124.   
   There was another party below deck that night, but this one was subdued. Everyone, the crew, the Catamites, the dogs, Conrad and I danced slowly, thankfully. I mulled over our abduction, our captor’s arrogance and American Empire. The beautiful fairy tale about the American Dream and Lady Liberty’s words: ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free’ was just that, a fairy tale. And empire? It’s human nature. Why should we claim to be different when it has always been with us from The Trail of Tears to the theft of half of Mexico? We got away with Manifest Destiny. Could we have been satisfied with a magnificent country stretching from sea to shining sea? Perhaps. But we weren’t satisfied. We aren’t satisfied. Empire is power and power is corruption and corruption is the cancer that hollows out a nation, a people, a dream until it crumbles into the dustbin of history.

   Conrad pulled me close and whispered in my ear. “A cloud has drifted over your eyes.”
   I looked up and sighed. “If I don’t want to hear this sordid, blood-soaked tale, who will? Who wants to be told that their beloved country is a monster?”
   Conrad smiled. “No more of a monster than any other country has been, is or will be, but if you don’t know what you have done, you can’t stop repeating yourself. Most of the world looks at the American people as blissfully ignorant at worst and sadly naïve at best. For God’s sake, how old is your country, a couple of hundred years? Europe is a couple of thousand years old, Greece three, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, India, China five. Five thousand years of history and people still learn nothing.”