Wall Street has climbed to levels never before seen in US history. If they were high in relation to underlying profits in 1929, they are substantially higher now. He is a prototype not just of Barton but probably, if we but knew, of the murderer of Jill Dando. The point about the US is that its economic and social organisation throws up more underground men, that it increasingly lacks the social and psychological constraints to contain them, and that there is a wider culture of violence and access to guns making their consequent acts so extraordinarily dangerous. There is, as Daniel Jeffreys argues in America's Back Porch, a growing undercurrent of rage in Middle America.
Ordinary citizens feel cut-off.
Never has ordinariness offered so few comforts and compensations, or implied such failure. The US will continue, but the contract that has underpinned its famous melting pot is breaking down. When British politicians invoke America's flexible labour markets, cheap discount stores or attitudes to wealth as exemplars for Britain to follow, we should be doubly cautious. But it is also part of a psychosis we don't want to copy .