The glue is gone: the things that held us together as individuals and as a people are being lost. Can we find them again?

There's a flutter to society now, a tremulousness: young people studying yoga therapy after college instead of essaying graduate school, and their parents taking cooking very seriously, with Hummers in the suburbs but debt a major household topic, and several grandmothers I know unexpectedly becoming "primary caregivers" because of a divorce. The presidency seems to have gone quite slapstick, with another Texan mocking the two seaboards with an ill-considered, long-term foreign war. Yet our brains' functional areas, our pharmaceutical needs and desires, in fact our genome itself, all seem to have been mapped. We look scientifically as well as affectionately at children, we think we know so much about their stages of development (about our need for them, as well). From day care to an eventual hospice, their every twitch has been accounted for.

Yet we don't know why we are widely hated so, when America was created to be imitated and loved. Now we sometimes have to force people to love us--send in the SEALS. Our democracy, at the moment, requires other countries not to be democracies to service us with Saudi Arabian or Nigerian oil, sweatshop textiles, and electronic parts. We want authoritarian governments to preside over our suppliers, although incongruously we feel astonished at the phenomenon of "asymmetric warfa...

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