On the wall of my school dormitory was a picture of a golden retriever in mid air about to land in a lake. The caption read: “I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m going.” To live in the west during the late twentieth century was to live like the dog. We were not concerned with the destination as much as we were with the motion; steering the ship was secondary to getting it out of the harbor. Then something changed. Terror, war and financial disaster forced us to freeze like a rabbit caught in the headlights. The West, marked by clocks, mass transit and progress, seemed to grind to…