The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Peter Higgs and Francois Englert this month for helping the world understand how a background field can cause phantom particles to acquire mass. The relatively irrational world of politics, riddled as it is with contradictions, offers its own version of the Higgs Field in terms of divergent national narratives.
For example, a news story can gain heft and traction in one field, while its equivalent in another field is rendered weightless or lightweight.
To the mainstream US media, a self-immolation on Tiananmen Square in Beijing is a political incident of the first magnitude. What about the self-immolation of a black man with a gripe about US democracy on the National Mall in Washington? Not so much.
One tragedy is over-reported, construed as being full of political gravitas and meaning, while the other is under-reported, dismissed as a meaningless mental issue.
When bad things happen in China it's political, when bad things happen in the US, it's somebody's mental issue.
The terrorist use of bombs and bullets to maim and kill civilians in a luxury shopping centre is a world media event; when US uses bombs and bullets on civilians in a remote desert, not so much.
Before the concept of Higgs Field entered public discourse, there were other, less elegant ways of describing the effect of field on a story. The durable concept of "double standards" comes to mind, as does "narrative frame".
Either way, one man's fish is another man's poison.
Washington doublespeak is littered with terms that assign a different weight to murder, depending on who does it to whom, and where. When the US does it, it's collateral damage, pacification, humanitarian intervention, peacekeeping, surgical strikes, to mention a few, whereas an act of violence by the other side is terror, and those who employ violence are terrorists.
It's rendered understandable, if not respectable, when the US does it, but just plain murder when any one else tries the same.
When an incident of chemical weapon usage by a non-US ally comes to light, it's a red line, a spark for war. When the US employs chemical weapons, such as the hundreds of thousands of tonnes of Dow Chemical-produced napalm dropped on villagers in Vietnam, or depleted uranium shells dropped in Iraq, it's war as usual.
There is also a distortion field when it comes to the issue of sovereignty. The US is big on self-determination when it results in breaking up non-allied countries into small pieces.
Look at the glee and end-of-history triumphalism that greeted the unravelling of the Soviet Union and even Yugoslavia.
Curiously enough, there is zero tolerance for secessionist self-determination in the USA itself. The last time a region tried that, in 1861, the country suffered the bloodiest war in its history. Ever since, the winning side has been lionised in Greco-Roman architecture for all future generations to genuflect to.
Winning a civil war isn't everything, but it's a force that puts you on the right side of the narrative. In this sense, the Lincoln Memorial, set in America's grandest public square, and the Mao Mausoleum, set in a similar symbolic location, serve similar functions.
It's been a bad few weeks in the Beltway, inside and outside the corridors of power. On the inside, elected representatives, so-called public servants, have shut down the government to better carry on their partisan bickering, bullying and betting the bank on the hopes that the other guy will blink first.
On the outside, a concatenation of violent events speaks to random events of individual despair. While a tragic farce is played out in the White House and the Capitol, troubled citizens have been self-destructing in dramatic ways.
There have been numerous shoot-ups and shoot-outs throughout the gun-laden, prison-packed US, including the case of a gun-slinging navy veteran who went on the rampage at a DC navy installation at the cost of a dozen lives and his own. But it is the cold-blooded police killing of ordinary civilian, Miriam Carey, in the shadow of the US Capitol Building that underscores the sickness of a system over-reliant on gun usage.
An unarmed black woman with no known agenda bumped her car into a barrier in front of Barack Obama's tightly guarded residence. For this "outrageous" crime, seven shots were fired into her car, no questions asked. She then fled, and to the credit of her driving skills, eluded top-notch secret service experts until she got to the Capitol where a roadblock gave her no escape. She was coaxed out of the car where her one year-old daughter lay mercifully unharmed, only to be cruelly cut down in a hail of bullets, even though she was unarmed.
In a different field, the US media lens might see such an act as an extrajudicial killing or gangland-style execution, or theorise that it was emblematic of a fascist government run amok, but the power of US icons is such that American propagandists quickly termed the Carey killing as a "heroic effort" which "rescued" Carey's baby, while keeping sacrosanct the brick and mortar symbols of US democracy.
Given the asymmetric violence and lack of compassion, it's an incident that seems as alien to America's self-image as Nazi Germany. Yet a reckless Berlin driver who scratched a traffic pole outside the Reich Chancellery and raced all the way to the Reichstag might well have been treated more judiciously, even during the height of Hitler's rule.
Another way to look at the Carey tragedy is as blowback of a bad war coming home. Shooting up cars full of unidentified people at roadblocks in US-occupied Iraq was standard operating procedure, even if there were children inside the vehicle or the hapless driver was simply lost and in a panic from the unfriendly attention of US soldiers waving guns.
Somewhere along the long and winding road of US democratic experimentation, Uncle Sam lost his way. As Chalmers Johnson presciently observed, the US can be a democracy, or an imperial power; it can't be both and remain effective.
Philip J Cunningham is media researcher covering Asian politics.