The Texans Who Dream of the Habsburg Empire

A woman freezes at the sight of white boots. A representative from Lucchese—the John Lobb of cowboy boots—conducts fittings with a gravity akin to a nun being fitted for a habit. I’m watching America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, a reality-TV series about the world’s most famous cheer squad, and the religious overtones keep coming. The older women in charge, all ex-DCC, run the show. They coordinate standards and issue coded assessments. “I can’t see her in ‘Thunderstruck’”—the AC/DC anthem inseparable from the DCC’s routine—is how one applicant is dismissed. Eventually, Charlotte Jones arrives. She, daughter of Jerry, first of her name, Stanford graduate, abbess of tasteful upkeep and of smizing, renders final decisions in firm epigrams.

The Cowboys’ cheerleaders signal America and Texas: a land of bespoke cults honing craft in private before exerting themselves in public. In this case, we see a cult of young women who dance in front of 100,000 people exceptionally well, in white cowboy boots and in perfect formation. But they are, in the end, only a sect within a greater religion: The Dallas Cowboys. The congregation at large worships Aikman and Staubach and Emmitt Smith. Only a DCC alumnae would recall members from the past. Like proper cults, the costs and rituals are known only by the initiated. These women have trained in ballet and in modern dance and in gymnastics. There are women from Texas—from the pine curtain of East Texas to the ochre-colored canvas of the plains to the Rio Grande—who have envisaged the white cowboy boots since girlhood. There are others from far away who want to dance in front of the largest audience possible. The Alvin Ailey Dance Theater in New York holds fewer than 300 people. AT&T stadium welcomes around 350 times that. The pain is grand too. A common end game for these women? Bilateral hip surgery from years of landing in splits. You too can buy the boots that these young women break their bodies for.

If you know Texas, and you watch the show, I’d bet that a second thought kicks in: People in Houston would hate this. Someone in Sugar Land or in Katy with a framed Earl Campbell jersey is calling the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders a cult. They mean it.

The myth of Texas is the endless braid of isolation and independence where the land becomes a vision board for Americans looking for heroes. Earlier this year, I found myself in a public-school building in a Dallas suburb, listening to a blend of preaching, crypto-history lessons, and an invitation to celebrate an empire’s number-one boy, dead for a century.

A small child in a tuxedo stood on stage and waved a flag bearing the Habsburg Empire’s coat of arms—a double-headed eagle on a black and yellow field, crowns on each feather. In this public-school auditorium in Plano Texas, about 300 people stood—some with something close to reverence, others looking respectful but confused—as the speakers played Haydn’s Kaiserhymn, the imperial anthem of the Habsburg Empire. It was the second time we had heard it that day.

We were in hour four of the Symposium for the Blessed Karl, a traveling roadshow of priests, contemporary Habsburgs, obscure authors, and local true believers. They run these symposiums in various parts of the US, sometimes on campuses, sometimes in rented rooms. Sometimes there’s a Latin Mass included. Sometimes there’s a grab bag of speakers like today’s.

Outside the auditorium was bric-a-brac marketplace. There were books from small religious presses whose output ranged from ‘studies’ of a minor saint’s life to scary-looking conspiracy tracts about dark forces within the church, with titles like “Infiltration”—Dan Brown with a spritz of Qanon. There was also a coffee company with different roasts named for various saints. St. Benedict’s Dark Chocolate Hazelnut was on offer. A woman sold tin can planters emblazoned with the portraits of Habsburg royals, including and especially Emperor Charles I, also known as Blessed Karl.

Karl, Charles I of Austria, was the Habsburg monarch for the last two years of the empire from 1916-1918. A nice guy, but naïve. Martyn Rady’s The Habsburgs: To Rule The World spends about a dozen of its 400 pages on him and introduces him with that era’s standard knock on Karl: “You hope to meet a thirty-year-old man, but you find the appearance of a twenty-year-old youth, who thinks, speaks, and acts like a ten-year-old boy.” To use Junior Soprano’s insult: He never had the makings of a varsity athlete. After the end of World War I and the dismantling of the empire into nation-states, Karl and his wife Zita were exiled to Madeira in 1922. They were apparently very nice to the servants and loved each other very much.

The push for Karl’s canonization started in the 1950s, but finally got traction in 2003, when Pope John Paul II approved of his status as “venerable.” Less than a year later, after being credited for healing the varicose veins of a nun in Brazil, he is, in the Catholic Church, known as “Blessed.” The only rung higher is canonization. Sainthood. That Karl was responsible for troops who used chemical weapons—poison gas—in World War I doesn’t help his case.

If the Vatican were in Texas, the chemical weapons accusations against Karl wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. In a gun culture, violence is romance. By the numbers, Texas has no equivalent there.

There are sportsmen who hunt white-tailed deer and Axis deer within all environmental and firearms good-sense laws. Bolt action rifles stored separately from ammo. An overpopulated animal hunted for food and for sport when the alternative is starving deer. There are owners of sidearms who carry for deep, legitimate reasons. A friend of mine was raised in Texarkana, a Black man in a Black family in a place that can be deeply hostile to anyone not white. As he told me once, he was taught to shoot by his older family members and carries a pistol in his car and in his home because the police were not there to help his family—they were there to sign off on the violence done to his community. I’m outside those cultures, but I tell myself that I get them as much as a Yankee transplant can.

Texas is also the epicenter of gun cosplay cults. Drive around and you’ll see them. White guys with scraggily faux-Special Forces beards. Their trucks have Punisher logos and big stickers that say “III%” in a parchment font. The stickers apparently represent that narrative that only 3% of Americans fought in the revolution.

If you meet these guys—and it is almost always guys—and chat with them, you’ll quickly learn that a few of them did serve in uniform. But a lot of them didn’t. They’re IT people, or they work in the energy industry, or they oversee the laying of fiber optic cable in apartment buildings. They’ve got degrees from TCU or A&M or University of North Texas. They practice at gun ranges or on a friend’s small patch of land or fulfill their needs by taking their gear on and off in one the state’s innumerable midcentury ranch houses. They like to dress like the last thirty minutes of Zero Dark Thirty. They like to dream about a revolution. Life, liberty, and, for more than a few, the delicate dance of stolen valor. From one angle, it’s Stripes with Black Rifle Coffee. From another: They believe that they are St. George with the divine spirit of constitutional carry. All they crave is a dragon to kill. And in the land of unfettered commerce and guns, there are seminars to help them harness that energy.

In a way, it reminds me of the Habsburg enthusiasts: dreams of the past resurrected and propped up and retrofitted for a fallen world.

My family lived in Texas for close to a decade. I’ve seen guns in hospitals. I’ve seen magazines swing from the belt of a former Scout Sniper whose mission is now standing sentry for a private school where the biggest physical danger is the parent driving a Tesla recklessly at drop off. This year that school—where I taught and which my young children attended—will train teachers on how to plug up gunshot wounds and why not to rescue a child alone and lost in a hallway during a “breach of the campus.” No one knows who asked for this security acceleration. No one can say why.

After the Sutherland Springs church shooting in 2017, I called my Texas state representative. I’ve got soft hands and own every book Philip Larkin ever published but I had done my research: I knew terms—magazine, cartridge, rate of fire, that semi-automatic is not automatic. I also knew that the 2^nd amendment is the real 1^st amendment here. My representative’s assistant was responsive to my voice mail and polite in his return. He said that my representative believed that because “assault rifle” was impossible to define, that any legislation would infringe on lawful gun owners’ rights. The definitions were the problem. Cults depend on internal definitions, the bending of connotation and denotation beyond public view. You don’t understand. That’s not what it really means. You can never understand.

That same year, a Texas financial guru invited my family to his ranch. He was a Texas native, an avid hunter and fundraiser for law enforcement and veteran causes. He did not serve in the military himself. He told us about buying from dealers with the highest ATF license, people who have the right to sell “destructive devices.” At his ranch, he had a gun vault that held everything from vintage pistols and bolt-action rifles to the kind of fantasy guns that he needed that ATF-certified dealer to get. In the corner he pointed out an AR-15. It was autographed by members of the SEAL Team raid that killed Osama bin Laden. They had signed the barrel of the gun in gold Sharpie. Wasn’t this a religious icon?

The Habsburg ‘symposium’, both the one in Plano and the circuit that versions of this crew make, offers sub-groups of conservative Catholics the pretext to gather under the umbrella of Karl. They’re not a mass movement like the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street or the more-visible-than-you-realize Opus Dei, but a gaggle of interests all blitzed into one smoothie. In the mix? Monarchist hagiography with a side of religious intervention. Shopworn socially-conservative and heartily natalist life advice. Marry the devout. Have lots of kids. Study the life of Karl and his wife Zita. Some agitprop: Keep up pressure on the Vatican. We’re close to canonization. And, finally, the classic American paranoiac: Watch out for Freemasons and globalists and people trying to take your lands. In Plano you could feel the urgency to delight believers and illuminate the unconverted.

Eduard von Habsburg, an apparent descendant of Franz Josef, ambassador from Hungary to the Holy See, was the first scheduled speaker. Suited and booted and well-rehearsed, the man listed in the event materials as His Royal Imperial Highness Archduke was the glib, conservative Gen X dad happy to play senior partner. He’s been giving posting a whirl (solid follow), happy for a Times profile, and serves at the privilege of Viktor Orbán. He delivered his advice with the lexicon of a serviceable podcaster: “How many children to have—spoiler: many!” Marriage was at the center of his remarks, and became a spiritual test-prep curriculum: “If you have young children, you should begin today to encourage them to pray for their future spouse” Steve Harvey’s Act Like A Lady, Think Like A Man for the Imperial Vienna set.

His Gen Z son, Paul (another Imperial Highness) spoke next. He’s apparently crushing it at an obscure religious college’s pop-up campus in Massachusetts. He echoed his father’s talking points but with a youthful ‘push me, Imperial Highness’ self-presentation. “We don’t rule anymore so we have to find something to do” was something he said. Later in the program, Maria-Anna Galitzine, granddaughter of Karl, gave a brief and subdued performance in which she talked about her family’s destitution after World War I. To many, the events of her life would seem OK: Galitizine went to Belgium’s elite Catholic university and worked in finance in New York, swimming along nicely in the age of merit. She now lives in Houston and appears comfortable in the country club and benefit scene.

The cults of Texas move everywhere and at all times. It makes all the sense in the world that the Habsburgs who settled in America would find it so welcoming. There is no center in Texas. There are only regions. Or, as a leading contemporary Mexican novelist figures it, Texas is a great theft.

B.J. Novak’s 2022 movie Vengeance was forgettable—New Yorker encounters real America— but one joke landed perfectly. When Novak’s Brooklyn media type makes it to a rodeo in the Panhandle, an announcer asks if there are any Texas Longhorn fans in the stands. He cheers. He’s greeted with silence and contempt. He’s in Texas Tech country. Guns up.

Consider Waco. Before Chip and Joanna turned it into a Pleasantville of mason jars and shiplap and the Millennial-grail quest for a forever home, two traumas and two cults defined the city to the world. The Branch Davidians and David Koresh is the one everyone knows. The violence at Waco that killed 86 people, including 28 children, lingers in the imagination. It was a chief tragedy of the pre-9/11 era in which Ruby Ridge and Waco and Oklahoma City became geographical shorthand for the millenarian groups that saw menace in fluoridated drinking water and power in an apocalypse. Even the descriptor for Waco for it depends on who you ask: Massacre? Tragedy? Siege? I still can’t believe that in a country where audiences reject any kind of discomforting politics in their entertainment, that there’s a two-season prestige TV miniseries about it.

There’s another trauma that was anchored to a cult of personality in Waco: the one-time ascendence and plummeting darkness of Art Briles’s Baylor football team in the 2010’s. The ugly, violent culture of rape and buried investigations and abandoned victims that Briles at least ignored and at most accepted is inseparable from Baylor’s rise from regional Christian school to national university. The school president at the time was Ken Starr. Their new stadium, built in 2014 at the peak of Briles’s success, is visible from I-35 and sits 10 miles away from where the Branch Davidian compound burned.

The Habsburgs might have been reminded that the only titles that matter in Texas are governor, reverend and coach.

The Church of Wells cult continues in East Texas about two hours east of Baylor’s campus. The slacks-and-oxford shirts of the Claremont Institute who crave a “withered” government are flocking to Texas en masse.

I say this as a Yankee transplant who moved to Texas with excitement: the outsiders who seek out Texas are not filled with the same reasons that drive people to New York (power and history) or to Los Angeles (youth and beauty).

What’s appealing about a cult is what’s appealing to the outsider about Texas: living a personal, idiosyncratic life free from judgement or assessment or interference. Writer and Texan Lawrence Wright wrote that Texas sees itself as free of neurosis. I’d argue that in reality Texas is just as neurotic as some imagined Upper West Side. Except that Texas’s neuroses don’t remain dormant. They explode.

I remember living in Austin in 2015-2017 and seeing the no-California sign on every fifth lawn: an icon of the Golden State inside the red struck-through no-smoking red circle. Yeah, thought I, who had lived in Austin for one year and pushed my infant son (a real Texan) through the neighborhoods. The stars at night are big and bright, you California so-and-sos.

The Leftovers season two takes place in a fictional Texas town, a backdrop for an Old West/Old Testament reckoning. That story doesn’t work if it’s in the woods of northern Michigan or swamps of Central Florida, to name two more locations in the American cult canon.

The desire for a cult intensifies as you get away from the two gargantuan cities of Texas, Dallas and Houston. West Texas—parts quite wealthy, parts poor—is literally running out of water. And once-cool Marfa is passé. The Prada store radiates cringe. Part-time Marfa resident and ne plus ultra East Village poet Eileen Myles has said, of the region, “I had no projections onto it, I had no sentiment about it.” I’m skeptical that any Yankee—myself included—could approach a place as ripe for projections as West Texas and say that they have none. To do so summons the kind of colonial thinking that’s been unpacked by geniuses like Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak. I say this without judgement and fully implicating myself: You could drop Myles’s words about Far West Texas into the mouth of a Dutch merchant journaling about Indonesia in the 17^th century.

There can also be beauty in the sets of Texans doing it their way. A cult becomes culture when it blossoms. Not something closed off, but instead a celebration of what excellence means to a group. A queer rodeo. The librarian who makes up, to those who might hate her, a cult of one, trolling censors and insisting that books about sexual health and the origins of the KKK belong in Llano.

Even early in my day with the Habsburgs, I was struck by how easily this Texas crowd gave so much time to people with cosplay titles. Strictly speaking, the Habsburgs have no right to use these. Long gone is their throne. And this was Texas, a place that defines itself in its desire to be alone. No American state flag is more worshiped. No state has the precise combination of being intensely American and avowedly apart from America. This is Texas, ain’t no royals. And from the speakers on stage there was obedience, even giddiness, when they asked questions of “Your Imperial Royal Highness.” You wondered if they might bend the knee.

The Habsburgs themselves were standard-issue: all conservative Catholic sawhorses and soft jokes about contemporary social mores. But once the American speakers took over the program, the ‘symposium’ got darker. David Ross, a local real estate agent, was the organizer and MC for the six-hour event. He began by speaking for almost half an hour about the life of Karl and his wife Zita, warping tales about Franz Ferdinand’s assassination with anecdotes from Karl’s life, praising him for saving the lives of troops in World War I and how nice he was. Ross ran the symposium with an odd sequence of Q&A’s and of speakers, and frequently vamped for 15 minutes here and there about Freemasons and how wonderful everyone on stage was.

Charles Coulombe, an author who began his career editing horror stories before writing books like Star-Spangled Crown and Blessed Charles of Austria: A Holy Emperor and His Legacy was there for the whiff of the academic. He had the good sense to use “Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy” instead of the intimidating “empire” (blame George Lucas). For half an hour he supplied the kind of “what if” arguments that make for great banter. But these only made for an intellectual mirage. If Karl had been around, European communism would have been tamped down. Woodrow Wilson was very bad. Coulombe had an effective set of gimmicks: a little Tom Wolfe, a little Ben Stein, a little Mitteleuropa Swiftie. In reality-show terms, Coulombe gave Karl and Zita the hero’s edit.

As the afternoon went on, the ideas denatured. The hours ran together—nearly 6 hours, no food served, only a fifteen-minute break offered—and right around the halfway point, my experience became like drinking a stein of MKULTRA’s finest psychotropics and then being set loose in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum with the sinister speaker of a 19^th century dramatic monologue as my guide. World War II would not have happened if Blessed Karl and “all of his intrinsic moral wealth,” which “many” historians acknowledged, could have stayed in power. Europe is out. Christendom is back. A nun once had her varicose veins healed by praying to Karl’s wife Zeta. Or did then-only-esteemed Karl intervene? We got hourly reminders from Ross that the Madeira islands (where Karl died in exile) are “closer to Africa than to Europe!” Boo to Woodrow Wilson and to the masons. Pray to Blessed Karl for a spouse. Everyone is talking about it.

The dark, dizzying thirst for monarchy belonged to the American speakers. It was the Americans talking about modern values being “crammed down our throats.” Ross’s enemies of the past? Woodrow Wilson, everyone else in Europe during World War I, communists, and Freemasons. Of the present? Modernity. And “the Protestant heresy.” Though calling out the Methodist and Baptist churches in Texas is fighting words, it’s good to know that the global call sheet of enemies never changes. Taken as a whole, the afternoon’s presenters and guests were Ant-Man’s gang to Opus Dei’s Avengers: no grand team but instead a slammed-together set of crypto-monarchists cosplaying as nostalgics, single issue right-wing Texas Catholics who very much dislike Pope Francis, pseudo-historians, rank and file property-worshiping fever dream Texans fretting about how billions of dollars and innumerable lands were stolen from the family with the help of the Freemasons, a classic antisemitic trope.

The actual Habsburgs on stage looked bemused and a little bored. I wonder what it is like to be a comfortable European with a fancy name accepting a meaningless Saturday morning among the compliant, welcoming middle class on the steamrolled corporate prairie of Plano.

There is what's known as the Habsburg jaw, a distinctive mandibular prognathism resulting from generations of royal inbreeding, pronounced in portraits of Habsburgs past. But figuratively speaking, today, the Habsburgs have no iconic face. No Queen Elizabeth. No Louis XIV. Perhaps because, for a dynasty, it's so diffuse: Many branches, many kids, many places, all racing cars or buying horses or trying to hit on someone in Shoreditch. They had no mascot save for Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination story was told at least three times that afternoon. The push for Karl’s sainthood resembles a branding exercise.

Texas is filled with happy lies too. The lie about income tax: Only the wealthy actually benefit from having no state income tax, so poor are the social services in the Lone Star State. The power grid is Soviet and flinches on any day that isn’t a windless 70 degrees. Through his ceaseless elevation of people from megadonor to state official, Governor Abbott has made his own kind of cult. I remember during the Deep Freeze of 2021 that he got on Fox News and blamed green energy for the elderly people who froze to death in their own beds, the desperate families who huddled in cars for warmth and died from CO2 poisoning. My family had been without power for two days, and the temperature inside our house got to 41. There was no power for my older son’s nebulizer nor his sinus vacuum. And we were lucky enough and had enough money to get rooms in the only hotel in Dallas connected to City Hall’s circuit. Abbott will never be president, so he rules Texas like a butler for the ultrawealthy, executive-as-Michael-Clayton for the Heritage Foundation.

Before he decamped to coach at Colorado, Cowboys legend Deion Sanders had a Texas cult of his own from 2012-2015, a school that produced as many scandals and crimes and comprehensive neglect of students as it did professional athletes.

In 2019, Art Briles became the football coach at a high school in East Texas. What a pitch he must have made to the parents: let me lead your sons.

We in the audience in Plano continued to chase the bleeding edge of the fringe. In the final hour of the day, Eduardo Ordonez from Camino Real de Tejas spoke. Ordonez was charming and told the old Groucho Marx joke about principals before unspooling a deeply niche plan to reestablish the Spanish branch of the Bourbon dynasty. The gist was that we should fight for an apparent spiritual bond among Texas-Spain-Habsburgs. Some would call it Carlism. I imagined it as a puddle of Catholic rulers in military uniform all dividing time like guys on a rap remix in the 2000’s: The Game! Carlos V, Count of Molina! Hurricane Chris! Ordonez was a strong speaker. He paused for applause lines, pointed out the young men in red berets in the crowd from his movement, and argued that Europe never existed and that “Christendom” is his goal. After he concluded, Ross added, “I love that accent!”

The fantasies are headed to government too. The only other speaker under 45 was Luis Canosa, a young man who was running for city council in Irving, another city in the rambling, strange canvas that is Dallas-Fort Worth. Canosa had a campaign table set up among the merchants outside the auditorium, and was chatty and confident in boots and a nice hunting jacket. He promised the symposium that if elected he would deliver “a complete and total Catholic takeover” of Irving’s city council. That plan was nowhere on his website or on his fliers. He described his opponent’s fundraising: “The devil sees what’s going on.” Canosa finished with a plea for funds and volunteers. Then Ross invited him to play a minute of the Kaiserhymn on the violin. He did. Canosa also won his run-off election in June and now sits on city council.

No one who attended the symposium would speak with me once I introduced myself as a journalist. Ross had given warning to the room about “someone taking photographs outside” and how all attendees were sure to be slandered.

As unhinged as some of the speakers’ comments were, it feels cruel to mock the people in the audience. Belief is not fact. That works both ways. All the surveys and studies on isolation and loneliness in American life are grim. The pandemic amplified that. And, like an emotional supply chain, the numbers may never come back down. People want a port in the storm. Some people get it from John Donne’s sermons or from Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope, or from arguing about the reboot of an X-Men cartoon or from Matthew McConaughey staring down the camera talking about Longhorn Nation. Gilbert Seldes, in his guide to 19^th century American cults The Stammering Century, describes the cult as a place of peace: “The underlying motive of the radical cults was salvation—in the modern jargon they were escape mechanisms … through cults, escape was offered.”

What was underneath this specific gathering? Leadership in the Catholic church is Blacker and browner and more from outside Europe. Attendance in the countries coded as white is down. Pope Francis has tried to offer a bigger tent for the church. The ideas and fantasies of a revanchist, dreamy, European, theocratic-monarchy wish list feels like an escape for some. But Christ told his followers to pray in a closet away from public eye and to beware false prophets. For Ross to say that Blessed Karl was “another Jesus” would scandalize many. In terms of acts in the real world, most historians slot Karl between AJ Soprano and Fredo Corleone in the dynastic failson pantheon.

Breaking from the Vatican is chic in Texas. A telenovela-worthy scandal involving nuns and sexting has wracked a parish and drawn the attention of the Vatican. A bishop in East Texas was removed from his post for relentlessly criticizing the pope for undermining the church by doing things like allowing trans people to be baptized and to serve as godparents. Ross made more than one cutting reference to “the past 11 years” (the number of years Pope Francis has been in office) and got knowing chuckles from the adults in the room.

In 1991, Don DeLillo wrote “the future belongs to crowds.” I agree with that. But it seems that you need fewer and fewer people to make a crowd. A thousand subreddits bloom, and each carries an atomic knife poised to carve out smaller and smaller sub-cults at any moment. The message today was not so simple as being super amped for Mitteleuropa, but was really about making a scrapbook out of all these alternative histories and fever dreams.

Maybe only California thinks about itself as much as Texas does. But where California has always stood in for “future” or “potential,” Texas has had intensity and loneliness. Remember the opening in Blood Simple: “What I know about Texas? Down here, you’re on your own.” Down here most dominions are private and bound up by barbed wire or West Texas crude or old, exhausted timber groves in Tyler. The world empires that fought over Texas ended up as flags outside amusement parks. Texas circles back on itself. The Heaven’s Gate cult, founded in Houston, wrote that Jesus was reincarnated as a Texan. I wonder what Ordonez and his crew of young men in red hats might think about that.

And truly, who cares about royalty? The day’s religiosity and yearning for a cultural connection to the old world, real or imagined, make sense. Or at least, it is expected. But Monarchy? In Texas? I expected a collective version of Cillian Murphy staring daggers at Prince Harry, a guy who half-ditched his Germans-cosplaying-as-King-Arthur’s-Court royal family and came to California and kept his title of Prince intact to more elegantly hustle American rubes.

Popularity, celebrity and power are each different things in the contemporary world. They were once fused together and injected with religion and called royalty. For those who think the world is leaving them behind, how attractive is that chance to claw back the past? And how appealing is a future of your own perfect design? Of all the cults in Texas, past and present, this weird carnival for a long-dead overwhelmed young man who saw the end of his family’s empire felt OK and totally common. Mostly harmless. Some strange people, largely the ones on stage, cling to its edges. The audience sitting around me seemed a little lost and a little expectant in the way that modern life leaves most of us from time to time. So spare a thought for the lonely Americans in the auditorium, dreaming of placid, wealthy old ghosts who might provide instructions on how to make it through the day.