Main Street USA, herein preserved by the museum town, Williams, AZ, is a fiction created for the generation of Americans born in the 1940's and early 50's in order to preserve their chances of retaining throughout their adolescence a sense of a safe, orderly and reasonable universe. Their counterparts in Europe, Russia and Japan -- other states with proclivities or histories of imperialism -- would not be afforded that possibility.

The ramifications of that fantasy continue to play a powerful and, arguably, globally-destructive role in the shaping policy and society of the nation.