Say "Wow!"

I don't often read a piece from the right or the left that does much more than depress me even more. In an odd way, Tom Engelhardt's piece today, "Tomgram: Engelhardt, America Last?" did the opposite. "So much of this has, of course, already been buried in the sands of history, but that’s no reason for it to be forgotten. Almost 17 years after 9/11, the parts of the planet that 'the greatest force, etc., etc.' was loosed upon remain in remarkable upheaval and disarray, while failed states and terror groups multiply, producing more displaced people and refugees than at any time since the end of World War II. Another great power, China, is rising, and an economically less than great Russia continues to hang in there militarily and strategically by force of Putinian chutzpah. Not surprisingly, American decline has become a topic of the moment."

The essay does an clear and insightful job of analyzing how far the country has fallen since 2001 and how many challengers have arose since we decided to stomp off on an "empire building" fit of hubris that put the wisdom and benevolence of the United States into such doubt that even our long-time allies began to make alliances that would eventually challenge American supremacy to the point that even the dumbest people in this country desperately went searching for someone who could convince them that America could ever be "great again."

Here is what we should have learned from our insane response to the 9/11 attacks, "Lesson one: It should have been too obvious to say, but wasn’t: Earth can’t be conquered by a single power, no matter how strong. Try to do so and you’ll end up taking yourself down in some fashion."

The United States is being "taken down" internally and externally and the lesson every failed empire has learned from doubling-down on military firepower is that a powerful military is never all it is cracked up to be. In fact, building a powerful military is always a precursor to a nation cracking up. "Lesson two: In the twenty-first century, military power, even that of the 'finest fighting force in the history of the world' (another presidential descriptor of these years), isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It doesn’t matter how many hundreds of billions of dollars you put into building up and maintaining that military yearly or how many trillions of dollars you sink into its wars and the mayhem they produce."

Engelhardt lists three other lessons the world should learn from watching the US disintegrate into a chaotic relic and he anticipates at least four more lessons we will learn on our way down the chute. It's worth reading if you are inclined to want to learn from history. Otherwise, you can be a typical American and keep your head buried in the sands of superstition and nationalism, you can chant the variations on "four legs are better than two" ("lock her up," "make America great again," "America first," "drain the swamp," etc.) until your unemployment and/or Social Security checks stop coming because the nation is bankrupt and dissolving. History is usually examined by the survivors, not the perpetrators. So, it's likely that everyone but the remnants of the citizens of the United States of America will be doing the analysis in the near future.