'Ought' Lang Syne

It has been a decade of collapse and exhaustion. It began with the breakdown of an antiquated balloting system and the charade of a moth-eaten electoral college and an unelected Supreme Court choosing the president. Less than a year after that, the myth of U.S. invincibility was pierced with a few box cutters.

As the Twin Towers fell, so did our guiding principles as a nation. We not only struck back — inadequately — at the perpetrators (landing us in a briar patch we're still in nine years later), but we were also stampeded neck deep into a second unnecessary war by an administration that cynically manipulated our deepest but unfounded fears.

No sacrifice was called for by our leaders; worse, with tax cuts for the wealthiest and the least binding of market regulations shredded, Wall Street partied as if there would be no next decade, leaving us with a staggering tab for their excesses. Executive power was expanded with a zeal that would make Dick Nixon blush and Tom Jefferson roll over in his grave. Our global moral authority was drowned in the CIA's waterboard torture pits and in the horror dungeons of Abu Ghraib.

After New Orleans was nearly washed away in the summer of 2005, the fiasco was complete. Our treasury was bankrupt, our international image tarnished. Faith in our governing institutions was eroded and respect for the Constitution made a mockery.

Indeed, Hurricane Katrina marked the turning of the tide of an entire period of U.S. history, the conservative hegemony that washed in with the Reagan revolution and definitively ebbed out to sea as the surge receded in the Big Easy. Just as President Reagan cut the last hanging threads of the New Deal, Katrina marooned the conservative majority on a desert isle of history. Isolated and bewildered by their sudden cruel exile, the best the Reaganites could do was put forward the privileged and befuddled son of a Navy admiral claiming to be an Everyman — who, in turn, chose a half-baked Alaskan pol unable to name a newspaper she regularly reads as his second.

If there were any doubts that the anti-government, free-market orthodoxy of the last three decades had come to a dead end, they were erased by the economic free fall that distinguished the closing days of the Bush era. That supposed, steadying, benevolent and invisible hand of the marketplace slapped one out of about seven American workers out of a job, shuttered more than 125 banks, threw one out of four American children onto food stamps, wiped billions of retirement funds off the table and did its best not only to rock our collective boat but to downright sink it.

1|2|Next Page>>

SharePrintEmail

Write a Comment

Terms

Enter your comments - 3000 characters max

Type in image code

Submit

 Receive China Post promos
 Respond to this email