Things are getting hot for the world's remaining superpower as well. Tom Englehardt writes at Tomdispatch.com about "Moving Out of the Superpower Orbit" in which, having shown the limits of our global reach in Iraq, and having no attention, money or military left to exert any influence over events elsewhere, we are now seeing our global neighbors go their own way in ways that may have been inevitable, but wouldn't have been possible, even five years ago--that is, before the present Bush administration.
Maybe I should be grateful to the squinty-eyed bastard. He's been an agent of change all right, but not in the way he imagined. The rest of the world will no doubt be better off. As for ourselves, I have mixed feelings. I would have preferred a more gentle decline, not this steep dive down a rat hole that we seem to be doing. The unscrupulous, even brutal projection of American power has always offended me, but I am not naive enough not to know that I have benefitted from it in some ways. American clout has sucked money out of the pockets of poorer nations for half a century, and given me the middle-class lifestyle I now fear to lose.
Maybe impending memory loss will keep me from remembering too clearly how it used to be. That and a well-tended garden (oh wait...I live in a desert!) may be my only hope.
Missing brain cells and overabundant zuchini. What a sorry-ass end to empire.
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