It's the words "thoughtful" and "inadvertently" that this author has some issue with. Yet, I will concede the truth for many may be somewhere in between, although I'm disinclined to be as generous in my summation of situation and circumstance as is the author. If indeed Glennon is right, we may then have a more realistic prospect of redemption and salvation, both representing two of the Great American Narrative's recurring motifs or -- depending on which side of the fence one sits -- myths. But that for me remains a very big "IF".
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In rounding things up here then, the following observation from columnist Paul Krugman of the New York Times, is apposite. He wrote in 2010:
"We've always known that America's reign as the world's greatest nation would eventually end. But most of us imagined that our downfall, when it came, would be something grand and tragic."
Krugman's loose expectation of the character of the Great American Demise as articulated above may or may not ultimately manifest itself as "grand and tragic", but as he suggests otherwise, I suspect that it will be more banal and pathetic, if past history and present circumstances indicate. Either way, both outcomes presuppose an inevitable demise, the actual events of which preceding and directly contributing to said "demise" ultimately one suspects being of interest and value to future historians only.
And the last word should
go to that (formerly) irrepressible American Man of Letters Gore Vidal, someone
who himself achieved no small measure of renown for turning "the mirror on
the follies, tragedies, trials and tribulations" of his beloved country.
In 2004 Vidal published Imperial
America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia, a
sardonic, plaintive wail on the notion of America as a contemporary empire, one
whose political, military, and economic elite is collectively all too mindful
of its place and position in the world -- albeit one that is now grossly inflated beyond acceptable reality for many Americans and non-Americans alike -- but selectively amnesiac about how and
by what means it got there, yet at the same time remaining completely unmindful as to how much more it might cost
to continue down said path.
In the following, and embodying sentiments light years removed from those which infected the PNAC ideology and which infected America in turn, Vidal 'riffed' on the notion of what it means to be a true American patriot, and how these folk might reflect their "true patriot[ism]":
"Those Americans who refuse to plunge blindly into the maelstrom of European and Asiatic politics are not defeatist or neurotic. They are giving evidence of sanity, not cowardice, of adult thinking as distinguished from infantilism. They intend to preserve and defend the Republic. America is not to be Rome or Britain. It is to be America."
I suspect though it may be too late for that. More's the pity I say. For all of us.
America, this is your empire! Come on down.
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