The currency regime that would succeed it would mean the re-emergence of the mark as the Continent's dominant currency and rule by the German Bundesbank, which is even less accountable to Europe's public than the European Central Bank.

BBC: Referendum St

It will be new players who come to rule this market, not previously dominant names like Nokia or RIM, he contends.

FORBES: Who Might Unseat Apple And Samsung As Handset Kings?

We have come 180 degrees from 1968, when Kevin Phillips in his landmark political study of that election, "The Emerging Republican Majority, " noted that by virtue of capturing the loyalty of the anti-civil rights whites of the South along with a majority of voters from the nation's heartland, Republicans put themselves in a position to be the dominant party in the country after decades of Democratic rule.

CNN: 48 years after MLK march, voting rights still vulnerable

Such forgetfulness can be partly blamed on a dominant national press that tends to report the grotesque exceptions not the blander rule.

ECONOMIST: The state of Britain

The Maguires were the dominant clan in the area and Hugh Maguire was the first of the Irish chieftains to rise against the rule of Queen Elizabeth I.

BBC: Fermanagh: Northern Ireland's lakeland county