October 27, 2009 05:08 PM UTC

Once we were Lost. Can we be Found?

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• by: JO

USA Today offers “9 Signs that America is in Decline.” http://www.usnews.com/money/bl…  Economic growth, prosperity, poverty, jobs are on the list, as are education and health care. So is “happiness.” :>( .

Question: are these symptoms or causes of decline? I’d argue for the former. For causes, we need to wonder where along the line we seem to have misplaced–I wouldn’t say “lost” exactly–our ability to mount a collective effort to address problems that affect all of us. Education is one big example. Environment/global warming/dependence on foreign carbon fuel is another. Health care is a third. A look at the current shenanigans in Washington fiddling about on this topic is cause for serious depression. (Q: Are antidepressants covered under the supposed new public option?)

Naturally I’m disposed towards pointing a great big finger–the Biggest, Longest Finger, in fact–towards the Reagan Era’s devotion to the Rugged Individualist and denigration of collective effort represented by democratic government. Most if not all of the symptoms identified in the USA Today report are not related to the world’s fatigue with the American Empire; they are home-grown. We have identified our enemy, and he is us. Old, old story.

One might have hoped that Yes We Can circa ’08 was a sign of identifying this malady and moving towards doing something about it. Maybe it was; the signs of recovery (and I don’t mean economic recovery) may be awhile in becoming manifest, given how far in the hole we were at the end of the Bush era. Still, nine months seems like enough time to see some serious concrete results in at least some areas, and the Stimulus seems like a missed golden opportunity to launch, say, Big Time public transit initiatives to reduce reliance of cars, whether driven by gasoline, electricity, or marketeers’ hot air. Instead, we seem to be delighting in highway projects. Hmmmm.

Some metahistorians may experience a tad of schadenfreude in pointing out the cyclical nature of empires and their inevitable decline. Greece, Rome, Ottomans, Britain, Soviet… are we next in line? And if so, what will we look like afterwards?

Sayeth USA Today: USA today has already fallen to NINTH place in the rankings of prosperity — not wealth, I gather, but prosperity, which is related to distribution of wealth. Is the combination of expenditures to maintain the Empire AND successful efforts by Republicans to redistribute income to the upper 1-2% to blame? Can this trend be reversed? Or does our loss of collective problem-solving point towards a one-way road Down?