You can usually tell when someone has given up. The house may be badly in need of a coat of paint. The garden is overrun with weeds. Maybe there's now cardboard where once there was glass.
How can you tell when a country has given up? Is it when a gaggle of misfits, lunatics and jesters seek to become president? Is it when the poor are reformulated to become destitute, their kids going hungry, while the wealth of the rich soars? Is it when a punk with an assault rifle lays waste to kids in an elementary school or some malignant shit cuts loose on a bible study group in a black church in South Carolina?
We hear a lot about the United States being in decline. It's being overtaken by China and, perhaps eventually, the whole BRIC gang. But America's decline isn't from the ascendancy of emerging economic superpowers. It's coming from the cancerous rot inside.
At times it seems that dysfunction has become the default operating system of the United States of America. Look at the Bush/Cheney days. Tax cuts followed by more tax cuts for the rich while the country waged two, trillion dollar wars financed by foreign borrowings. That was pretty nutty. How about cops killing unarmed black people from coast to coast? That's kind of fucked up. The dismantling of America's social safety net in the face of rising poverty and burgeoning inequality. The rise of corporatism and the mutation of what is now a "bought and paid for" Congress and a corporatist Supreme Court. That's institutional dysfunction at the highest levels. Major cable news outlets that quite deliberately churn out outright lies and confusion. The rise of the "permanent warfare state." Mass murder - in theaters, in schools, in churches. A people who have rejected knowledge in favour of belief. Declining standards of living and levels of education. A nation that exemplifies the chokehold of neoliberalism.
When it comes to decline, the United States needs no help from foreign rivals. It's already given up on itself. Isn't it about time that we, the branch plant to the north, figured this out?
10 comments:
I think many have figured it out here, Mound. The problem is, given that the political process offers no hope of relief, what to do about it.
What does it mean when a nation's national debt is over $18 Trillion?
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
@ Lorne - I have your point. It's scary when your best customer is going downhill but you can only ignore it so long before it also bites your backside.
@ Hugh - $18-trillion is a huge amount of money but it's not the debt that's most worrisome but the complete absence of any policy to respond to it. The American economy continues to tick over on borrowed money, giving the creditors a haircut called "quantitative easing" from time to time, gambling that they won't revolt - that is until the day they do.
To keep this in perspective, in the postwar era every American president, Democrat and Republican, reduced America's debt to GDP. Even Nixon did while running the massive war in Vietnam. It wasn't until Reagan that the situation changed and debt to
GDP shot up. Bush Sr. continued the trend. Clinton, aided by a couple of huge bubbles, reduced debt to GDP. His successors with two massively costly foreign wars, casino capitalism, and tax indulgences for the rich sent the ratio soaring and, coupled with the 2008 made-in-America global meltdown, left Obama to inherit one truly godawful shitstorm.
Time to get the Guilotines out of storage!
Mound, I feel so sad reading your post but it is reality and you summed it up quite well. Why our so-called leaders in U.S. and Canada fail to understand which is so obvious? Whenever I see a baby I feel very sad and depressed thinking that what kind of future she/he are going to have. It is becoming more and more difficult to watch or read news.
Hi, LD. When you read the pope's encyclical, there's plenty of reassurance in his common sense observations. It leaves you in little doubt that our leaders don't "fail to understand" anything. They pretend not to understand. There's a real malevolence to them and, as you point out, it's the young whose future we're writing off today.
Much of what you point to is about gross immorality. While I do think this kind of decadent nastiness is a sign, lots of countries do nasty things--the US just has more scope.
What I've noticed about the US, though, is that at the same time it's doing all this stuff, it's also skipping those coats of paint and putting cardboard where there was glass. The US isn't doing the maintenance. They're letting infrastructure molder away, they're whittling away public education, they're letting whole cities go into receivership (OK, just one so far, but when that one used to be the symbol of your industrial might, something's gone seriously wrong). The place is deteriorating at a nuts-and-bolts level.
Hey, PLG. Driven the Trans Canada across the prairie lately? We're not doing the routine maintenance on our house either.
What we're not addressing is that not only is our infrastructure poorly maintained but it's also obsolete. It was designed and constructed for a different climate than the more demanding climate we've now crafted for ourselves (and all other life forms too). One expert has estimated Canada could be looking at upwards of a trillion dollars to replace and reinforce our infrastructure to meet the impacts of climate change.
Yes, well, it has always been a disappointment to me that we had tethered our little boat to their huge liner instead of sailing freely. But it's definitely been a worse feeling ever since it started to be obvious that the liner was the Titanic, and our leaders (especially but far from exclusively fucking Harper) insist on adding more hawsers and chains coupling us to them as they go down.
Yup! And then there is our own PM having his go at Russia. That's like a little crackie going after a Husky.
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