The Beginning of the End?
January 28, 2010
What President Obama said last night is not relevant in the details, save for one. Actually it is the details of what he did not say that should be noted and logged for posterity. Someone a thousand years from now will do a show on Rise & Fall of the American Empire, and last night’s speech will be noted as an important sign. A sign of what? Well the end times of course. No not the oft quoted but little proved prophecies of the return of Jesus or any of a thousand doomsday prophecies based on religions. I am talking about the inevitable fall of our American experiment, which any psycho-historian worth is or her weight could have predicted twenty years ago.
Actually 22 years ago when President Reagan stepped down after his second term. No hold on, I admit I am a fan of Reagan and what he accomplished as our President. I happen to think that he was one of our greatest. Was the man flawed? Yes, he was flawed. He made mistakes. He was human. However, I am not commenting specifically on Reagan as a President; instead I am commenting on him as the lead politician of his nation, this nation. In his capacity as that lead he was able to get people on both sides of the isle and around the country to believe in him and cooperate with one another. We had problems but they were minor because we believed that we could fix them. Reagan was no savior; he was anti-hero in every regard yet he was the right man at the right time. The Cold War had gone on too long and Americans had for too long complained about their country but done very little (with notable exceptions) to correct the issues. Reagan came in and he sold most people on the fix he offered, as imperfect as it was. Problems are much smaller when you can believe in what you are doing.
President Obama finds himself in a much worse situation to be sure. He came in under similar circumstances to President Reagan but we are in the midst of a second Vietnam (for that is what Afghanistan and Iraq are) and there is no interest between the two parties in cooperating. Our debt is worse than it ever was and is only going to get continue. The world does not need America the way it once did and our word as well as our dollar, are not buying us very much. It may very well be an impossible task and, no offense to the man, his socialist ideals whether genuine or simply political are not going to work in a country that does not understand it is no longer even capitalist. In effect, we are a mess.
The real question becomes whether we will, like Rome, be sacked by those barbarians we once conquered or like Britain, simply fade into a second-rate power (no offense to my British friends and Anglophiles everywhere). Can it be stopped? Of course. Our downfall is not divinely ordained but to do so we would need to set aside our apathy and all our notions of what America stands for. We would need a new constitution and a new government and more importantly the idea that we should and can all work towards the same goal. Good luck with that.
