"Sleepwalking into the Imperial Dark/ What It Feels Like When a Superpower Runs Off the Tracks"

[KoKo]

Sleepwalking into the Imperial Dark
What It Feels Like When a Superpower Runs Off the Tracks
By Tom Engelhardt

Years ago, in the George W. Bush era, I wanted to put a new word in our domestic political vocabulary: “Republican’ts.” It was my way of expressing the feeling that something basic to this country — a “can do” spirit — was seeping away. I failed, of course, and since then that “can’t do” spirit has visibly spread far beyond the Republican Party. Simply put, we’re a country in need of Prozac.

Facing the challenges of a world at the edge — from Japan to the Greater Middle East, from a shaky global economic system to weather that has become anything but entertainment — the United States looks increasingly incapable of coping. It no longer invests in its young, or plans effectively for the future, or sets off on new paths. It literally can’t do. And this is not just a domestic crisis, but part of imperial decline.

We just don’t treat it as such, tending instead to deal with the foreign and domestic as essentially separate spheres, when the connections between them are so obvious. If you doubt this, just pull into your nearest gas station and fill up the tank. Of course, who doesn’t know that this country, once such a generator of wealth, is now living with unemployment figures not seen since the Great Depression, as well as unheard of levels of debt, that it’s hooked on foreign energy (and like most addicts has next to no capacity for planning how to get off that drug), or that it’s living through the worst period of income inequality in modern history? And who doesn’t know that a crew of financial fabulists, corporate honchos, lobbyists, and politicians have been fattening themselves off the faltering body politic?

And if you don’t think any of this has anything to do with imperial power in decline, ask yourself why the options for our country so often seem to have shrunk to what our military is capable of, or that the only significant part of the government whose budget is still on the rise is the Pentagon. Or why, when something is needed, this administration, like its predecessor, regularly turns to that same military.

More at..........
http://my.firedoglake.com/tomengelhardt/2011/04/19/engelhardt-this-cant-end-well/

[WingDinger]

1. I like NOTsies

[raccoon]

2. Great, must-read article. K&R. nt