Our ethic is "It's every man for himself. And to hell with you. Me. Me, me, me, me. My, my, I, I, I. I."

Many of our people died to make this land "your" land as you marched from east to west and south to north sweeping all before you. Those of us who remain are now in large part convinced to believe this land is "your" land...to send our young in defense of your policies to foreign shores...to celebrate "your" federal holiday in honor of "your" land.

DOMINATE

Weak aside -- no place for those our struggle
Leaves behind
Our Lord won't tolerate those whom through
Attrition fall

We must dominate !

With iron through our veins and a will made so elite
Hunting for our daily bread and the sinister close in sight
Hunger always drives the beast and the women fall prey

Leading all the wonderers to certain fate
Another victim reviled
I'm staring at you through the eyes of the wolf
Tell me who is going to save you now !

Animal sense ever alert
Praise be to the father-war
As a servant I am serving myself and I bathe in anticipation
Unless you taste it you could never know
All the power our Lord bestow
With a bow and a kiss profane
Be a victor or be a victim

Cold finger on the trigger
Behind a line drawn in the sand

Anger rise !
We fight a war with much at stake
The rights of birth that no one can take

Overflowing with anger
A soon to be awakening
Will be martyrs on to glory
Dawn finds us in this rage

As it must be
This dawn of the mad

My finger on the button
With what's so foreign in my sights

Anger rise !
We wage a war ... our nature to preserve
By any means ... our enemies be gone

No longer can we wait
As an enemy drains our future
As the light of a new day shines
Our anger fuels our march this dawn

Call of duty ... all the minutemen rise and shine
Call of duty ... only sovereigns stand the test of time

At worst, "everything is 'Yo, wassup, wassup, playa?'" says Walt "Baby" Love, a veteran Los Angeles radio personality, now with KJLH-FM (102.3), which plays older R&B music. "Ignorance is supreme. Some of these people on the radio nowadays, they don't care if someone walks down the street and shoots 10 people. They'll make some joking comment about it."

[M]ost urban DJs indulge talk of "big pimpin'"—the violence and ostentatious wealth—that fills much of gangsta rap.

But even in the movies, of course, 15-year-old heroes don't have guns. And in real life, most boys, most people, no matter how angry or frustrated, are able to control their behavior, if not their emotions.

In the end, the thing that made Andy Williams different from millions of frustrated and vengeful students was the gun. Without the gun, there would be no tragedy, no sorrow, no fear, no anger spreading like a familiar stain across the country. Without the gun, he might have thrown some rocks, spray-painted a wall, slashed a tire or even an arm. In high school, we all have our moments of insanity. "Rebel Without a Cause," S.E. Hinton's "The Outsiders," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" all touch that nerve. In those years, we all want to be prettier, more popular, faster, stronger, smarter, tougher, cooler, better. We want to be loved, respected, admired. But if that doesn't seem to be happening, some will settle for being feared.

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

And God blessed them: and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

[W]hat is man that thou shouldst remember him,
Mortal man that thou shouldst care for him?
Yet thou hast made him little less than a god,
Crowning him with glory and honor.
Thou makest him master over all thy creatures;
Thou hast put everything under his feet.

If only you will now listen to me and keep my covenant, then out of all peoples you shall become my special possession; for the whole earth is mine. You shall be my kingdom of priests, my holy nation.

God be praised, he gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Therefore, my beloved brothers, stand firm and immovable, and work for the Lord always, work without limit, since you know that in the Lord your labor cannot be lost.

For to love God is to keep his commands; and they are not burdensome, because every child of God is victor over the godless world. The victory that defeats the world is our faith, for who is victor over the world but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?

In the JudeoRoman world, there was no religious sin, however, in failing to honor the ethical precepts of nascent Christianity. That is one of the more obvious differences between nascent Christianity and the JudeoRoman church which the Roman emperor, Constantine, established in the name of Christ. Rome's unholy synthesis of Christian ethics and Jewish (God-given) and Roman (Imperial) law provided Rome the absolutist, self-righteous authority to conquer the western world in the name of an ethical morality which it seldom, itself, practiced, most noteably at the top. Rather, JudeoRomanism has provided the driving attitudes beneath western imperialism, colonialism and the current Bush administration's religious capitalism. The western world remains Roman after all these years, still Catholic despite the Lutheran and myriad Protestant Reformations.

Cooper captures his society's obsession with domination by imbuing his main protagonist, Hawkeye, with all the desired traits of the new Americans. Hence, Cooper "chose as a hero a man who subdues the Indians and the wilderness, [and] ris[es] to a position of influence within his community" (Tuska 57). A position based on Hawkeye's whiteness. For, as Hawkeye ironically exclaims: "I am not a prejudiced man, nor one who vaunts himself on his natural privileges, though the worst enemy I have on earth, and he is an Iroquois, daren't deny that I am genuine white" (Cooper 31). Hawkeye continues his polemic speech against the Native Indians: "I call them Iroquois, because to me every native, who speaks a foreign tongue, is accounted an enemy" (50). Hawkeye incorporates the tenets of his Judeo-Christian ideology, literally.

The desire to escape the routine—or the horror that has disrupted the routine—is not uniquely American, of course. But the preoccupation with celebrity is, if not unique, at least far greater in this country than elsewhere. As Peter Jennings, the anchor of ABC's "World News Tonight," once observed, "No country in the world is so driven by personality," has such a "hunger to identify with personalities, larger-than-life personalities especially ... as this one."

Hollywood has helped to both create and feed that hunger. There is another, even more distinctively American force that contributes to the cult of the celebrity: our historic exaltation of the individual. In such diverse cultures as Western Europe, Australia and many Asian countries, the desires of the individual have traditionally been subordinated to the needs of the community.

But the United States was founded on the bedrock of individual freedoms; liberty and the pursuit of happiness have been self-evident truths of the American life since July 4, 1776. Academics use the term "American exceptionalism" to describe our tendency to attribute to many achievers a stature not so easily given in other countries. We are, after all, a democracy, with no monarch, so we create our own royalty out of these achievers—or, in some cases, malefactors or even innocent (or not-so-innocent) bystanders.

By the end of the 20th century, however, individualism was no longer the product of a set of political rights so much as it was a form of cultural assertiveness. Fed by a constant emphasis in the mass media on personality, exceptionality and celebrity, the individual wasn't the person who reserved certain inalienable rights to himself; he was the person who got the most attention, which is why people like Donald Trump or Puff Daddy or Dennis Rodman or Madonna have all been cited as examples of individualism when they were really examples of exhibitionism. Whereas once individualism meant protecting oneself from the incursions of society, now it was an incursion on society—a kind of showing off. That, naturally, affected the balance between the individual and the community.

It is nearly 20 years since historian Christopher Lasch, seeing this change in our concept of individualism, declared America a "culture of narcissism," but what Lasch said then has only intensified with time. The forces of consumption and advertising, the emphasis on personal psychology and the obsession with the here and now that Lasch cited, as well as the various results of these forces—increased promiscuity, drug use and other forms of self-gratification, the growth of the self-awareness movement, an increasing trivialization of personal relations and a new callousness—have all contributed to a new way of seeing ourselves not as parts of a whole, but as the whole.

In this environment, subordinating oneself to the community is actually stupid and self-defeating. Individuals generally regarded as successful are those who don't subordinate themselves. They jump from the anonymous pack. The social consequences of this new individualism are all around us. In his recent study, "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community," political science professor Robert Putnam found that over the last four decades, there has been a decline in civic engagement and a concomitant retreat into the self. Participation in voting, service on committees, church attendance, social gatherings, philanthropy, even the number of dinner parties—all have dropped. As Putnam makes clear, this is truer of younger Americans than of older ones. Though Putnam wouldn't put it this way, it all leads to an inescapable conclusion: Selfishness is on the rise.