When your life spans the rapid social change that has occurred from WWII to the present it is easy to reflect that you are living at a time of great and fundamental transformation. As a kid I listened to “The Shadow” and “Gangbusters” on my little Arvin tube radio and read my first book, Smiling Jack and the Daredevil Girl Pilot, based on a newspaper comic strip character of the time. I remember making my first phone call and nervously asking the operator to connect me to some “exchange” like “Belmont 3437.”
But I am not going to take you through a litany of seemingly nostalgic reminiscences like those that are circulated by the “senior set” who use computers and the Internet to lament Bakelite phones. Sure, now I can order MP3 files of “The Shadow” and “Gangbusters” and listen to them on my iPod. I actually found a first edition of the Smiling Jack book on the Internet and ordered it (now that was nostalgic). And yesterday I made a phone card call from Hong Kong and talked to my 92-year-old mom for ten minutes with “next-door” clarity, and for less than a buck.
One more thing I remember as a kid: America was the greatest nation in the world and had just beaten the Nazis and the Japanese and saved the world from tyranny. The sixty years up to the end of he 20th Century were very much the “American Era.” It wasn’t without its problems, but we, in some sense by default, were Numero Uno in many things. That’s probably over, and the question is whether America will ever achieve the dominance it won along with the victories in Europe and the Pacific. It might well have been an anomalous period that might never occur again.
China is considering buying General Motors. You remember the saying, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the USA.” China already makes Jeeps outside Beijing and Buicks near Shanghai, just as well as we ever made them. They make computers (assembled my MacBook Pro), the best-selling Lenovo and a lot of other durables. They don’t make only plastic crap. They hold notes for $700 billion of George Bush’s “off the budget books” Iraq war, so they can afford to buy American corporations if they wish. Their banks, which used to be notorious for bad loans, are better off than “number one in bad loans” banks, and their people—and government—are not mired in debt.
If you travel internationally you can appreciate the status of a faded champion in subtle ways. American airlines have a shabby feel, with lousy food and rude service. The United boarding lounge staff at SFO seemed almost to take joy in telling patrons they were 25 seats overbooked and treating them like their government never bails them out. Homeland Security seemed a bit more friendly, but we still had to walk in our socks over filthy floors. American hotels are grimier and looking like their “fourth star” is broken. Not so, as many who traveled to China during the Olympics will attest, in places that used to look ad feel decades “behind” America. Airlines, airports, service personnel, security, and hotels often put us to shame and shabbiness. Our infrastructure, public and private, is often badly in need of repair and replacement.
Many Americans, Rush Limbaugh, and some other jerks like him excepted, hope Barack Obama will be able to rescue us from us from the fate I feel we have put ourselves in for—“has beens.” But I don’t think he can, or anyone can. He might be able to stem or top some or most of the stupidity and cupidity that has made us a nations of wastrels and managed to create a huge economic disparity in spite of our putative egalitarianism. Obama is seen as (except those idiots who have called him both a fascist and a Communist) a progressive and a pragmatist. But he really just needs to be a reformer first. He must get us to change our stupid, wasteful and greedy ways. He’s going to get resistance from an entrepreneur I flew back from China next to about his policies on American corporations who take their business off shore. This guy claimed that when he took his several companies to China it “doubled” his employment back home. But he was talking about his management people, not the more numerous production people. If China buys GM that slippery logic won’t fly.
War is a big problem. We have spent hundreds of billions gearing for a type of war we can possibly fight without harming ourselves. Other nations, including those who have fundamentalists who espouse suicide, are, or will soon acquire those sorts of weapons. We opened Pandora’s nuclear box. Then we went and squandered hundreds of more billions unsuccessfully fighting wars we had no business in starting and no particular tactics toward “winning.” Korea, Vietnam and Iraq were and are all civil wars. We had no real effect on any of them other than depleting ourselves. Moreover, with them we started our own civil “culture war.”
Inexorably, our wealth was squandered, then shifted, by thirty years of economic policies crafted by the plutocrats who funded the campaigns of Reagan and the Bushes, who argued that taxes were inherently evil, and any political agenda to enhance or repair our social and physical infrastructure, or to protect our precious resources, were “socialistic.” To finance their wars and keep money flowing to the top one-percenters they borrowed us into a pit of penury—just laying the “taxes” on future generations. Emboldened, they stole elections, perverted institutions such as the CIA and Department of Justice, launched preemptive war, defecated on our honor with Abu Ghraibs and drowned our values with waterboards.
Obama can repair some of that, but he is still mired in Afghanistan, a toilet that flushes away empires and will provide the heroin to help you forget about it. It is a tragic place where they blow up girls’ schools and execute women for entertainment, but there is no way we are going to stop them. The brutal religious fundamentalists who like it that way will fight us to the death and thank us for making them martyrs. Ironically, the Americans closest to them are our religious fundamentalists. The industrialist that flew with me thought that the reason China remains communist is that it is “not a Christian nation.” Ironically, some Chinese converts feel the same way. But they have had this huge economic advancement under communists I had to reply.
But I was going on about Afghanistan. Even the great Obama will be brought down by it unless he can extract us soon. Perhaps if he pulled out and let the Taliban threaten Pakistan enough to take over those Paki-nukes the Pakistan army—always the default government if the country—would wake up, pull their troops from the Indian border and kick some Taliban ass. If we continue to let civil wars be our problem we will never overcome the damage of our own “culture war.” It is good to see America get some our respect back, but it feels a lot like the respect people give to sports figures who are past their prime; a bit like the sports star who “partied” a little too much and didn’t look over his shoulder.
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© 2009, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 5.10.2009)