Take a look at a video of George W. Bush speaking to the nation five or six years ago.

Like a pop single from 1962 (or 2002, for that matter), it didn’t age very well.

It’s astonishing that this transparently frightened man was the leader of the free world for eight years, and was given so much license to commit so much destruction.

But, then, nothing seems to define our era quite so much as license.

We give ourselves license to incur fantastic levels of national debt, and hand the bill to the next generation.

We give ourselves license to invade other countries on the most patently bogus of pretexts, bringing disaster upon them and us.

Or at least some of us, that is, because we also give ourselves license to allow a tiny fraction of the population to carry the entire national security burden for all the rest of us.

We give ourselves license to spend half again as much as any other country in the world on healthcare, only to be ranked 37th ‘best’ by the World Health Organization, just so we don’t have to do the simple work of writing corporate predators out of the parasitic cash cow booty feeding troughs in which they’re entrenched.

Meanwhile, a bullet is heading toward the heart of the body politic in the form of global warming, and we give ourselves license to pretend that the threat isn’t even clearly defined, lest we should have to relinquish our precious Hummers.