It is in this effort that we find the manufacturing of the civility of empire: the United States not as it is, but as it prefers to be seen. An empire made tolerable not through the absence of violence, but through the presence of figures who make that violence easier to set aside - whose supporters urge patience or dismiss all critics as addicted to loss and misery, rather than as observers of history and students of political patterns who understand exactly where these capitulations lead.