Is America Losing It?

Americans have traditionally been big believers in fundamental fairness. It's axiomatic among us that if you have legitimate grievances and you present them sincerely and candidly, eventually you will get justice. However, that belief hasn't been tested in a while. What happens when parents stop teaching their children that America's a special place? A generation of young Americans may come of age with no reason to believe in American uniqueness. If these young people decide to adopt more, um, direct ways of evening out class differences, will we respond by shaming them?

We rely on the press to keep us informed about changes in American life. However, recent history has shown that the real function of the press is to promote happy talk. If we lose our unique way of heading off serious political unrest, we won't know about it until after Americans' trust in other Americans is gone. Once social awareness catches up to the underlying political reality, it may be quite difficult to restore domestic tranquillity.


By the time we find out how ordinary we are, we'll have dug an enormous hole for ourselves.

Just kidding.

I'm with you.

"Ordinary".

We have become, in the words of President Bartlet of "The West Wing", a member of The League of Ordinary Nations.

We attack other countries for no reason.
We torture.
We squander our resources for a fast buck, with no thought for the future.
We engage in petty political squabbles while the nation crumbles around us.

Ordinary nations do that sort of thing...

After the USSR collapsed, we decided to go for the brass ring of being the world's sole superpower.

We squandered our wealth in imperial military adventures in Iraq, the Balkans, Iraq again, and Afghanistan while not taking down the hugely expensive cold war nuclear and conventional forces.

We squandered our wealth in imperial financial adventures aimed at keeping the dollar as the global reserve currency, implementing numerous free trade agreements, exporting our production and know how abroad, and running huge trade deficits year after year.

America has lost it.