America is glued to their TV screens, instantly reacting to every mobile alert, balanced on a knife’s edge. Ready to laugh or cry. In academic circles they talk about this moment in history as ‘late, late empire’ – the downward slope after a peak that’s not discernible in space-time. We just know it’s passed. We’ve felt it for a long time, but it seems time to admit it now. The TS Eliot adage of the world ending with a whimper instead of a bang applies to the American experiment. Though I would suggest a simple update – America ends not with a bang but a TV-tinged whimper of alternative reality transmuted into a collective stupidity underpinned by baseless pride.
That place we exalted in childhood history and civics courses was always just an idea whose expression was vested in our most mundane and personal aspirations. An idea we can longer recognize as our own in the rear view mirror.
