Friedrich von Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards,

I just got back from a vacation to Hawaii, where my wife and I took my young son over to see the Arizona memorial at Pearl Harbor. A couple days later we went on the tour of the battleship Missouri, mostly because nearly half a century ago my dad took me to see various fighting ships parked around America. In the early 1960s, the battleships I toured seemed emblematic of America's righteous might, wreaking havoc on our evil foes. Not only were they impressive in themselves, but they symbolized a power that to all appearances could be counted on forever.

Today, touring the battleship struck me almost as an exercise in ancient history, embalmed in amber; one's vision of this enormous vessel is distorted by a kind of astronomical red-shift effect, as if the whole experience of World War II is accelerating ever faster away from us like a distant galaxy.

Still, as I walked around the ship, I couldn't help but ponder the giant shadow that World War II had cast not only over my boyhood, but even over my adulthood, though I rarely consciously noted it. It constantly floated in the middle distance, a religious crusade that justified not only the mysteries of the Cold War but somehow also sanctifying all the details, however dubious on their face, of American society.

In fact, I think it's fair to say that not only for me, but for the entire nation, the whole second half of the 20th century existed in a sort of post-New-Deal, post-World War II haze, so pervasive that the full dimensions of it weren't entirely evident even during, say, the 1960s. (In fact, it's interesting to think how much of the intellectual underpinnings of the Sixties, even it's anti-Americanism, still rested on New Deal, World War II, and American Century intellectual foundations.)

Of course all that just made it even more clear to me as I paced the deck where MacArthur took the Japanese surrender, how much that haze is now blowing away in a cold wind. I think I've mentioned several times in the past five years or so that it feels to me as if we've clearly left The American Century behind and are into something entirely new, although it appears that most of our population hasn't caught on, exactly. The rise of China and India, the de-industrialization of our economy, our massive trade deficits and dependence on foreign sources of capital, our equally massive levels of immigration, and the sense of many, many chickens coming home to roost has gradually signalled a great shift in eras for me.

Sadly, the short term thinking of the past three decades, including the lack of truly fundamental technical innovations (face it, the Internet doesn't exactly match up to electrication or the Model T as a productivity enhancer), the long decline of our savings rate, the stall-out of income growth for most of the population, our financial reliance on stock and housing bubbles, the rise of the consumer-credit dependent "mall economy", the excessive growth of public sector obligations without corresponding revenue mechanisms to support them and to make visible exactly what such obligations will really eventually entail in terms of future living standards, the increasing shabbiness of our infrastructure, etc., etc. all suggests that we are entering a much less optimistic, greyer, far less certain era.

While we've been living in the rosy glow of the past, or busy with our pet schemes to rake in "money for nothing," we've been neglecting our future prospects. A day of reckoning is upon us.

Given the setting, the comparison with the U.S. Navy at anchor on December 7, 1941 was hard to avoid.

What also struck me profoundly on the deck of Missouri is that our intellectual toolkit as it currently exists is simply inadequate to our current circumstances and their challenges, in exactly the same way that a battleship, no matter how powerful it appeared, was no longer a meaningful part of a fighting naval force even 67 years ago.

A large cause of our political paralysis, perhaps most clearly symbolized by the lack of even a pretence of serious discussion about last autumn's TARP legislation, is simply a profound lack of thinking about how we need to organize ourselves for this new world.

It seems clear to me that we haven't even begun to ask the right questions yet about where we want to go and what kind of a country we want to be, because we've been lost in this daydream in which we would always be the post-World War II colossus bestriding the world economically and militarily. Of course, lacking any concrete goal, we have no clue at all about the necessary steps we must take to get there.

In such a teleological vacuum, it is hardly surprising that the hustlers and sleazebags are busy grabbing all they can carry off. In such a telelogical vacuum, it seems obvious that the Bernanke-Geithner-Obama "revolution" could be little more than a rearguard action, a very tactical series of moves fundamentally aimed at restoring the status-quo-ante with a minimum of tweaks to placate "the yahoos" (i.e., you and me.)

Along with feeling overcome by rage, fear and frustration at being trapped in a car driven by a set of chauffeurs who seem to be looking only in the rear-view mirror, I occasionally ponder the more hopeful aspects of all this.

My more hopeful view is based on the fact that this is not the only time in history that our nation's leadership has been mentally trapped inside a set of outdated assumptions from a rapidly vanishing era. The whole ethos of the last decade reminds me powerfully of the 1890s, when the cognitive apparatus of the ruling class was stuck in the agrarian, even antebellum nineteenth century while the ground had already shifted under underfoot. Urbanization, the development of the railroad network and national markets, the enormous growth of industry and the consequent dethroning of agriculture, vast immigration, etc., had far surpassed any intellectual concepts that the government or the population at large possessed.

Likewise, in the 1890s powerful private interests had thoroughly corrupted government and politics, but that was as much because American politicians and elites alike were living with a antique and vitiated world view, lacked any coherent new perspective, and so had no compelling reason to either stop taking or offering the bribes.

That era eventually got its new world view with the Progressive movement. While this was an ideology that may not have turned out to be quite as much an improvement as it seemed at the time -- to speak bluntly, I think many of our current problems are in fact directly traceable to the less savory underbelly of Progressivism -- I have to admit that for several decades Progressivism at least tried to use its influence for good rather than for evil. It is hardly the only political ideology that over time has rotted and gone bad (see the later history of the Federalist party or of Jacksonian Democracy if you doubt me.)

Be that as it may, we again find ourselves in desperate need of a new world view, and, sadly, we're not any better provided with one than our great grandparents were.

So what do we do about this?

It seems to me that a good start would be to draw up a list of the fundamental questions we should be asking ourselves these days. In other words, what do we want to be when we grow up? Contributions by our brilliant readers are very much solicited.

Remember, the Navy looked pretty pathetic in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, but the disaster had, shall we say, a tonic effect on its organizational and fighting skills.

Cheers,

Friedrich

While I feel pessimistic about our current situation, I would follow Friedrich's theme and concluding paragraph by noting that precisely six months after Pearl Harbor, the Battle of Midway had essentially decided the outcome of the Pacific War. Six months.

I think it was Fareed Zakaria who said that our problems are clearly solvable, but that it is far from clear whether we have the political character to effectively address them.

Posted by: Ned on April 18, 2009 1:11 AM

OK, this is going to be positively Jeramaic and no doubt I'm going to be labeled a religious nut job but here goes:

Be not solicitous therefore, saying: What shall we eat: or what shall we drink, or wherewith shall we be clothed? For after all these things do the heathens seek. For your Father knoweth that you have need of all these things. Seek ye therefore first the kingdom of God, and His justice, and all these things shall be added unto you.

Yeah I know that I sound like some fundy, and that many of you will turn off at the slightest inkling of Religion raising its head but America(and most of the West) is a fundamentally Pagan country. Sure there are heaps of people who call themselves Christian but practice the opposite. A country dies without public and private virtue. You either self destruct or someone gobbles you up. America seems to be choosing option No 1. Bloody hell, you don't even need to be a Christian to recognise this, Romans, Spartans, Indians, Japs and Chinese could tell you cannot hold a country together unless its people be patriotic, honest, hard working and willing to choose the right thing over comfort.

It's not that America lacks the intellectual power or wealth to change it's destiny. It completely lacks the moral power to do what it needs to do. Yeah there's lots of jingoism but nearly everyone is looking out for number one, screw the country.

I have to admit that for several decades Progressivism at least tried to use its influence for good rather than for evil.

That's because it was operating an a Christian cultural environment. That social capital is now gone, undermined by the very progressivism that it both gentled and tolerated. Progressivism in Asia and Eastern Europe had a totally different flavour.

But it's not enough to have virtue, one needs the appropriate metaphysics in which to interpret the world. The idea that there is no right or wrong or that facts which are inconvenient should be ignored or suppressed(Chris White are you listening?) is the root and branch cause of the Western Malaise. Finally, political power has been granted to those who can't govern themselves, debtors, druggies, spendthrifts, American Idol viewers, welfare bums, etc. all have the same right to vote as the most studious and responsible citizen. Are you surprised that the car is out of control when the idiots behind the wheel have been voted in by the idiots who cannot drive. Any resurrection of your country lays in a cultural movement which reasserts the primacy of the truth and acts on it.

Posted by: slumlord on April 18, 2009 7:52 AM

Unfortunately, the answer to your question has already been given: socialism lite, global world governance, multilaterialism, and multiculturalism. All the most influential organs - the comanding hights - of our culture are now in agreement that American exceptionlism is at an end. As Yeats said "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." Through a virtual coup d'etait, power has been given to the most anti-American president (and Congress) in our history, a person who would have been inconceivable to any previous generation. We will be slowly boiled like the poor frog and in the end, with the exception of a powerless collection of old-fashioned diehards, we will be "happy" with our new dispensation, much like the pod people in the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Posted by: Terra on April 18, 2009 9:45 AM

We lived near Pearl Harbor when I was 8 or 9, and I had two very different experiences with it.

My family paid a visit to the Arizona site, and it left almost no impression on me. On the other hand, when my fourth-grade teacher told our class how her family went to church that morning, and the pastor cancelled the service and told everyone to go home and pray-- well, that story has haunted me to this day. Probably because I could relate it to everyday experience.

The image of enemy bombers coming over hills one could see and smell from one's backyard tends to concentrate the mind. The civil-defense drills I'd been through on the mainland were s combination of adult paranoia and childhood lark. Not Honolulu's. We all took them very seriously. Aerial bombing wasn't theory; it was local history, and pretty recent history at that.

Incidentally, my recollection of Pearl Harbor in the '60s and Guantánamo Bay in the '70s is that the two were quite similar, at least geographically.

...the answer to your question has already been given: socialism lite, global world governance, multilaterialism, and multiculturalism. --Terra

And this differs from the Roosevelt/Truman administration, in that...?

Posted by: Reg Cæsar on April 18, 2009 2:59 PM

Being generally left-wing but not anti-American, I'm curious to read this. I always enjoy Friedrich's posts even if I place the blame for things elsewhere. :)

But what could we do? I suppose we could encourage saving (hike the sales tax) and try to build an industrial economy again. It's kind of too bad that American car companies actually started making cars that were almost as good at the Japanese ones just as they started to go out of business.

I actually am not sure if America can lead in high-tech; we are too anti-intellectual to raise our own scientists, and have always had to import them from abroad, first German Jews and then Chinese and Indians, who are now more interested in building up their own countries. And while we seem to do pretty well in media like Hollywood, I don't think you can generate enough cash on luxuries like movies to fund a major economy.

The one government program that would be helpful would be national healthcare; we'd actually save money by destroying the insurance companies and cutting doctors' salaries down to size. Every other civilized country has it...and notice how the German car companies are still alive, even though they don't have Japanese quality.

Posted by: SFG on April 18, 2009 5:17 PM

"I actually am not sure if America can lead in high-tech; we are too anti-intellectual to raise our own scientists, and have always had to import them from abroad, first German Jews and then Chinese and Indians"

Yeah, we were all living in grass huts and burning scientists alive until we imported them. Part of the problem is that people believe shit like what you wrote...

Posted by: anon on April 18, 2009 5:55 PM

I'm not denying that we are facing real problems in this country but a lot of this end-of-the-American-century doomsaying is just the utterings of the me! me! me! baby boom generation facing death for the first time.

Posted by: Pat Hobby on April 18, 2009 8:48 PM

Excellent post, FvB. I haven't hit upon any solutions yet (that don't involve pitchforks, anyway), but you've covered just about every point that's been pre-occupying me for the last 5-10 years.

Slumlord: There's a time and a place for Jeremiahs - and that time is now! Nice rant.

SFG: I actually am not sure if America can lead in high-tech; we are too anti-intellectual to raise our own scientists, and have always had to import them from abroad, first German Jews and then Chinese and Indians, who are now more interested in building up their own countries. And while we seem to do pretty well in media like Hollywood, I don't think you can generate enough cash on luxuries like movies to fund a major economy.

This sort of nonsense makes my head explode, but I'm going to control myself and politely suggest you take the trouble to inform yourself a little better about the history of science and technology in this country. Yes, we've been graced with brilliant immigrants, but if you seriously believe that this country would have turned into a technological basket case if those "Chinese and Indians" had decided to stay home in the last few decades...well, please do a little reading. I'm happy those gifted German Jews (and non-German Jews, and non-Jewish Germans) showed up, but no, to echo the irritated anon, we would not, as a matter of fact, be a techno-backwater without them. Our graduate schools being chock-full of foreigners has little to do with the "anti-intellectualism" of Americans. I don't have time to dig through my files now, but a quick search turned up this, which might provide some info to chew on regarding this issue. You could do worse than comb through Citizen Carrie's archives - not strictly science, but a good critical look into the "Americans are techno-morons" propaganda. (In support of your view, there is an old Tom Wolfe article you might enjoy: "Dumbass Iowans with Assorted Other Mainly Whitebread Helpless Americans Sitting Around Waiting for Immigrants to Come Found Silicon Valley So They Can Download Porn into Their Grass Huts".)

Posted by: Moira Breen on April 18, 2009 10:00 PM

That the U.S. is hitting hard times is undeniable. But what country, what society, will lead the future? Europe is committing demographic suicide. So is Japan. Russia is literally drinking itself to death. China and India are both still largely masses of very poor peasants, with fragile political systems. (Yes, India is a functioning democracy. It also has multiple active armed insurgencies.) Brazil? The Islamic countries? Don't make me laugh. Africa is a horror show; Latin America at its best is a mess.

Perhaps in the future no one will lead. Instead civilization will begin a gradual slide to darkness, with ever increasing levels of permanent unemployment, crime, corruption, and political violence, and continual breakdown of the infrastructure.

There is, after all, nothing to say that this whole industrial civilization thing is long-term viable. The "Fermi paradox" implies that all such civilizations break down.

Posted by: Rich Rostrom on April 18, 2009 11:43 PM

The "Fermi paradox" implies...

I think you're referring to the Doomsday argument.

Which reminds me, if time travel is in our future, why haven't we seen it in the past?

Posted by: Reg Cæsar on April 19, 2009 12:57 AM

Moira: You're right. I'm dumb.

I don't think it's genetic, BTW: the Germans produced a huge number of scientists and German was the language of science before WWII...and much of the Midwest is of German stock. They're probably the most intelligent of the Europeans, honestly.

But you're probably right that the foreignization of science faculty has more to do with shitty outcomes for scientists than anything else. Still, what are we going to do about it?

As for Tom Wolfe: he is clever. Kind of makes you wonder when artists went left-wing.

Posted by: SFG on April 19, 2009 12:08 PM

we've clearly left The American Century behind and are into something entirely new, although it appears that most of our population hasn't caught on, exactly. The rise of China and India, the de-industrialization of our economy, our massive trade deficits and dependence on foreign sources of capital, our equally massive levels of immigration

What's this we stuff you're talking about? Since most people don't even have a clue what's going on, where do you get the idea that we made it go there?

While we've been living in the rosy glow of the past, or busy with our pet schemes to rake in "money for nothing," we've been neglecting our future prospects.

That's not true. Most people have been desperately trying to make ends meet and raise a family. It was the big money boys that were busy inventing schemes to fleece the public. And they weren't neglecting the future at all. Its just that their version of the future is a nightmare for the rest of us, as we lose all our freedoms, jobs, savings, and opportunities.

we again find ourselves in desperate need of a new world view...So what do we do about this?

Don't worry. A new world view will be provided for us, by ths same big money boys that run things now. Only it won't seem so new, as we again find ourselves in chains.

Slumlord is right. It isn't we that run much. It's the Lord. And we have run the same course as the Israelites in the Old Testament before they were enslaved by the Babylonians.

Posted by: nano on April 19, 2009 2:53 PM

I'll keep saying this at all the blogs I read, just so it sinks in: we need a return to huge tech monopolies and massive state spending on R&D. That's how stuff gets invented.

Patents, IP rights, etc., are important but second-order. The first step is finding a way to pay smart creative geeks to sit around all day inventing shit, as at monopoly-era Bell Labs or the Cold War-era DoD. Everything good from about 1940 onward came from there, and nothing good came from anywhere else, basically.

If you don't want to do that, as in the deregulation craze, then brace yourself for stagnation -- exactly as we've seen since the early-mid 1980s.

Microsoft is a welcome trend, but they need to junk all of that blank slate education bullshit that Gates' dingbat of a wife has been pushing. But still, they're not exactly inventing the next big idea like information theory, doing solid state physics research, etc.

Bring back Bell!

Posted by: agnostic on April 19, 2009 5:44 PM

Terra:

We will be slowly boiled like the poor frog and in the end, with the exception of a powerless collection of old-fashioned diehards, we will be "happy" with our new dispensation, much like the pod people in the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Chilling, and all too true.

Posted by: Tupac Chopra on April 19, 2009 8:37 PM

Don't the Tea Parties give anyone here hope? After all, they were much more about ordinary Americans spontaneously protesting willfully amoral out of control leadership than they were about taxes (as they have been misrepresented to be). We've got the blueprint: our founding. Maybe the common people can drag our leaders (or rulers, if you prefer) back to their roots. Anyway, it's a start.

Posted by: ricpic on April 19, 2009 9:57 PM

Bill Gates and his wife are part of the problem. They are indeed SWPL.

And pace FvB, the problem is a REJECTION of the WWII legacy by the Boomers. THEY are the problem, and the generations after them who rejected the WWII legacy even more.

WWII was won by mobilizing vast amounts of men into the military-industrial complex, asking them to kill and die for America, while Rosie the Riveter worked in a short-term enormous production line. We could literally make more ships than the Germans or Japanese could sink. Among other things.

Part of that mobilization meant power and control passing to Joe Average GI and Rosie. Not the elites and SWPL yuppies and their forbears, the Hippies and Yippies and Bill Ayers and so on.

Barack Obama and his ilk are part of the SWPL crowd, just like Bill and Melinda Gates. And just as Gate's wife is behind the hard-left lunacy of his money to Ayers's brother and Ayers himself, yes really, women form the critical component of SWPL elites running roughshod over the legacy of GIs in WWII.

The problem with America is that women are totally disconnected from men, since most are single and most want/choose single motherhood if they become mothers at all. Men are at best competitors to be frozen out of the workplace. In alliance with SWPL elites.

This is why in WWII the entire nation was mobilized behind the GIs, and today vast amounts of it is mobilized AGAINST the GIs.

America has lots of resources, human and otherwise, but most women and all of the elites fear and hate the general populace. They saw clearly the threat of the Battleship Missouri, which was constructed AFTER Pearl Harbor in record time, and crewed by massive amounts of volunteers.

Such a national mobilization ALWAYS results in Jacksonian Democracy, more power to the White working/middle classes which is the brunt of the fighting, building, and engineering forces. A mortal threat to Yuppies, SWPL, Ivy League grads, and of course, women.

Posted by: whiskey on April 20, 2009 2:46 AM

Battleships were obsolete years before Pearl. The USS Missouri was the last battleship we built. The US carriers, the highest value target, were not in port. We had cracked some of their codes, and, by Midway, had cracked more. Washington believed war imminent.

Posted by: CC on April 20, 2009 2:21 PM






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