The Decline Phase
I’ve Someone who is totally not me has been saying for a number of years now that we, the United States, are clearly in the decline phase of our empire. With increasing cultural and economic rigidity combined with ever louder proclamations of our greatness, I think it inarguable that the power of our empire is diminishing. Even as the world’s only superpower, it is diminishing.
In any event, Billmon takes the time on the anniversary of the greatest intelligence and leadership failure of our nation’s history to riff on this same theme. Since he echoes my thoughts, I thought I’d quote him. Plus, that way I don’t actually have to, you know, write my own thoughts down. Woohoo!
What I’ve learned (from 9/11, the corporate scandals, the fiasco in Iraq, Katrina, the Cheney Administration’s insane economic and environmental policies and the relentless dumbing down of the corporate media — plus the repeated electoral triumphs of the Rovian brand of “reality management”) is that the United States is moving down the curve of imperial decay at a amazingly rapid clip. If anything, the speed of our descent appears to be accelerating.
The physical symptoms — a lost war, a derelict city, a Potemkin memorial hastily erected in an vacant lot — aren’t nearly as alarming as the moral and intellectual paralysis that seems to have taken hold of the system. The old feedback mechanisms are broken or in deep disrepair, leaving America with an opposition party that doesn’t know how (or what) to oppose, a military run by uniformed yes men, intelligence czars who couldn’t find their way through a garden gate with a GPS locator, TV networks that don’t even pretend to cover the news unless there’s a missing white woman or a suspected child rapist involved, and talk radio hosts who think nuking Mecca is the solution to all our problems in the Middle East. We’ve got think tanks that can’t think, security agencies that can’t secure and accounting firms that can’t count (except when their clients ask them to make 2+2=5). Our churches are either annexes to shopping malls, halfway homes for pederasts, or GOP precinct headquarters in disguise. Our economy is based on asset bubbles, defense contracts and an open-ended line of credit from the People’s Bank of China, and we still can’t push the poverty rate down or the median wage up.
[colbert]Well, if you were aiming for ‘depressing’, Billmon, mission accomplished.[/colbert]
