How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

by Daniel Immerwahr

One of the blockbusters of the age was a work of science fiction, Looking Backward (1888) by Edward Bellamy. It imagined a man falling asleep in Boston in 1887 and awakening in the year 2000 to a luminously bright future, a future where everything worked. Bellamy’s prophecies were exhilarating. Consumers, he predicted, would no longer buy goods in stores. They’d place orders into pneumatic tubes, using what he called “credit cards,” and their purchases would come whooshing back via the same tubes. For a small fee, they could even have music piped into their homes as if it were water. “It appears to me,” Bellamy’s time traveler marveled in a retrospectively hilarious passage, “that if we could have devised an arrangement for providing everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, and beginning and ceasing at will, we should have considered the limits of human felicity already attained, and ceased to strive for further improvements.”

MacArthur’s goal was Manila. And, finally, he had the planes to take it. One Manilan remembered them screaming through the city like the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz,

The United States is the only country whose flag, by law, must change when the shape of the country does.

It was a known bug: humans didn’t travel well. Take them from one part of the planet to another and their typical response was to get sick and fall down.

Perhaps the only thing you need to know about Herbert Hoover is that he wore a jacket and tie to fish.

91 percent of the world’s population stops at red octagons. Even the North Koreans do.

There is every reason to think that Rumsfeld spoke from the heart. One of his greatest blunders in Iraq was banking on what one official called a “Wizard of Oz moment,” when the wicked witch would be killed (perhaps in an air strike) and the liberated inhabitants of Oz would joyously take over.