When the history of the end of the twentieth century is written, unless we take drastic action, three events will point out the decline of America as a world power. First, the Oklahoma City bombing, while hardly the first case of domestic American terrorism, demonstrated to the nation in shocking fashion that the United States had violent internal strife. Second, the elections of 2000, while the technology and corruption that contributed to the problems in Florida, demonstrated to the world in shocking fashion that the United States could not run its elections as well as many third-world nations. Third, the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks demonstrated to the world in shocking fashion that the United States, even its military center, was not only not invulnerable to foreign attack but in fact remarkably vulnerable. These three events constituted a triple blow, painting a picture of a nation with violent internal problems, with an unconstitutional President, and vulnerable to attack. Disorganization on all levels of the U.S. government contributed to each of these three problems.

Moreover, the response to each of these tragedies demonstrated the nation’s inability to deal with such problems. In response to Oklahoma City, we built a monument, cracked down on the survivalist movements within the U.S., and executed someone. No one addressed the concerns of those survivalists, short of loose talk about the disaster that was Waco: not only did the government-perpetrated horror of Ruby Ridge go all but ignored, but the U.S. did not seriously address the general subject of domestic strife. The U.S. is a violent nation as industrialized nations go. Not only is it filled with guns and gun violence, but it is also violent towards its poor and alienated. While the quality of life in America is famously high, but the indifference with which the people and the government, especially, treat the poor is equally notorious. No great discussion of these issues followed the Oklahoma City bombing.

The elections of 2000 led to widespread discussion of election reform, but remarkably little anger. The tacit agreement of democracy is that, when our guy loses, we will plan for next time rather than revolt. Thus does succession, always historically a juncture for revolution, become placid, if not mute. In the elections of 2000, Floridians were deprived of their legal right to vote. Both parties played their roles, ignoring the people for the sake of their own agenda: Democrats asked for recounts only in areas they expected to gain votes through recounting, while Republicans attacked the very idea of recounts. A Republican minion, working for a Republican governor, certified the original election results, refusing to count even the recounts that various counties had themselves performed. The state Supreme Court, final arbiter of elections for each state, weighed in with a proposal to recount the entire state; its criteria for counting votes should have been clearer, but it seemed at last a reasonable, nonpartisan solution. The U.S. Supreme Court put a stay on these recounts to hear the case of Bush v. Gore, the voters themselves unrepresented, and then argued in their verdict that their own stay would prevent the recount from occurring in a reasonable time period. The court’s verdict has been thoroughly deconstructed by legal experts, claiming as it did that recounts violated the equal protection clause, which would have wide-ranging implications -- if the ruling did not remarkably specify that it could not be used as a precedent for any other case. The notion of elections as expressing the will of the people, rather than the will of state officials and arbitrary court decisions, had been thoroughly demolished. To top it off, Gore had won a majority of the popular vote, the only contention existing because of the antiquated system of the electoral congress, the original intention of which had long been nullified. The United States proved itself to be not unlike Rome, governed by arcane laws instituted centuries before. Such greater implications, of course, did not utterly escape notice but, as with Rome, went without redress.

Worse yet, the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks led only to the most insipid discussion of how much the Arab perpetrators depended upon Arab thinking in general. The long history of Arab terrorism and characterizations of America as “the Great Satan,” which had so traumatized Americans in the 1970s and 1980s, did not help the situation. Nor did the ongoing and horrible Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Of course, Arabs are not a united front; Arab governments and Muslim religious movements are not only distinct but diverse. Moreover, any history of U.S. foreign policy towards the Middle East, of overthrowing popular leaders and supporting unpopular ones, was obscured in the ensuing discussion. Americans puzzled over “why they hate us”. Bush told Americans that it was jealousy over U.S. wealth and power, a comfortable explanation. But few mind the rich neighbor if he’s a good one, say, through feeding the starving neighbors or giving them water and school systems. When Americans hear of hundreds of fatalities in a foreign nation, a major concern is always the handful of Americans among the many dead, suffering, or held hostage. The great American notion of human rights seems to apply only to Americans, as opposed, say, to the civilians who U.S. soldiers kill in warfare. The condemnation of terrorism and attacks upon terrorists, as an appropriate response to the horrific terrorist attacks and the thousands of lives they claimed, must be accompanied by seriously and sympathetically addressing the circumstances that drive people to become terrorists. People with power do not have to resort to terrorism as a response to their unheard complaints, and cutting off terrorist means, while admirable, fails to address the underlying problem. Invading Afghanistan made Americans feels as if something was being done, but its people being straffed by attack helicopters when they traditionally fired a gun at a wedding ceremony would not help attitudes against the U.S. As if nothing had been learned, the U.S. response to the 11 September 2001 attacks participated in the same unilateralism and insensitivity that contributed to those attacks. In the year following the attacks, for which the world poured out unprecedented statements and gestures of sympathy, not only U.S. approval ratings but belief in American values themselves plunged around the world, even among U.S. allies, to remarkably low levels. What the U.S. government does is not to change anything but actually to design -- no kidding -- advertisements for America directed at the Muslim world.

The domestic side of the U.S. response demonstrated American stagnation. If the absolute trauma of the 11 September did not shock the nation into addressing its problems, probably nothing would. The airline industry had been privatized as part of a conservative gesture, based upon the belief that business functions better than consumer satisfaction-insensitive government, leading to rising airfares, lowered aviation standards, and several bailouts of repeatedly bankrupt aviation corporations. Security had been reduced to shocking incompetence, with ex-cons working for private companies sub-contracted by airlines at bargain rates to handle security. Media reports exposed this failing year after year, yet even after 11 September it took two months for Congress to even propose a bill federalizing aviation security. The law as passed required more machines before the deadline than factories could produce. The stagnant party system remained intact even on matters of national security, maintaining a slow, bureaucratic, and unresponsive government. How planes known to have been hijacked were not intercepted, despite the quick response times in other situations, has never been explained in a satisfactory manner.

The portrait being painted is one of a behemoth nation, powerful but painfully slow to react. Our school system is consistently rated below many second-world nations. The nation’s infrastructure is in a state of disrepair, with bridges and streets and irrigation systems cracked. The nation’s social services are perhaps fifteen years behind industrialized Europe. While the industrialized world is pushing solar and electric technologies that would render gasoline obsolete, the U.S. under Bush is aggressively pushing oil. The democratic beacon to the world is less democratic than many of the nations it has inspired.

In retrospect, in the history books yet to be written, this makes sense: the U.S. rocketed to global domination in the wake of World War II, and not because of its military strategy. As someone close to Hirohito advised the emperor prior to Pearl Harbor, you cannot beat America. It’s not that the U.S. is smarter or more determined than, say, the Japanese. It’s that, as he put it in loose translation, “all America is a factory.” The population density of the U.S. is not great, but is has many people and it is an industrialized nation. It took America almost a year to land in Africa after Pearl Harbor, a year in which the people and the press clamored that the draft and the donations were going for naught. In fact, Africa was selected knowing that it would delay landing in Europe but as a way of calming the population, showing that something was being done while gaining something of a victory. If one projects the military output of America, with its factories converted to production of munitions and tanks and planes, no one in the world could compete. After a year, Africa was all America could manage. Italy would seemingly take forever. But over time, the graph of U.S. military might would far surpass the rest of the world. The U.S., by 1945, could afford to throw planes and tanks at Europe almost indefinitely. This is important because it is not a factor of brains: it is a factor of being a big, strong nation. There was no great intelligence behind it, no great superiority of military tactics.

Unfortunately, this same attitude is pervasively American to this day. Our military philosophy is still governed by the policy of overwhelming force. When we invade Iraq, we do so with a quarter million soldiers. Not to mention superior technology, bought more than invented. This is David and Goliath. It is not brave. It is not particularly smart. That’s not to say it’s not good, like World War II, if the cause is just -- but, say what you like, the U.S. does not win wars based on intellect and courage.

Bill Maher was right when he said that, say what one likes about the 11 September terrorists, they were not “cowardly” as so many Americans called them: what’s cowardly is launching cruise missiles from hundreds of miles away. Cruise missiles that, not unlike the Patriot missile made famous in the Gulf War, are fairly inaccurate.

America is not an intellectual nation. We are a nation of interpreters and dreamers -- and wonderfully so. We get more interested in new projects than in maintenance or fixing what is old. This is the nation that went to the moon. Give Americans a challenge, and they typically respond. Back Americans into a corner, and they do damn well. Make them poor and they invent things. But maintaining our infrastructure, voting for someone who wants to develop a successor to the internal combustion engine ... these are not things America is good at doing. We’d rather tear down and build an even bigger skyscrapers - for that you can find investors -- than maintain the buildings, even the history, that we have. It’s just not sexy enough. And Americans love sexy.

The growing portrait is of a more industrial version of the Soviet Union, an increasingly dilapidated nation powerful because of its size and money. But we are increasingly shifting to a service economy. We are not positioned well, as our infrastructures crumble and our people go uneducated, for the global economy we now face. We need educational reform, damn the voters and constituent demographics and special interest groups with their donations. But our government isn’t functioning that way. We need people who will call upon Americans to evaluate our foreign policy and our global attitude. We need to invest massively in new technology, a Kennedy-like call to reinvigorate our material and educational infrastructure while say, eliminating the need for gasoline by, say, 2020. What we need is direction, vision: bold plans that look to the future. We cannot rest upon our laurels. And we are.

To top it off, the U.S. is going to be a majority Hispanic nation in a brief time, and we’re not prepared to deal with this present wave of immigration. This is not a problem: the U.S. is an immigrant nation. Like many industrialized Europeans, giving birth is a lower priority than living well: most industrialized nations now need immigrant labor to support their declining born citizen populations, and most born citizens are too proud to shovel shit, dig graves, ferry trash, or even work in fast food or at gas stations if they can afford to avoid doing so. Again, the U.S. is not prepared; its schools, the education they offer already failing and incapable of dealing with speakers of languages other than English.

This is not an anti-American tract, though those are fashionable in intellectual and leftist circles. This is not an apocalyptic essay warning of impending doom, of barbarians at the gate. It is a historical evaluation of America’s present position, how the American psyche functions vis-à-vis national and global issues. America is not spelled “Amerikka.” It gives immigrants opportunities, as every family who was sent members to the U.S. can see. The U.S. has real problems, but it ensures its people a good deal of rights and protections. America is a great nation. But it must act intelligently if it wants to remain in the forefront of nations around the world, if the last sixty years are not to be a tentative blip in history -- with the three events cited earlier being analyzed like the various signs for the collapse of the Roman empire. History has this to say to those at the top, to the mighty empires around the world with their vested interests that prevent addressing the problems all can see but few can easily solve: solve your fucking problems, because your position is not an entitlement.

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