That whiff of careening, heedless adolescent fecklessness is part of what makes the archetypal American male presence alarming when he is equipped with a global cudgel.

NEW DEHLI India s new budget for 2008 2009 says less about the country s current financial health than it does about the irresistible tendency of Indian governments to use the national budget as a pre election cudgel.

But it will be used as a cudgel by those who claim that electric cars or solar panels technologies that will make only a marginal contribution, given their huge incremental costs are the solution to climate change.

Of course, Germany s eagerness to discharge the burden of history is not new. Back in 1998, the renowned intellectual Martin Walser publicly attacked the pervasiveness of Auschwitz in Germany s remembrance culture, declaring that the Holocaust had become a moral cudgel with which to intimidate all Germans and keep them in a perpetual state of guilt.