Communist dictators tend to be garishly embalmed. The corpses of Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung and Mao have become tourist attractions. Some of them wanted to be cremated. Instead they were placed in ornate coffins of crystal in elaborate, dimly lit mausoleums that are the focal points of vast city squares. Expert undertakers wage a complicated battle against time to keep the dear leaders seemly for the hordes that file past the coffins to pay their respects.

The most romanticized Marxists, though, are the ones that got away, the locations of their bodies not verified for decades: Che Guevara, who was shot in the jungles of Bolivia; Patrice Lumumba, who was shot in the jungles of the Congo; Salvador Allende, who was shot (or shot himself) in the Chilean presidential palace and dumped in an unmarked grave in Valparaíso for the length of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship. And finally there is one whose corpse remains officially missing: Rosa Luxemburg, who was also shot, in a car in Berlin, and dumped in a canal.

Luxemburg, a Polish Jew born in 1871, lived a Pan-European political existence in a time of Pan-European tumult. She was educated in Switzerland but spent most of her adulthood in Germany. She participated in the Russian Revolution of 1905 and edited and contributed to a number of leftist European newspapers of the era. Today she is most famous for her role as a leader, along with Karl Liebknecht, of the Spartacus League, a left-wing spur of the Social Democratic Party that diverged from the mainstream to maintain adamant opposition to World War I. As a result of her views, Luxemburg spent most of the war in jail, released only in 1918, when political prisoners were given amnesty.

In January 1919, after an attempted workers' revolt, German paramilitaries kidnapped Luxemburg and Liebknecht from the Adlon Hotel in Berlin. After an unsuccessful attempt to kill her by a blow to the head, Luxemburg was put in a car and shot in the head, her body thrown in the canal. When spring came, a body was fished out again. An autopsy at the city's Charité Hospital identified it as Luxemburg's, and she was buried at Friedrichsfelde Cemetery next to Liebknecht. For the next 90 years--at least the ones when the German government was not actively persecuting them--leftists came to pay their respects to Red Rosa, even though the remains in the mausoleum were said to have disappeared after Nazis desecrated the tombs in 1935. In Communist East Germany, her status was elevated to martyr, and today Berlin's Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz U-Bahn stop is at the heart of the glossy consumer district that has sprung up in Mitte since the fall of the wall. The whereabouts of her body, however, remain unknown.

In 2007, the head of Germany's Institute of Legal Medicine, Dr. Michael Tsokos, was assisting in the effort to clear out the basement of Charité Hospital, part of a process of consolidating the forensic institutes of the former East and West Germany into one building. The building that had housed the East German institute was more than a century old, and the basement was filled with macabre detritus dating back to the institute's foundation, in 1833. In the days before photographs, doctors had learned anatomy by looking at actual specimens. Hundreds of these remained--tissue samples, ears, brains. There was also a body. Headless, mummified and missing its hands and feet, it had no identification to indicate its age or identity.

But Dr. Tsokos had heard a rumor, one that the oldest employees haunting Charité would talk about from time to time: that Luxemburg's body had never actually left Charité Hospital and that some other corpse had been fished out of the canal and buried instead. Dr. Tsokos was told that someone had even claimed to have seen Luxemburg's head, which was cut off post-mortem, in a jar of formaldehyde in Hamburg the 1970s. Unfortunately, this key witness died in 2006. Undaunted, Dr. Tsokos considered the possible connection between the missing corpse with the one he had found and set out to solve a mystery 90 years old.

The story of the missing corpse is only the latest chapter in the collected mythology of Rosa Luxemburg. There's no shortage of romancing when it comes to her life: She was the subject of a 1986 biopic, Die Geduld der Rosa Luxemburg, by Margarethe von Trotta; a 2005 historical novel, Rosa, by Jonathan Rabb; and, most recently, a 2010 French musical, Rosa La Rouge. But as the introduction to a new book of her collected correspondence, The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg (Verso, 512 pages, $39.95), points out, only a quarter of her written work has thus far been available in English, the rest inaccessible to the unfortunate "Anglophone monoglot."

The new collected letters is therefore intended as a companion volume to the forthcoming 14-volume collection of her newly translated complete works. It consists of 230 letters to 46 different recipients and spans from 1891 to Jan. 11, 1919, four days before her assassination.

While certainly useful and exciting for the Anglophone monoglot scholar of Rosa Luxemburg, the epistolary Rosa Luxemburg experience can at times be slightly tedious for the casual reader--and this is only a fragment of the 2,800 letters, postcards and telegrams contained in the six-volume German edition.

As Luxemburg wrote, "It's the German thoroughness that prevents a true picture of life or of the times from being created, a picture that should be tossed off with light strokes."

The bulk of the letters in the first part of the book are addressed to Leo Jogiches, an activist who was also murdered in 1919 and was Luxemburg's lover from the 1890s to 1907. Luxemburg variously refers to Jogiches as "precious gold," "my bobo" and "my little mite." Following their protracted arguments and reconciliations via one-sided letter is rather like trying to act sympathetic toward a friend whose boyfriend you hate. "He's a controlling asshole!" you want to tell her. But then you remember that this is a woman who devoted her life to things much greater than mere boyfriends.

There is some soap-operatic satisfaction to be gleaned, however, when she recounts "a brief and soft-spoken but frightening confrontation--during a trip on an omnibus" when, after he has learned that Luxemburg has taken a new lover (the dashing physician Kostya Zetkin), Jogiches declares that he would sooner kill her than lose her. After the bus ride, Luxemburg and Jogiches meet friends at a nice restaurant.

"A fine orchestra was playing, in the gallery, music from the last scene of Carmen," she writes, "and while they were playing L softly whispered to me: I would sooner strike you dead." Yikes!

As for the momentous political developments Luxemburg lived through and her stints in and out of prison, history comes through only in fragments--"Dear Vladimir," she writes to Lenin in Dec. 18, about a month before she died. "I am taking advantage of my uncle's trip to send all of you heartfelt greetings from our family, Karl, Franz, and the others. God grant that the coming year will bring us great fulfillments."

Footnotes assist in historical orientation, but in many ways the letters serve to remind that political movements are made up of incremental bureau
cracy and banal accounting as much as soaring speeches or dramatic marches.

Her best letters, then, are those written from prison, where she was held for almost all of World War I. Here monotony and loneliness provoke a literary unity between the smallest details of her everyday life and the larger political endeavors that she has tried to accomplish. She must face the depth of her commitment, and finds she has "become as hard as polished steel and from now on will neither politically nor in personal relations make even the slightest concession."

But she is drowning in memories. A wasp flies into her cell and she writes, "It's such a reminder of summer, of the heat, and of my open balcony in Südende with the broad view out onto the fields and the groves of trees shimmering in the heat, and of Mimi [the  cat] lying in the sun all folded together like a soft package, blinking up at the buzzing wasp."

She recalls the moving shadows of tree limbs across a cafe table in Berlin, the jubilation of Karl Liebknecht on a country outing one summer, the minutia of a frozen bumblebee "cold and still as though dead, lying in the grass with its little legs drawn in and its little fur coat covered with hoarfrost." In her letters to her friends, who sent her, it seems, a near constant supply of flowers and cookies, she constantly asks them to join her in her remembrance:

"Do you remember the fabulous full-moon night in Südende," she writes, "when I was walking you home, and to us the gables of the houses, with their sharp black outlines against the background of a tender blue sky, seemed like the castles of knights of yore, do you remember?"

She describes singing an aria from Figaro to a flock of titmice on her windowsill, the blackbirds that she feeds, her advances in her botanic studies and a ladybug she has wrapped in cotton wool to protect from the frost. But as soon as one is tempted to begin thinking of her as a nice Disney character who sings to birds, she brings us horribly back to earth.

In her most powerful letter, which must also be one of the most powerful letters of the German experience of World War I, she is merely describing the regular delivery of bloodstained army uniforms that come to the prison to be cleaned and mended for reuse. On one delivery, the cart is being pulled by a yoke of undomesticated water buffaloes, spoils of war from Romania. The buffalo must be heavily beaten to obey, to the extent one's hide had split.

"The one that was bleeding kept staring into the empty space in front of him with an expression on his black face and in his soft, black eyes like an abused child," Luxemburg writes. "How far away, how irretrievably lost were the beautiful, free, tender-green fields of Romania! How differently the sun used to shine and the wind blow there, how different was the lovely song of the birds that could be heard there, or the melodious call of the herdsmen." She begins to cry. The prisoners unload the sacks of bloody uniforms while the soldier who beat the oxen paces in a corner, whistling to himself. "And the entire marvelous panorama of the war passed before my eyes."

I first read about Dr. Tsokos and the body from the basement that might be Luxemburg's corpse in the papers. After the discovery, a search ensued for sentimental tokens that might have traces of Luxemburg's DNA. A leftist member of the German parliament styled her updo in honor of Luxemburg. In a photo made public after the discovery, the corpse looked Classical in its repose, lying on white cotton drapery at the mouth of a scanner like a headless Venus de Milo, its surface the color of a used tea bag. The legs ended just below her bended knees and the upraised arms were cut off above the elbow. After 90 years in a cellar, one would expect a skeleton, but the body had served as the object of study for medical students as exemplary of a natural mummification process called adipocere that occurs in corpses that have been immersed for extended periods in an anaerobic environment--such as mud at the bottom of a canal.

In early 2010, I happened to be in Berlin wandering around Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz and I started to wonder what had happened to the corpse, so I called Dr. Tsokos and, on a frozen January day, went to the Institute of Legal Medicine to meet him. His office was located in a compound of older brick buildings arranged around snowy courtyards that were scattered with birch trees. It had the feel of a sanitarium, and I half-expected to see nuns pushing invalids around in antique wheelchairs with blankets on their laps, but the sidewalks were empty.

Dr. Tsokos was a media-savvy guy, casually dressed in a sweater and jeans and cavalier about the more chilling aspects of his life's work. His interest in the mystery corpse seemed purely technocratic--he was somebody who was obsessed with his job, and not too concerned with leftist politics. Sitting before a dark wooden cabinet filled with skulls, he proceeded to tell me of all the unsuccessful attempts that had been made to identify the corpse.

He had begun with the original autopsy report from June 1919, which was riddled with inconsistencies. It had noted no signs of head trauma, and witnesses to Luxemburg's murder had said that she had suffered a blow to the head with a rifle before her death. There was no notation of hip disease, but Luxemburg had walked with a limp from a degenerative hip disease she had as a child. The autopsied body was shorter than Luxemburg's recorded height (even though she described herself as "Lilliputian"), and, most curiously, the doctors had not followed autopsy protocol--strange, because one of them was responsible for teaching it.

"I thought, 'Oh, shit, this is really interesting,'" Dr. Tsokos said. He went to the state archive to search for a postcard with a stamp she might have licked, leaving DNA evidence. But Luxemburg had always used water to wet the adhesive. He searched for a hat or a coat that she might have worn and left a stray hair on, but he found none.

He decided that he would instead operate on the exclusion principle, and prove that the body was not hers, but every step he took seemed only to affirm that the corpse was Luxemburg's: radiocarbon dating revealed that the woman had lived at the turn of the 20th century; a CT scan of her internal organs revealed that she was 47 when she died; the body had evidence of hip degeneration and was sufficiently Lilliputian.

Dr. Tsokos sent tissue samples to Munich, where a method of identifying trace isotopes in bones revealed that the corpse had lived in Poland, Switzerland and Berlin, and that it had signs of malnutrition that corresponded with Luxemburg's extended stints in prison. He issued a public call for information and received more than 100 emails in response. Nothing came of the 10 or 20 that were actually of interest: Luxemburg had kept a herbarium as a hobby, and four of her botany books were discovered in an archive in Warsaw, but they had only male DNA on them. A grandniece was located in Israel, but since she was not a direct descendant there was only a 50 to 60 percent probability that they were related. Luxemburg never had children.

Dr. Tsokos was in a bind: He could not prove that it was her, but he could not prove that it wasn't her, either.

"For me I don't care if it's her or not her," he said. "It's just an amazing story. It's a murder case that was 90 years old. I wanted to try and ID whoever it is."

So he did what he had to do: The body was turned over to the police and buried anonymously.

ewitt@observer.com

"It's crap," he says. "You should know it's crap, and say it is. And we have a duty, it seems to me, those of us who are academics, and seriously involved in the world, to actually change our mode of thinking."

Listening to Mr. Harvey would be one thing, but the one-hand work from RSA Animate — who has given the same treatment to Barbara Ehrenreich, Dan Pink, Jeremy Pifkin, Philip Zumbardo — does wonders.

Team Lamont, meanwhile, just released this ad featuring people wearing their coats inside out, a symbol of how Lieberman has become a turncoat to the Democratic Party by running as an independent.

-- Azi Paybarah

During his long, legendary career on the left, Ralph Nader must have read or heard versions of that quotation on many occasions. Now, as he resumes his impossible quest with the open assistance of Republicans and conservatives, he is acting out Marx's maxim.

"Tragedy" may or may not describe what happened in 2000, when the Nader candidacy drew enough votes from Al Gore in Florida and New Hampshire to deprive the Democratic nominee of victory. But to hear his impassioned rhetoric, Mr. Nader believes that the Bush administration's selling and renting of national policy to corporate interests is tragic indeed.

"Farce" aptly describes what is happening in 2004, at least so far as the latest Nader candidacy is concerned. Perhaps pining for the crowds and acclaim he evoked so well in Crashing the Party , his memoir of his last campaign, the consumer advocate and youth idol announced that he will run again this year, no matter the consequences.

Then, to his dismay, Mr. Nader discovered that three-plus years of the Bush-Cheney regime have concentrated the minds of many of his erstwhile supporters. The first to abandon his cause were celebrities like Michael Moore, who declared his preference for retired general Wesley Clark last fall and urges current visitors to his Web site to devote themselves to electing Democrats in November. (According to Mr. Nader, he wasn't even invited to the Washington premiere of Mr. Moore's blockbuster movie, Fahrenheit 9/11 . His response was an embittered open letter to his "old friend" that made sport of the filmmaker's waist size.)

The defection of Mr. Moore anticipated the rejection of the Nader candidacy last month by the Green Party, whose leaders also seem to be familiar with that old Marx quip. Rather than renominate their 2000 candidate, they put up an unknown whose chief campaign promise is that he won't hamper the Democratic Presidential candidate. The Natural Law Party also displayed little enthusiasm for Mr. Nader.

These developments are worse than embarrassing, since they have deprived Mr. Nader of easy ballot access in dozens of states where the Greens have earned a November line. Meanwhile, Democratic officials in various states are seeking to keep him off the ballot by challenging the validity of his petitions (in much the same way that Mr. Bush tried to keep his rivals off the New York primary ballot in 2000).

Yet although the prospects for Mr. Nader are quickly shrinking, his would-be rescuers are already revealing themselves. The new Naderites include the strange Manhattan therapy cult that now dominates the Reform Party, which will provide ballot access in some states after endorsing him in a teleconference call last May. He can also count on at least one group of activists who are absolutely determined to see him succeed: right-wing Republicans.

Tens of thousands of dollars from major Bush donors are pouring into Mr. Nader's coffers, and he is using that money to pay for petition signatures that will get him on the ballot in swing states. The American Prospect reports that earlier this year, Mr. Nader's aides solicited a California company that usually performs such tasks for Republican candidates.

In Arizona, a former Christian Coalition staffer circulated the Nader petitions along with an anti-immigration initiative. (The resulting petitions were so riddled with error and alleged fraud that they were thrown out by the state authorities.) In Florida, the G.O.P. chairwoman (who answers to Governor Jeb Bush, the President's brother) demanded that Democrats drop any legal effort to disqualify the Nader candidacy.

And in Oregon, where Mr. Nader recently became a featured guest on right-wing radio, two conservative organizations phoned their members to urge their attendance at a state petitioning convention in Portland. Leaders of Citizens for a Sound Economy and the Oregon Family Council explained bluntly that they have no use for Mr. Nader-except as an instrument to siphon votes from John Kerry.

Reluctant to leave the national stage, he has accepted a bit part in a farce written and directed by the corporate politicians he affects to despise. That is a kind of tragedy, too.

· Correction

A quotation in my last column from President Bush's letter to Congress justifying the Iraq war was incorrect. The accurate quote follows: "I have also determined that the use of armed force against Iraq is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001." I regret the error.

The conversation, at least the one end of it I could hear, seemed charming and precious enough, until that moment came, that moment I knew would arrive sooner or later as the heiress made her way outside the cocoon of hearth and home. She was listening intently to her friend, and then she turned to me and, without excusing herself (I must teach her telephone manners), she asked me what a movie theater was.

Later research would show that the heiress is alone among her friends in having never seen the inside of a movie theater. That no doubt qualifies as little more than child abuse in some quarters of this city. I prefer to consider it a case of cultural disobedience: I'm not quite ready to cede my values and parental power to entertainment moguls whose products seem to define our very existence.

I knew what was coming next: She returned her attention to her friend, listened for a more few minutes, and then directed a flood of inquiries to me concerning movie stars I barely could identify, followed by equally earnest questions about singers whose names meant nothing to me. (She mentioned something about something she called "In Sync" and someone called Britney something-or-other. I'm far too uninterested to find out Britney's last name.)

The heiress awaited my reply. "What do I look like, a candidate for president?" I said, finally. This seemed to amuse the heiress, and successfully shifted the conversation back to more familiar ground-school projects, swimming lessons and the like.

If she continues to go through life as blissfully ignorant of pop culture as she is now, the heiress had better forget about a life in public service. As long as smirking, jaded baby boomers are in charge of the nation's dialogue, candidates for public office will have to be better informed about sitcoms and movie stars than they are about, oh, stuff like national defense and social policy.

The pop quiz is all the rage this year. Don Imus subjected an all-too-willing Rick Lazio to questions about television shows the other day. And, of course, George W. Bush was held up to media contempt when he had trouble with a magazine writer's questions about television shows, including Sex and the City , a program that apparently concerns itself with vacuous New Yorkers and their sex lives. This led certain quasi-political columnists to assail the governor as a pop-culture ignoramus. In the rarefied circles of the elite media, there can be no harsher charge.

When Americans were saving the world from the Nazis and leading the Free World against communism, presidential candidates who professed ignorance about television shows no doubt would have won praise for their gravitas and sense of priorities. Today, a candidate who can't identify sitcom characters can expect nothing but scorn and loathing from those who can't seem to summon an opinion on, say, the death penalty or a tax cut or the future of Social Security.

The media-obsessed boomer commentators no doubt think they've created something original with their ironic pop quizzes. Ah, but if their taste in pop culture were any better, they'd know that the Monty Python troupe had them beat by three decades. Of course, the Pythons' goal was satire, not empty irony. In a skit the Pythons produced in 1970, Eric Idle was the pompous-looking moderator of a show called "World Forum." His "guests" were Karl Marx, Lenin, Che Guevara and Mao Zedong. After introducing the four grave-looking commies and expounding on their historical importance, Mr. Idle fired a question at Guevara: "Che Guevara-Coventry City last won the F.A. Cup in what year?" It was a trick question: Coventry City, in 1970, had never won England's Football Association Cup!

The skit ended with Karl Marx answering a series of questions in hopes of winning a lounge suite. He got two right, about the political origins of the class struggle and the development of the industrial bourgeoisie. But he missed Mr. Idle's last question: "Who won the Cup final in 1949?" (It was the Wolverhampton Wanderers, who beat Leicester 3-1.)

Poor Karl never got the lounge suite.

The quizmasters who would control the tenor of American politics think they're mighty funny people, indeed. And they figure we're laughing along with them.

Personally, though, I'm pretty happy George W. Bush doesn't spend his time watching sitcoms. Maybe there's hope for the heiress after all.

As the countdown continues to that great Christian conceit, the third millennium, Lewis Lapham offers readers a portable guide to Last Things, from Gilgamesh (the Flood) to Bill Gates (the Anti-Christ?). In a devoutly terminalist nation, where cultural historians remind us that apocalypse is probably even more American than apple pie, Mr. Lapham, editor of Harper's Magazine , is an urbane skeptic. "The foretelling of the end of the world," he reminds us, "is as old as the wind in the trees."

Since the first shaman terrified his audience with a predicted imminent crash in the hairy mammoth population, we have been suckers for the doom-and-gloom salesmen who infest every epoch. Now, as time runs out on the "game clock of the 20th century," Mr. Lapham writes, "the bearers of bad news already have swarmed onto the field waving the banners of destruction and blowing the triumphs of doom."

He continues: "Amidst the clatter of foreseeable headlines we can expect them to continue to predict catastrophes matched to the fears of the audiences they have been paid to alarm–politicians talking about the trade and moral deficits, economists worrying about the depleted reserves of oil and Deutsche marks, movie producers depicting the future as an increasingly barren heath largely inhabited by robots …"

This, of course, is tonic common sense, buttressed by the reminder that what we usually hallucinate as exterminating angels are only our own sinister alter egos. History, in Mr. Lapham's construction, is a steel-nerve balancing act between inhumanity and humanism, massacre and redemption. For every world conqueror and his pyramid of skulls, there comes a prophet of hope to rescue humanity from the final darkness. The abyss is not bottomless.

In the late-imperial decadence of Clintonian America, replete with mystery cults ("The truth is out there") and millenarian paranoias (the "Y2K problem"), Mr. Lapham strikes the pose of a stoic philosopher. In contrast to the "quack evangelists" who rule the temples of the electronic media, he counsels a return to the works of the Great Historians, preferably in a quiet study with a sober view of some ancient ruins. "Calm down and reflect" are his watchwords.

I am afraid the toga is more impressive than the philosopher. The reader who pays careful attention to Mr. Lapham may score 100 percent on his next Western Civ exam, but I am willing to bet my dogeared copy of Thucydides that he will be frustrated, if not outright nettled, by the sloppy concepts that confuse rather than organize his eclectic collection of excerpts.

To take obvious examples, it is morally disconcerting to read that the expulsion of Empress Eugénie from the Tuileries (she had a bad cab ride) or the arrest of Jefferson Davis (he spent almost as little time in jail as Michael Milken) are in any sense equivalent "ends of worlds" to the extermination of Jewish children in Nazi death camps. Nor is Karl Marx's "expropriation of the expropriators" in Das Kapital , except in the most disheveled mind, any counterpart or analogue to the ecocide forecast in Rachel Carson's Silent Spring .

Such conflations, moreover, point us back to Mr. Lapham's foreword, where Titus' sacking of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. is eloquently equated "in the ferocity of man's heart" with Auschwitz and Hiroshima. I am not impugning Mr. Lapham's moral sensibility. Anyone who conjugates "Napoleon, Adolf Hitler and Harry S. Truman" probably ranks high in personal conscience, but flunks out at the level of understanding historical specificity.

To my way of thinking, carnage not only makes up much of history but also has a distinctive history itself. Mr. Lapham, I think, is simply wrong about steady-state supplies of inhumanity in history. The debate over the constitutive role of violence in human culture–killer apes, "Manson gangs" from Mexico, and all that–belongs in the anthropology department. Historians are generally more struck by the changing scales and logics of violence over time. The low frequency of war in sub-Saharan Africa before 1500 contrasts with the explosion of internal conflict that accompanied the growth of the Atlantic slave trade. Likewise, as sociohistorical processes, Napoleon's execution of Spanish partisans is simply not commensurate with Hitler's scientific extermination of an entire people.

There is a directionality in history, even if it is only bad water rising. Lucretian confidence in the ultimate balance wheel of history, like Enlightenment faith in the Newtonian rationality of markets and states, crumbled in face of the advent of concentration camp ovens and atomic firestorms. And rightly so. To comprehend such unprecedented forms of inhumanity and threats to the continuity of culture has required revolutionary new ideas (Marx and Freud at a bare minimum) about history, not just an evening with Procopius or Voltaire.

Worlds, contra Mr. Lapham, really do end. The synagogues in Krakow may have been carefully restored, but the people and their great culture are gone forever. Likewise, there are no longer Trojans, Arawaks, Tasmanians, Mandans nor Greenlandic Norse. Their dark prophets were not such cranks after all.

Nor is the current "end of nature" hysteria as irrational as Mr. Lapham seems to believe. Although plagues, volcanoes and earthquakes make brief appearances in The End of the World , natural forces count for little more than background noise in his "wreck of time." His understandable distaste for hyperbole slips carelessly into cavalier disregard of the unprecedented dangers posed by our current meddling with biospheric metabolism.

Human culture, after all, occupies a highly unstable, even experimental niche in natural history. Each major step toward the biological reunification of humanity–through medieval Eurasian trade, the 16th-century invasion of the New World, even modern air travel (in the case of H.I.V.)–has been a dance with plague and death. The H.I.V. infection–and prospective AIDS deaths–of 21 million sub-Saharan Africans is a world-shattering fact in the same sense as was the Black Death of the 14th century in Europe and China.

Likewise, even in the quiet pond we call the Holocene (the 11,000 years since the last ice age), environmental historians are finding the fingerprints of extreme climatic events all over civilizational collapses (in the middle and terminal Bronze ages) and epochs of chaos (as in the 14th and 17th centuries). As recently as the late Victorian period, powerful El Niño events contributed to famines in India, China and Africa that killed more than 35 million people.

If the new millennium scares the pants off many of us, it is not only because we are rubes for Mr. Lapham's doomsayers and rapturites. The conjugation of radical environmental instability with extreme global inequality (according to a recent study by the United Nations, the 225 richest people in the world have a combined wealth equal to the 2.5 billion poorest) augurs a rough ride ahead. Is there a destination? I don't think even Clio, muse of history, knows for sure.

Already, this is proving a summer for the record books. By mid-June, the Silly Season well advanced. Commentator on ABC referred to "Maidenstone Club." So much for Roone Arledge's chance of getting in. Southampton Hospital reports new high for June occurrences of seasonal syndromes like "Grigio Grimace": dysfunction of facial muscles similar in effect to Bell's palsy. Results from strain of tightly clenching and consuming plastic cups of cheap white wine. Usually at overpriced charity functions and media occasions thronged by cretins whose expensiveness of turnout and transportation can't hide a fundamental crudeness of aspect, thought and speech patterns.

But it's not simply the garden-variety riffraff passing by that knits the brow and causes the spirit to rage. What was feared is now official: The First Liar, Mrs. Liar and Chelsea are abandoning 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on or about July 31 to spend a week at the Alan Patricof house at 63 Hunting Lane, East Hampton. What this will do for the neighborhood at this crowded time of year beggars imagining. If you doubt me, ask the members (those few who didn't quit in protest) of Greg Norman's Medalist Golf Club in Florida about how wonderfully the First Presence enhanced their annual member guest weekend. Already, owners of houses in the neighborhood are being invited to rent their houses to the Presidential Support Team: the guys who move the First Ball in the rough, the accounting team responsible for "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap's Sunbeam audit to keep the First Scorecard, etc., etc. The White House is offering roughly half the going weekly rate, which at first sounds penny ante until you take into account that without the heavy, politically motivated hand of the Great Greenspin (sic) on the money supply throttle, the Dow Jones wouldn't be anywhere near the level that has underwritten current rentals. I figure this is a wash.

Anyway, I'm putting my porch time to good use; in the spirit of Terry Southern's Guy Grand ( The Magic Christian ), now is the time for all good men and women to come to the aid of making it hot down here for El Primo Creepo. If you disapprove of the First Lecher's conduct in office, or disagree with the Administration's position in the Mideast, its abandonment of Japan for China, or-on the domestic front-its monocular focus on the Fed-subsidized transfer of the national wealth to the very rentier class that will be surrounding him in East Hampton like wriggling puppies, literally slobbering with self-congratulation, then verily I say to you: Letter a placard, don a stout pair of picket line-walking boots and hie thee to Hunting Lane! A nice round sum of 5,000 protesters should really make the First Visit worth a postcard to the folks in Hope.

Herewith a few other tiles in a random mosaic. A Defining 90's Moment: Rain pounding on the tent. The crowd inside glamorous, famous, rich, gathered for a ceremony. The babble typical of such moments, a sparkling, noisy obbligato of self-congratulation. Vocal preening. Then, all at once, a hush upon the place. A silence that's reverent, all-eclipsing. I look toward the aisle. The Great Greenspin (sic) is being led toward a choice seat. Immediately think of favorite phrase-"It was one of those moments of rare beauty that are vouchsafed to men who do business in great waters"-from Samuel Eliot Morison's History of the United States Naval Operations in World War II . (Note to recent Brown graduates: "World War II" was a conflict that took place in 1939-1945 between the United States, Great Britain, the U.S.S.R.-where caviar comes from-and their allies, and Germany-which makes Beemers-and Japan and their allies. In it, people risked-and many gave-their lives for their countries. Did you ever hear of such a silly thing?)

"Well, Alan made all this possible," someone behind me murmurs. Not so, I think. The taste, the care, the class and-yes-the money that makes this possible were all well in place when the Fed chairman was still but a mote in Mammon's eye. What he made possible were a good many of the guests. Still, it's quite something to be able to quiet a mob of self-regarding, publicity-crazed loudmouths by your mere presence. At that instant, the spirit of the 90's truly walked among us.

You Read It Here First: In The Wall Street Journal (June 2), Martin Feldstein, keeper of Reaganite flame, said any cure of the Korea collapse must leave interest rates on outstanding debt alone. Hey, Marty, if it'll work in Seoul, why wouldn't it have worked in Dallas? And The New York Times (June 27) discovers Karl Marx had some keen insights into the nature of global capitalism. This space predicted Marx would have another bite at the apple (Apple?).

Now This. New Yorker writer Mark Singer (whose take on Terry Southern and Easy Rider in a recent issue is worth a lifetime subscription) once observed that a true financial calamity requires everything to go wrong in a unique and perfect way. What applies on the way down applies on the way up. It's as true of booms as of busts: Everything must just fall into place. That's America's story in the 90's. Our reserve-currency status permitted self-abusive trade balances, there was a credit-financed, growing-population consumer boom, a morally bankrupt politics played guardian angel to magnetic, fluid securities markets driven by people who had run out of things to buy and who now discovered the allure of bits of engraved paper. Everything worked together and at once, as if a complex jigsaw puzzle had been spilled willy-nilly from its box and assembled itself at one go. Now cracks are showing. Fix Japan, and it'll be O.K., we're told. But we match up badly with Japan, as they say in pro basketball. You oversave because you don't consume enough, we tell them, so stop oversaving and start consuming! But where exactly are they going to put the stuff we say they should consume?

Faustian Bargain Department: Goldman, Sachs & Company is going public. Influential retired partners have argued against the move-in the spirit such partners always will, that of the boards of prewar East Side co-ops who blackball 30-ish self-made derivativocrats trying to buy someone else's apartment for more zeros than could be spoken of politely when the board members bought theirs. Still, having been a partner of Lehman Brothers when it went from partnership to corporation, I know that there'll be changes, and Goldman will never again be what it was.

Other Faustian bargains merit study by the connoisseur. Here's my favorite. Fearful of the threat posed by "liberal" multicultural-P.C. agendas to high culture, the right lined up with the free-market "conservative" crowd and has ended up with the Walt Disney Company and Donald Trump in the saddle and high culture in worse shape than ever. This is not the audience's fault or wish; the problem, if you ask me, is that our bedrock culture-shaping institutions-films, TV, print, museums-are dominated by Ivy League baby-boomers, from Harvard in particular: These are the worst and most narrowly educated people in America, who-ironically-bring to their high-paying work a thoroughgoing contempt for the greater audience, which is much brighter, more seasoned, thirstier and discriminating than these arrogant young idiots know enough to give it credit for! When a market stinks, it often has something to do with the product, although it's easier to blame it on the demographics.

Take "Wally World," the celebrity theme park and infomercial bazaar the Manhattan Mediocracy's most obvious eager beaver is industriously constructing on the ruins of the magazine formerly known as Time . The model may be Disneyish-indeed, the evolving product is the media equivalent to what would have happened had Michael Eisner gotten his way at Bull Run-but the premise-that Mickey Mouse, so to speak, was the inspiration of a focus group-seems to me to be flawed. Fatally so.

Or take book publishing. Here's a business that has in most instances abrogated its fiduciary responsibility to writers, a business in which-in some houses-expensive, overflacked and self-congratulatory party-hosting clearly ranks higher on the agenda than the intellectual elbow grease needed to help well-edited books find a market. A hundred freeloaders noshing Le Cirque tidbits doth not a market make, even though it be ever so much fun and exclusive!

It's not just the right I feel for. There's the flip side, too. I weep for the so-called leftish, liberal heart, which had beaten exultantly in tune with great collective programs (like the New Deal or the Great Society) that undertook to ameliorate social suffering and inequity. It drank too deeply of the 60's, and what it read in the coca leaves as greening-of-America "individualism" has turned out to be a selfish, agenda-ridden, laissez-demander philosophy that preaches, "One for all, and all for me." Deep down, both old-fashioned liberals and old-fashioned conservatives must feel as if they're in exile. I know I-a bit of both-do.

So Read a Good Book, See a Good Movie: Read Guard of Honor , one of the three or four greatest American novels to come out of World War II, being reissued by the Modern Library. Read Harold Bloom's and Mary Karr's rants on the state of poetry in The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997 and Viper Rum , respectively. I especially like what Ms. Karr has to say; my guess is that she shares my opinion that about as black a day as postmodern poetry has known was when James Merrill bought that goddamn Ouija board. And she isn't afraid to name names. Indeed, I shall use her as my model when I come to write my magnum opus: Ozymandias in Union Square: The Myth of Roger Straus .

Go see The Last Days of Disco . Whit Stillman's film is a truly wonderful take on young people trying to make out who they are in a city which is once and forever now! and therefore simultaneously the best and worst place on earth to undertake the fraught voyage of self-discovery. Plus he has the same kind of feel for how the city can look on film that set Woody Allen apart.

And keep an open mind on Steve Brill. It's tempting to write him off as the William Ginsburg of publishing, but the guy has an edge (who do you think came up with "Eddie Haskell" as a nickname for the editor of a prominent newsmagazine?) Will this play through, or is Mr. Brill's ambition merely to replace this paper as a Four Seasons-Nick & Toni's "must read"? If the latter is indeed the case, we can only wait and see. His success will depend on the depth of his pockets and the shallowness of his ambitions.

There is nothing like a perfectly done potato skin stuffed with melted cheese to prompt serious rumination, and watching the kids disport at the Day School occasioned miscellaneous reflections bearing on the future of this great land. What possible good can portend for the children of a culture that has bought more copies of Elton John and Bernie Taupin's banal, unmusical tribute to the late Princess of Wales, in a mere six weeks or so, than preceding generations have bought of Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" in the past half-century? Not much, I wot. (Incidentally, readers wishing to know what a proper musical salute to an English rose should sound like are invited to listen to "Rose of England" from the musical Crest of a Wave , 1937, by Ivor Novello-an artifact of a much-beset era that held itself erect with penurious pride, rather than slumping and whining about its Versace-clad victimhood.)

Readers of this column will be familiar with the Old Blowhard's oft-expressed conviction that Karl Marx is likely to have another bite at the apple. Not that I'm in the least bit a Marxist, mind you (nor was Marx), but I do think that the man must be ranked among the greatest financial journalists who ever lived, every bit the equal in perspicacity of Adam Smith. His analysis of the "character" of capitalism, and the tendencies, largely self-destructive, that flow from that character, is as penetrating and on the money (if you will) as any ever written. Much of that analysis, let us not forget, was first mooted in the dispatches Marx wrote during the 1850's for the New-York Tribune , not exactly a socialist rag, whose ill-paid European correspondent he was. Capitalism, Marx saw, releases certain inherently antisocial, suicidal energies; it is Mammon who appears to hold the key to whatever it is that precipitates the lemmings, or the Gadarene swine, to destruction. And capitalism as a "system" probably has most to fear over the long term from nothing more or less than the public behavior of those who control or own the capital. In this the O.B. concurs-or, as the lady of this house puts it, "How long can it possibly be before someone just shoots Donald Trump?"

This is a typically long-winded O.B. way of getting to my point, which is to make sure you have all read John Cassidy's first-rate piece, "The Next Thinker: The Return of Karl Marx," in the recent double issue of The New Yorker . There is so much to think about in Mr. Cassidy's piece that one hardly knows where to start. Globalization, the sheer, irresistible force of capitalism, materialist values, downsizing and other tropes of "efficiency," all were anticipated and described by Marx-as I say, so much to think about. Go find it! Go read it!

The observation that particularly struck the O.B., not without a frisson of amusement, was the following: "Capitalism … made human beings subjugate themselves to base avarice. 'Money is the universal, self-constituted value of all things. It has therefore robbed the whole world, human as well as natural, of its own values,' [Marx wrote in 1843] … The money-driven debasement of popular culture, epitomized by most of Hollywood's output, was also foreshadowed by Marx. In the Grundrisse (Outlines) … he argued that the quality of the art a society produces is a reflection of the material conditions at the time."

Grundrisse was published in 1857, the same year that Charles Dickens, another Londoner, in infinitely better circumstances than the threadbare Marx, published a great book that tackled many of the same issues: Little Dorrit . Something was definitely in the air; predatory, shameless, callous capitalism-call it "trumpery" (defined by Webster's as "worthless nonsense")-was stinking up the joint. Indeed, when, not long ago in a talk on Dickens' great novel-perhaps his greatest-I compared Dickens' depiction of the Merdles' grand reception for the worthies of public and private life to the goings-on in the Bill Clinton-John Huang-James Riady Oval Office, a listener came up afterward and gently chided me for socialist tendencies.

What amused me about Mr. Cassidy's observation is this. There is a certain very vocal school of defenders of High Culture who look about themselves today and see a wasteland. I agree with that conclusion. This particular school, however, blames the whole catastrophe on "60's-style liberalism," in consequence of which it has formed an alliance with, is funded by, and has in general become the cultural dogsbody point man for free-market, laissez-faire, supply-side capitalism on the grounds that both stand for traditional, refined values.

But they do not. The current issue of Harper's Magazine excerpts a "must-read" excerpt from a new book, The Conquest of Cool , by Thomas Frank, which makes an inescapable point: Without capitalism's shoulder to it, thanks to the profit it saw in effecting a revolution in popular/mass culture, the great rock 'n' roll-spoked wheel of the anarchic, know-nothing, tradition-abhorring values ascendant in the 60's, in which the rock sensibility ruled all (and still does), could not have crushed everything in its path as efficiently as the panzers once overran the defenses of France or the barbarians the gates of Rome. Why, in God's name, do you think the Europeans resist the "New Global Economy" as determinedly and valiantly as they do?

Because they know what the true cost will be.

Sure, France and Germany would like the money, anyone would, but not at what they know the cost will be in terms of cultural annihilation. They have looked across the Atlantic; they know what unfettered capitalism's "long march through the institutions" looks like.

The O.B. intends to return to this theme in future columns, but let me leave you with this thought. In The New York Times of Oct. 22, Martin Arnold wrote the only insightful column on the current state of publishing that I have read in a dog's age. The point he makes is that publishing is bereft of talent-not writers, but editors, marketing people, people like that. It's tempting to blame this on low pay, but publishing has always paid badly. So here's something to think about. In the mid-1980's, half of one Yale graduating class signed up to interview with Goldman, Sachs & Company. This suggests a value system unlikely to produce many book people.

As Marx saw, the last laugh is generally Mammon's.