to boot. The virtues of the military are those of a past aristocratic society, where courage, honesty and authority were greatly valued. Once upon a time, Western societies took their cue from the past. No longer. The military is the last bastion of the last virtues of the past.