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F-USA BY MICHAEL VENTURA Date: 2107 Subject: The decline and fall of the former United States of America (F-USA)
We must begin by stating without equivocation that the former United States deserves to be honored as a crucial experiment in human history and surely the most creative society the world has yet seen. Save for religion, spirituality, and the theatre – in which it could be argued that the former U.S. was at best derivative and at worst backward – one cannot name a human endeavor in which that society failed to create fundamentally new forms. Music, literature, sports, cinema, education, dance, war, psychology, architecture, visual and plastic art, governance, transportation, engineering, agriculture, commerce, communications, medicine, and every science – for better and for worse, all these and more were forever revolutionized by that society's innovations. From the cotton gin to the Internet, its inventions were envied and copied the world over by cultures as different from the former U.S. as China and the Muslim nations.
Why the former United States was so inexhaustibly creative is a subject that will long be debated. Among many reasons are that it was the first large polity in which royalty was permanently abolished and all government made elective, the first in which many could rise above the societal level at which they were born, and the first where common folk could own their own land. At its founding, its citizens enjoyed more freedom and autonomy than any citizenry in history. Its constitutional system, the most original political system devised up to that time, enabled many who were at first excluded (slaves, women, etc.) to gain rights. And the former United States was the first nation in which all the world's races, ethnicities, nationalities, and religions interacted and intermarried in relative peace – relative, that is, when one considers how elsewhere those same races, ethnicities, nationalities, and religions had murdered one another for centuries. These factors released tremendous and still-undefined energies in the human psyche (energies blocked by the strictures of previous cultures), resulting in a cultural atmosphere in which anything seemed possible.
Of course, it has also been argued that a country situated like the former United States could not help but bountifully prosper. Here was a nation with no strong rivals on its borders; a nation protected from invasion not only by vast oceans but by the vastness of its territory (impossible for an enemy to overrun); a nation with so many varieties of climate and topography that it was gifted with abundant natural resources of every description, more so than any in history. So, in fairness, history must ask: How could such a nation fail to be bountiful?
By contrast, consider its neighbors. Canada was (until recently) too cold for widespread settlement. In the Latin American countries, the native populations were too numerous to nullify, much of the land was topographically inhospitable, and the climate was too tropical to exploit with the technology of the 16th through 19th centuries. The settlers of the former United States, however, found a continent that was rather thinly populated, while its eastern topography and climate were not unlike what the colonizers were used to, so it was well-suited to their level of technology. Also, Latin America was conquered by cultures still under the influence of the Inquisition, while the former United States benefited from cultures of the Reformation and the Enlightenment, in which (relative to most human history) new ideas were encouraged.
In short, and to put it crudely: In its founding conditions, the former United States had a lot of luck – but hidden in that luck was the beginning of that society's fall. Early on, as a culture, the people of the former U.S. came to believe their luck was a kind of divine providence and that, being divine, the luck of their society would never run out. Also, a generally shared belief system held that the Creator would not so bless a nation that was not good – so it followed (in this belief system) that they deserved their luck. This, in turn, reinforced their assumption that their luck wouldn't run out. These beliefs, held almost reflexively and unconsciously by many, contributed to an arrogance that was one (but only one) engine of their undoing.
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How they could do!
They even had a phrase for it: "good old American know-how." They knew how to do.
How did they lose that ability? How did such a country become, in the end, helpless and beyond saving? (To be continued.)...
http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/column?oid=oid%3A543178
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