At the Teaching from the Left conference at Harvard Law School in March 2006, it was proposed that we live in “interesting times,” and that the recent events in the United States mean that we are uniquely at a point of crisis and responsibility. The fact that the government now condones torture, permits famine, fails to address health epidemics, erodes civil liberties at home as well as encouraging their erosion around the world, and initiates war, is taken as evidence of a kind of state of emergency unique to our generation. Yet I am not certain that there is anything unique about these particular political events, either now or at any other time in human history. Rather, one could say, “It is the end of the world. Again.”