September 11, 2009

Is America Actually Still Capable of Great Things?


Odd that President Obama even felt the need to reassure us on that point Wednesday night, don't you think? What has been going on that would call our capability into question?


I was musing out loud to a friend recently about the rough congruence of a normal lifespan and big societal changes. Life is change, the Buddha tells us. Suppose, I said, you had been a man born in Dresden, Germany, in 1910. By the age of 4, the Great War would have commenced and lasted until you were age 8. A few years after the that, the Weimar Republic would have succumbed to one of the great episodes of hyperinflation in world history. That set the stage for the rise of Hitler and the Brownshirts in the 1920's, and by 1933 (age 23 for unser Mann) the Third Reich ran the state with murderous, totalitarian control. When this German reached the age of 29, World War II would have begun, and if he were able-bodied, chances are he would have been conscripted into the Wehrmacht. If he survived the war, he would have returned to a hometown utterly destroyed by Allied bombing. The Soviets who arrived in the eastern part of Germany as a liberation army decided not to leave, so now Der Mann finds himself a citizen of the GDR, a Soviet satellite, a Communist government replacing Fascism. At the age of 35 he is perhaps trained in whatever heavy industry the Soviet Central Committee decides is appropriate for East Germany. Dresden is rebuilt, much of it in the inimitable Soviet style. This state of affairs continues until 1989, when the Berlin Wall is torn down, and as our Mann expires in 1990, at the age of 80, talk is rife about reunification with the West, bringing the country of his birth full circle.

So maybe the idea that things must always stay the same through the laws of inertia is something of a myth. America, because of poor, short-sighted leadership and business practices, transmogrified itself from the manufacturing colossus of the 1950's, during my own youth, to its present hollowed-out "consumer" economy, dependent on foreign borrowing for its solvency and for overseas manufacturing for most of its everyday needs. Unlike Der Mann, Americans have never been exactly confronted with some immutable sign that Things Have Changed: when your city is destroyed and your German rulers are overthrown in favor of Soviet stooges answering to Moscow, it's hard to pretend it's the same-old same-old.

It seems likely that during my lifetime, we will witness the end of American financial hegemony in the sense that the dollar will no longer be the world's fiat currency. This fact alone will bring about huge changes, since it won't be possible to print valuable currency as a way out of debt or to control the cost of basic commodities by pricing everything in dollars. China, India, Brazil, Russia, the Eurozone, will all have a lot more to say about how such things are done. These changes are inevitable and are already underway. Our era of "legacy" domination is coming to a close.

So I don't know the answer to Barack's question. I think it's unfortunate, really, that he decided it was the best political course to do "a lot of big things at once." That strikes me as a survival of the old style of American Exceptionalism. It would have been much better to start with a job-creating, sustainable effort to rework the energy grid so we can move toward self-sufficiency. But maybe all these old pols who have been in Washington, D.C. forever, and refuse to see (or are incapable of seeing) how much things have changed need to find out the hard way, and have history happen to them (and to us) as der alte Herr Mann did in his.

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