I’m currently reading Arianna
Huffington’s “Third World America”, her treatise on the escalating economic
woes of the wealthiest nation in history. Aside from her constant need to
create quotable soundbites and her tendency to write like the blogger she is,
it’s a good read, and an alarming one (not just for Americans). Two things have
jumped out at me so far:
1. America is a
country, but is also an idea, and a fine one at that. Over more than three
centuries, the idea of a democratic utopia for mankind has inspired the rest of
us plebians toward greater ideals, although in the last century at least the
idea has started to yield less and less.
That’s why I
raised an eyebrow at the end of the list of superlatives Mz Huffington uses to
describe her adoptive country: aside from the obvious ones, she uses the word
‘noble’.
The
traditional understanding of ‘noble’ as ‘being of high moral principles’ may
have been applicable in another age, but not anymore. In fact, if anything, I
would say that ‘noble’ is the least appropriate word one could use to describe
modern America. Powerful, yes. Great, indisputibly. But noble?
Western
values are corrupt and morally bankrupt, and no nation can claim the blame
quite like America. That’s not to say Americans
are guilty as a nation, any more so than ‘Germans’ are collectively guilty for
World War 2. America post-WW2,
however, has presided over the collapse of any notion of Western moral
superiority (for better or for worse), and of all things, ‘nobility’ went
first.
2. A March 2010
Harris Poll is quoted in which Republicans are polled regarding their
feelings on Barack Obama. Apparently,
57% of those polled believe he is a
Muslim, 38% believe he’s doing ‘many of the things that Hitler did’, and 24%
believe ‘he may be the Anti-Christ’ (chapter 2 page 86).
Paranoid and
frightened they may be, and justly so in the face of the steady decline of
America, but aren’t these the same people who voted for George W. Bush? Twice? The man who, more than any other
elected President (including Nixon and Reagan), presided over the key events
that have resulted in America’s current condition? Bush 43 was the harbinger,
and yet Obama is ‘the Anti-Christ’?
The American Society of Engineers’ 2009
report on America’s infrastructure was described later as ‘the kind of report
card you would have expected on the eve of the collapse of the Roman Empire’
(p94).
America’s
degeneration began long before Obama. It’s not Bush’s fault either of course,
but here’s the thing: of the $2.2 trillion needed over the next five years to
just make America’s infrastructure barely passable,
only $975 billion has been budgeted. Where are the spending priorities?
Overseas wars (begun under Bush), and the unfair bailing out of multi-national
corporations. Obama’s not perfect, but there’s one word I would ascribe to him:
noble.
Post-script:
“America is like a middle-aged man, still clinging to a perception of himself
at age twenty-three, refusing to take in the wrinkles and the bald spot showing
up in the mirror. And the bad knee. And the clogged arteries that could make
his heart stop beating at any moment. We still see ourselves as a youthful
nation, when it simply isn’t true anymore.” – Arianna Huffington, “Third World
America” 2011
