That's what the movies do. . . . They give us lines to say, they assign us parts:

Spectacle is one thing money really can buy.-Terrence Rafferty (1995, p. 84) 1 Summer is the season for spectacle.In America, at least, it is a time for captivating the distracted attention of citizens through the outré, the outsized, and the outrageous.From hype for hurricanes to blockbusters from Hollywood, summer spectacles resist yet also reinforce the centrifugal spirals of privatizing pursuits.Vacations from work, school, government, even first-run television have traditionally taken people away from supposedly responsible preoccupations with public topics of business, education, politics, perhaps religion.Summer in America is for families, we say, but it entertains them with vistas and stories far larger than everyday life.2 On the political calendar, the season of spectacle stretches from Memorial Day to Labor Day, with fireworks for Independence Day between.Thanksgiving gets pageants and dinners, New Year's Day parades and football bowls, Christmas nativity scenes and services, Halloween the trick-or-treat trail of costumed kids.Even at this level, spectacle is nothing like an exclusive prerogative of summer.Still the elective affinity is hard to miss.Summer gets Shakespeare in the park and movies after dark.It means fairs at the state capital, concert tours across the country, and adventures at Six Flags Over Somewhere.It indulges in the pastoral epic of baseball and the sunshine roar of stockcars.Even best-sellers on the beach reach for hyper-realities to draw us beyond mundane endeavors.3 Spectacle is the form and setting targeted by the essays for this summer issue of Poroi.Writing in Wisconsin, Michelle Brophy-Baermannexamines love on the sensational screens of reality television.Contributing from Virginia, Joseph H. Lane Jr. explores uses of Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War for panoramic defenses of imperial action by America, especially in

There are many ways of putting Jesus at risk and making us feel his suffering. 1 -

Life is like a box of chocolates . . .

Bring them on! 1 1 So said a pugnacious president, forty-third in the lengthening history of the United States. Literally this was George W. Bush talking just the other day about retrograde Iraqis, who are not acquiescing in American rule but assassinating American soldiers instead. Mythically this might sound like Dirty Harry from Clint Eastwood movies, growling at a punk to "Make my day!" But because the President comes from Texas, self-consciously mimics horse operas more than other movies, and sometimes appears to treat foreign affairs as a streamlined imperialism of cowboys over Indians, the press and the populace tend to view his administration as a resurrection of the western matinee. This is not exactly wrong, but we can do better.

The aftermath of events on September 11, 2001 shows the importance of film, television, and other electronic media in constructing our political realities. Soon the Bush administration was working with Hollywood screenwriters to help anticipate possible targets and scenarios for further terrorist atrocities. Yet the main Hollywood contributions had come earlier, even before September 11, through popular films. These let American audiences experience acts of political terrorism in vicarious, virtual, symbolical, and other modes. 1 Now, in response to the dramatic escalation of terrorist attacks on U.S. institutions, Americans can call on cinematic prefigurations of terrorist strategies, the movements and states that use them, the regimes that support them, and the politics that reply to them.