Bryant Park, NY

"Hell is full of good wishes and desires" -  Saint Bernard of Clairvaux


The myth of progress, rather like the myth of enlightenment -

is that enlightenment could be attained collectively through
collective will, rather than personal will (there's a myth of our epoch).
The American president is "ruler of the planet" (Superman II) Superman is the myth of America's will, the myth of its "enlightenment", that of coke and marlboro.

This isn't merely a naive, innocuous theory, it's a perverse faith which has consequences

that would seek to destroy anything which stands in its way. 
The triumph and the summation of the enlightenment is the nuclear warhead.

With that phallic-mushroom heresy began the slow rollback of the enlightenment fallacy,
and the beginning of the cessation of the American epoch. 

Superman is how America saw itself: forward looking, morally right, generous, magnanimous & the benchmark-keeper of all decency.  Now the Apollonian veil of its
clean promise seems sullied, It is now beginning to see itself as it really is.

Its prime mobile was a vehement opposition to  old Europe - 

backward-looking, too Catholic, too Gothic, too old and full of

charnel-house basilicas to fit its glossy, forward looking ideals.  

It was the attempt to roll back the medieval to a Renaissance-inspired neo-classical ideal.

The war against Islam is interesting in that it is a war with the heretics of enlightenment - who wants to hold back the tide, of the democratic ideal. 
In essence, it seeks to oppose and reject violently the liberality of wall street usury and debt-interest fallacy, that blind mayhem of greed, endless frontier-horizon yellow-bricked roads to neverland, which yields nothing more than the consequent gross commercial idealising of all material.  The consequences, however unintended, of Luther, Calvin, & Locke.