Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

One and a Half Cheers for American Decline
The Future’s Not Ours -- and That’s Good News
By  Tom Engelhardt
Compare two assessments of the American future:
In the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll in which 61% of Americans interviewed considered “things in the nation” to be “on the wrong track,” 66% did “not feel confident that life for our children’s generation will be better than it has been for us.” (Seven percent were “not sure,” and only 27% “felt confident.”)  But here was the polling question you’re least likely to see discussed in your local newspaper or by Washington-based pundits: “Do you think America is in a state of decline, or do you feel that this is not the case?” Sixty-five percent of respondents chose as their answer: “in a state of decline.”
Meanwhile, Afghan war commander General David Petraeus was  interviewed last week by Martha Raddatz of ABC News.  Asked whether the American war in Afghanistan, almost a decade old, was finally on the right counterinsurgency track and could go on for another nine or ten years, Petraeus agreed that we were just at the beginning of the process, that the  “clock” was only now ticking, and that we needed “realistic expectations” about what could happen and how fast.  “Progress” in Afghanistan, he  commented, was often so slow that it could feel like “watching grass grow or paint dry.”
Now, I’m not a betting man, but I’d head for Vegas tomorrow and put my money down against the general and on Americans generally when it comes to assessing the future.  I’d put money on the fact that the United States is indeed “in a state of decline” and I’d make a wager at odds that U.S. troops won’t be in Afghanistan in nine or ten years.  And I’d venture to suggest as well that the two bets would be intimately connected, and that the American people understand at a visceral level far more than Washington cares to know about our real situation in the world.  And I’d put my money on one more thing: however lousy it may feel, it’s not all bad news, not by a long shot.

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