Decline of the U.S.: Where It All Started

Where did it all start? Where did the United States, superpower of the free world, start to slide downhill? It started last year, in something that the President or the Supreme Court or someone else said or did. No, it started before that, when so-and-so did such-and-such. We can trace it back, all the way to whenever and whomever. But here's my take on it. Logically speaking, the decline of the U.S. began from its peak. Right? It was at a peak, and then it ceased to be at its peak, and that's where the decline started. So, then, when was the U.S. at its peak? There was something resembling a peak in the 1990s, when Clinton balanced the budget and the economy was in a long-term expansion. The Soviet Union had collapsed; the U.S. was the world's sole superpower. But in the 1990s, the world was no longer the property of the United States. Japan had soundly thrashed us in manufacturing in the 1980s. Those jobs were gone, as Bruce Springsteen sang, and they weren't coming back. An increasing amount of our stuff was being made abroad. Billy Joel's song "Allentown," commemorating the decline of the Rust Belt, actually came out way back in 1982. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton of the balanced budget was also the Bill Clinton who was humiliated by thugs in Somalia, and who could not lift a finger to stop the Rwanda genocide in 1994. In the 1990s, wages for the average person stagnated. Families were able to keep up economically, in many cases, only because both husband and wife were now working full-time-plus, while struggling to raise the kids. There was no longer so much money for the poor; people were feeling the pinch and were angry about having to pay taxes (for welfare payments, they believed) that bit into what money they did make. The U.S. did have an international adversary, the Soviet Union, from World War II through most of the 1980s. That Cold War rivalry cost the U.S. a great deal in time, money, and anxiety. We lived under the threat of nuclear annihilation. Yet we still do, strictly speaking: the Russians still have their missiles, and so do others. We are not preoccupied with this on a daily basis now, and we were not preoccupied with it then. Yes, we have our photos and, in some cases, our memories of schoolchildren practicing for nuclear war by getting under their desks or going down to the basement. But that threat eventually slipped into the fabric of daily life, in the way that you make sure to clean your dishes so you don't get food poisoning. You mostly don't worry about it until something goes wrong. What we had in the 1960s and thereabouts, that we don't have now, is confidence. Things had kept getting better, and we thought they were going to continue to do so. We had surplusage -- we had enough to waste. Cars had fins in the late 1950s and, a decade later, men had long hair. It was not crucial for young people to get their careers together: they could hitchhike around the country; they could be hippies. The United States, as king of the postwar world, had built layer upon layer of security and control to protect itself. We didn't just have NATO; we also had SEATO and CENTO. We weren't worried about Mexicans sneaking into Texas, not nearly as much as we were worried about Communists sneaking into Vietnam, half a world away. Vietnam. That, I propose, is where the downhill slide began. Eisenhower, especially, had built a stable and prosperous country. JFK's assassination cast a long shadow; but the liberal policies of the time continued to march forward under Lyndon Johnson. The country could afford a lot. But it could not afford Vietnam. Not financially, and not politically or socially. People were worried that Vietnam might tear the country apart. To some extent, it did. Construction workers beat, and young National Guardsmen murdered, young college students who were protesting it. There were riots. The international image of the United States took a drubbing. By present-day standards, the country was in flames in 1968. LBJ did not run for re-election in 1968. Primarily because of his Vietnam policies, he was essentially disgraced. The chant of the day, for antiwar protesters across the street from the White House, was "Hey, hey, LBJ -- how many kids did you kill today?" There hadn't been anything quite like that before. Johnson's departure opened the door for Richard Nixon, who kept us in Vietnam -- who, in fact, escalated the conflagration -- and who would eventually lead us into the oil shock of 1973. Nixon's own disgrace and resignation yielded the ascent of his second vice president, Gerald Ford (the first, Spiro Agnew, having also been disgraced). Ford was a good man, but not a great politician. He was defeated by the hapless Jimmy Carter, another good man of insufficient temperament and experience, who was in turn defeated by Ronald Reagan. Thus we passed the 1970s with an unusual number of presidents and vice presidents, bouncing from Kent State to Watergate to the Iranian revolution to a severe recession. In important ways, we started downhill in 1968. The assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that year (and the nationwide riots and city-burnings that followed the latter) had a powerful negative impact. So did the police beatings of protesters at the Democratic convention in Chicago. Many experienced a profound alienation from the Establishment. Rather than participate in the world of Nixon et al., it became increasingly reasonable to "turn on, tune in, and drop out," as Timothy Leary proposed. The generation gap, as it was called, was so large that Jerry Rubin could gain a wide following for his adage, "Never trust anyone over 30." People of greater age were precisely the ones who were sending young men off to die in that absurd, counterproductive war. After 1968, the oil shocks of 1973, and the global humiliation of having to flee Saigon in 1975, the confidence and the power never returned. Ronald Reagan could promise "Morning in America" in 1980, but he could deliver that new day only by adding enormously to the national debt; and when he left office, he left us with a savings and loan crisis that cost more than $100 billion to fix. It had been encouraging to see a confident face in the White House. Reagan was a leader. But he was delivering a pipe dream. Had he not perpetuated the fantasy of an America that could continue to boss the world around, perhaps the next generation of Republicans would not have imagined that it made sense to waltz into Iraq so nonchalantly. This is not to say that the U.S. will have entirely failed in Iraq. Important good things may come of that adventure. Indeed, at this point important good things seem ever more likely to come of it, thanks especially to the leadership of General David Petraeus. But it was an adventure that the nation could not afford. The hundreds of billions (if not several trillion) that it will ultimately cost were badly needed at home, as were the thousands of people who went over there to fight and die. The Vietnam era was the time to face up to that kind of adventure -- to think and talk about it, sort it out, and convert its learning into national policy and consensus. We did not achieve that. People still argue that we should have tried harder to win that war, instead of recognizing that we didn't belong there and didn't really need to be there. It took more leadership than we could find, at the time, to knock our heads together and make us decide what we were all about. None of the presidents during or following the Vietnam era -- Johnson, Nixon, or Ford, or subsequently Carter or Reagan -- were up to that. And so we had to repeat the experience, thirty years later, in a different form and place. God only knows what kind of world we could have produced if we had stood so strongly and had spent so much, not for anticommunism and capitalism, but for human rights and democracy. Especially since 1968 or thereabouts, we have stood, too often, for the bad guys, because they have said and done what our leaders wanted. This has given us a legacy of powerful anti-American movements around the world. In a bid to keep what we used to have, we have done what aging institutions do: we have supported the status quo, which tends to mean the rich and powerful, at the expense of the ordinary person. That's the story of Musharraf in Pakistan, of Mubarak in Egypt, of the Shah in Iran, of Pinochet in Chile, of Batista in Cuba, of Thieu in South Vietnam ... the list goes on. It is also, increasingly, the story of America itself, whose growing gulf between the poor and the super-rich takes us ever closer to the example of Latin America in decades past. Any nation will have many small rises and falls, as it climbs toward or descends from its peak of influence, power, and wealth. A nation has many dimensions, with myriad people and activities underway at every moment. In a very rough and overall sense, however, I submit that 1968 was the year when America reached its peak. Economic and political indicators have lagged at differing rates since then, but that was close enough to the high point. I would also suggest, incidentally, that the nation's decline from that peak has been facilitated, not retarded, by dirty, deceitful, and violent efforts to cling to the past. The United States still stands for special things. One hopes it does not completely squander that reputation, and the power and influence that go with it, in a foolish bid to avoid the future. The future is scary, and it often brings unpleasant changes. But let us not fight reality. Let us rather make the most of it. It is, indeed, morning in America. The nation is older, and some things that were once easy are not so easy anymore. But life is to be lived nonetheless. Let us live it right.

The Ultimate Intellectual Piracy

The United States may soon cease to be the world’s greatest threat to global peace.

That statement may come as news to those who were not aware that the U.S. ever was a great threat to global peace. And surely, by many measures, it is not. How many countries have a Peace Corps? How many provide real estate for a United Nations?

Let us not quibble about the U.S.’s standing as the world’s leading seller of weaponry. Let us not debate the invasion of Iraq, or the devastation and brutality of the Vietnam War (or, indeed, the murder rates in our own cities).

In fact, let us withdraw that statement about the United States altogether. Because soon, it may not matter anyway.

The U.S. has had its Ugly Americans abroad, as well as its piggish Yuppies cluelessly asking themselves, “Why do they hate us?” in the wake of 9/11. But at least some such Yuppies did ask, and some actually seemed to want to hear an answer. That, however, may not be the way of the future.

Surely there will always be a liberal, educated fringe of Chinese individuals who have not only visited the West but who have also come to appreciate the good things that the West’s liberal, educated fringe try to achieve. Such individuals will undoubtedly be grossly outnumbered, though, by those Chinese people who, in good middle-class American style, neither know nor care, very much, what the rest of the world may think or believe.

Most Chinese may be like most Americans – concerned, that is, with what’s on the barbecue or in the fridge, and not so concerned with what someone with a cause, somewhere else in the world, seems to be complaining about.

China has a reputation, these days, of copying what other people invent. There is no law of nature that limits such copying to the good things. Those who plunder goods from others’ homes may inadvertently haul away some dust and cockroaches as well.

In particular, China may be copying some flaws from America of the 1960s. Chinese responses to Tibet certainly make it seem that way.

On Tibet, as in Vietnam, the world speaks out, in the name of fairness and humanity. The Dalai Lama, like a latter-day Ho Chi Minh, actually talks as if he believed that the leaders of the superpower were reasonable people. But those leaders have their eyes on domestic opinion, and domestic opinion is clear enough.

It took a long, long time for Americans to make up their minds, take action, and ultimately end the Vietnam War. Even in a fairly open democracy, with many fictions exposed by a relatively free press, it took years on end for society to get sick of its own anti-communist rhetoric.

Americans of that era knew what they believed. They knew it because it was what someone had told them, and it was also what their friends seemed to believe. We cannot expect anything different from the Chinese, and we are not getting anything different. The effort to talk sense to Chinese people – even educated, westernized ones – about Tibet, these days, seems much like the effort to talk sense to Americans in 1968 (or, actually, in 2003).

Tibet is not the point. Tibet is merely the illustration. If the Chinese people are presently able to support internal or localized nationalist hype á la the Alamo or Cuba, in the future they may also be able to support nationalist hype focused abroad, á la Saigon or Baghdad.

Things are changing very quickly, these days, in the U.S.-China balance. It is easy to notice the shifts in the balances of finance, military power, and influence. But other things are shifting as well.

Sooner than we expect, people of the whole world may begin to encounter the Ugly Chinese. If such a thing happens, it will not be because Chinese individuals are interpersonally ugly. Much to the contrary, they hail from a culture that seems to foster deference and agreeableness. It will happen, not because of who the Chinese people are, but despite that.

Power tends to corrupt, and the Chinese people are gaining power. There are things they want and, as shown in Tibet, there are things they will take – not because they are right, educated, or caring, but simply because they will be increasingly able to follow their beliefs and feed their desires.

It will be too bad if China copies us so diligently in that mistake. But the writing does appear to be on the wall. Chinese public opinion is harshly set against a fair deal for the people of Tibet. Leaders in China, like leaders in the United States, do not generally tell their constituents to set their nationalism aside in favor of respect or decency to others.

Ultimately, the problem is with the accumulation of power itself. When a nation becomes as big as China or the U.S., it tends to expect its leaders to achieve outsized things at the expense of other peoples. There had never before been a superpower like the United States. And in its own, different but conceivably far worse way – as we may soon begin to see – there may also never be a superpower like China.

Veterans Day

I have never been too interested in Veterans Day. I think we can blame some of that on the state of affairs in our household when I was a teenager. Dad was among the worst right-wing idiots on the subject of the Vietnam War. He never did quite catch on that the hippies, peaceniks, and protesters were right – that we were wasting tens of thousands of American lives on a struggle that would not have begun if the French had not colonized Southeast Asia, which they had no right to do; if President Johnson had not lied to the American people about the events of Tonkin Gulf; if corporate money in America had not been so terrified of anything resembling socialism. We got a horrendous backlash on all points – in the socialistic steps of LBJ’s Great Society, for instance, and in riots and the growth of factions promoting violent overthrow of our government.

If we were going to fight in Vietnam, we should have fought to win. Otherwise, we should never have started. Same thing in Iraq. I see these generals making a hash of things – not counting Petraeus, who seems to be playing a bad hand very well – and I think Veterans Day is one more occasion when those who send kids (but not their own!) to die can pretend that they really do realize it is a matter of life and death. So when Dad would hold forth on his ideas (e.g., that we should just line up the peace protesters and shoot them), I think it was understandable that I would not merely reject his views, but would to some extent reject the American military too. It seemed to me that he did not understand what America was all about. I wanted no part of him and his Army, and I had some justification for that attitude.

But today, on this Veterans Day 2007, I am willing to make an exception. The immediate reason is that I just watched a tear-jerking Veterans Day commemoration video. A related reason is that Dad died two days ago, and he was a dad for whom few things in life were as important as the years that he spent in the military.

There is no denying that the miliary is what keeps the country safe. The military has been the vehicle of horrible and atrocious behavior, from the war with Mexico to My Lai to Abu Ghraib; but this is what you get – it is what all armies get, at some point or other – when you train people to kill and destroy. It’s awful stuff to learn how to do, and it needs to cease as soon as there is no longer a threat that other people want to do the same to you. The military’s excesses may stoke that desire on their part, and that prospect needs intensive attention; but there are always going to be freeloaders, abusers, and megalomaniacs who will think that subjugating the people of another country is a fine idea.

This morning, I went for a run in the park. I felt wonderful. It’s because I got eight or nine hours of sleep; and I did that, I think, because I was just worn out at the end of the day yesterday. I can’t say that Dad’s death was the sole reason, but it was clearly a weight that I carried with me for the day. Today, some things seemed to have fallen into place.

It was fitting that I went on that run, and that I felt wonderful doing so, because the Army was not Dad’s only preoccupation. His book, which I have been annotating for some time, is a testament to his years in World War II, but also to his years in the Civilian Conservation Corps. As a CCCer, he planted trees and, as I was thinking on my run this morning, he helped to build a state park somewhat like the place I was running in. He loved trees; and while his taste in books did tend toward warfare and historical battles, his behavior over the past 50 years was much rather in the direction of CCCish trees, stonework, and parks.

Dad fought in a war. The Army impressed him because, I think, it told him exactly where he stood. There were (to him, anyway) none of the picayune, Byzantine politics and innuendoes that would so often ensnare him in civilian life; he was free just to be a man, as he understood the term: to destroy things, to run over things that got in the way, to replace them with the things he preferred, and to build on that basis. In that sense, for him the best of civilian life (both in the CCC and after the war) was that which allowed him to just bust in, ram ahead, and get it done.

So he built a park; he cut trees; he grew and trimmed trees; he took the family on vacations, predominantly to national parks; and he built a home, insofar as he was able to construct a sense of what that might mean, that was surrounded on all sides by sawdust, wood blocks, gardens, trees, bees, stonework, raspberry vines, flowers, and grass, laid out in the way he wished. There, he found a refuge from the outside world, for which he shared a passion with his wife for some 55 years, until they finally gave it up as requiring more work than they could manage in their old age.

In those regards, the house and the war against Japan ran together. There were these outside forces that needed to be repelled, mostly by blood and steel, and there was a vision of better things, done in the American way, that could be constructed on a new beginning. For while I fault Dad’s book as focusing overmuch on his wartime years, as though that were the main thing in his life, I also recognize, within that focus, a preference for telling about the positive, helpful things that one can do within the hell of war. One can pour sulpha into the wound on the leg of a prisoner of war; one can have a conversation with a Japanese person, even though one will be unable to stomach dinner in a Japanese restaurant a half-century later.

Those GIs who gave chewing gum to kids in WWII, who are now embarked on armed social work in Afghanistan and elsewhere, were not originally there to be nice. But they discovered, as Dad did, that the larger purpose behind war is peace. You can train your soldiers to kill, but you cannot necessarily prevent them from crossing the lines to join the Germans in singing hymns on Christmas Eve. I saw some research, recently, in which they seemed to have found that an unbelievable number of soldiers will not be able to make themselves shoot straight at the enemy, even when their failure to do so leads to their own death. We may have an image of what war is, but it ain’t always what it’s supposed to be, and it wasn’t with Dad either.

So my dad built a park, fought a war, built a home, and nursed his trees. I resisted against a war, left that home, and, this morning, ran in a park that someone, probably someone like him, built. I can’t quite piece together all the threads that run in and out, among such observations. But I can tell you that I felt great on my run; that I am aware it is Veterans Day; and that I am sorry for what the world’s veterans have had to experience, and am glad for what they have been able to achieve nonetheless. I am sorry they have had to shoot at each other, and I am glad for all the times when their shots have missed. That may not be a suitably morose reaction from someone whose father has died, nor is it a very rah-rah kind of Veterans Day sentiment. But I can’t help that. That's just the way it seems to me.