6

AMERICA, UP OR DOWN?

I SHOULD TELL YOU that I don’t think too much of modern-day America. It’s not the America I grew up in, one I had always assumed was the greatest nation in the world. In fact, I do not believe that America is a great nation anymore. If the only criterion for being a great nation is military power and wealth, then of course America is still a great nation. But I suspect that when, during most of the twentieth century, people throughout the world said America was a “great nation” or “great country,” they weren’t just referring to our military strength and wealth, but to the type of nation we were, what America stood for. Today, polls show that people around the world no longer look up to America as a great nation. In fact, the majority of the world’s people have a negative feeling about America, and a great many regard it with contempt. These are the very same people, or their parents, who used to look way up to this country.

Although every single one of the following nations had a very positive opinion about the United States in the past half century, less than three years of Bush being president had passed when 67% of the people in France already had a negative feeling about America (and 87% were opposed to Bush’s war). Other figures were 71% (and 85% against war) in Germany; 40% (and 60%) in Britain; 59% (and 76%) in Italy; 74% (and 79%) in Spain; and 68% (and 83%) in Russia. Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center, which conducted the international poll between March 10 and 17, 2003, said, “This is the most negative international public opinion about America and an American president that I’ve ever seen.”

How can a nation be considered great if it invades another country (Iraq) in violation of international law—a country not its enemy and not a threat to its own security—something unprecedented in America history? And perhaps worse yet, after America did this its people cheered its leader, Bush, on, the vast majority thinking it was just fine when we did this. And this support continued even after, mind you, we learned there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (the main, stated purpose for the invasion) and even after Bush acknowledged there was no evidence connecting Hussein and Iraq with 9/11, which had started the whole movement toward war in the first place.

In the midterm elections in 2006, the Democrats, just barely, gained control of the Senate and House of Representatives. Immediately, liberal columnists, even particularly bright ones like Paul Krugman of the New York Times, declared that the nation had finally, finally turned on the administration of George Bush because they were fed up with the excesses of right-wing politics, and more importantly, they finally realized that going to war in Iraq was wrong. But it is these columnists who were wrong. America turning against the Bush administration had very little to do with right-wing politics and believing that the war in Iraq was wrong. It had virtually everything to do with the fact that we had lost the war in Iraq, with no end in sight. Do you really think that if Bush had completely succeeded in Iraq that the very same polls that today show our invading Iraq was wrong would still say that? No. Definitely no. Bush would still have an approval rating far in excess of 50 percent instead of being where he is, in the low thirties.

The only reason why a great number of Americans turned against Bush was that his war against Iraq turned out to be such an abysmal failure and disaster. Before that outcome had become clear, polls showed that most Americans could hardly have cared less that we invaded Iraq, a broken-down country that had no weapons of mass destruction, and was not involved in 9/11. (For instance, at a time when we had the upper hand in Iraq, when things hadn’t yet spun out of control, a January 12-15, 2004, New York Times-CBS News national poll showed almost 70 percent of Americans, including majorities in both the Republican and Democratic parties, gave Bush high marks in his war against terrorism.) In fact, they could hardly have cared less that thousands of lives had been lost, including those of young Americans, and billions of dollars had been spent in the war. Why didn’t they care that much? Because, they would tell you, these are the things that happen during a war.

But hey, we want to win. I mean, that’s the American way, right? There was an April 16, 2007, article in the Los Angeles Times about the little hamlet of McCook, Nebraska, located in an area of America’s heartland that is overwhelmingly conservative, and where God and the flag are supreme. The piece captured the hints, for the first time, that some of the residents of the prairie town were having second thoughts about the war in Iraq, primarily because one of its young men, age twenty, was killed by a roadside bomb there, and the small town, which heretofore would not have questioned Bush if he wanted to invade New Zealand, was taking the death of the young man very hard.

Why were there some heretical thoughts in McCook about the war? It wasn’t really because of the twenty-year-old who was killed. I mean, they sincerely mourned his loss, but again, that’s what happens in war. No. As the McCook mayor, Dennis G. Berry, said about the war: “Nebraskans like to win, whether it’s on the football field or the battlefield. But there’s this feeling of where is this going, and will this ever end?” So I hate to break it to you, Paul (Krugman), but the Democrats’ midterm victory had very little to do with America becoming disenchanted with the politics of the right, as you and many other columnists have suggested. It had virtually everything to do with the way the war is going in Iraq.

Is it a great America when a monstrous, grotesque, obscene figure like Ken Starr can literally set up shop in Washington, D.C., to find anything he could, anything at all, to destroy the president of the United States, mostly over his private, consensual sex life—with our federal government not only funding his entire effort, but the majority of this nation’s media, liberal (most notably the New York Times) as well as conservative, actually aiding and abetting and encouraging him in this criminal and immoral conduct?

What kind of America is it (again, is it a great America?) where, in the 2000 presidential election, the highest court in the land, the United States Supreme Court, stopped the recount in Florida that was authorized under Florida law, took the election away from the American people, and openly appointed George Bush president? It unquestionably was one of the biggest crimes in American history, yet the nation quickly put this epic crime behind it, going on to other things as if nothing really serious had taken place. For example, five days after the court’s high crime, the caption of an article in the Los Angeles Times read: “The Supreme Court Should Weather This Storm.” The following day an Associated Press story noted that Justice Sandra Day O’Connor had fired a hole-in-one at a Phoenix golf course.

I do not believe any of the above things (invading Iraq, Ken Starr almost destroying the Clinton presidency over nothing at all, the theft of the presidential election), each of which represented conduct that was unprecedented in U.S. history, would have happened during nearly all of the twentieth century in America. Nor do I believe any of these things would happen today in any of the major European nations. Indeed, can you think of even one (much less, all three) of these things, or something similar to them, happening in even one of these countries in the past half century? With the exception of banana republics and dictatorships in third-world countries, things like this just aren’t done. But here in America, not just one but all three of these things happened.

And the most frightening thing of all, by far, is that this nation let Starr, the U.S. Supreme Court, and Bush get away with it, doing absolutely nothing to any of them. Bush, Starr, and the five Supreme Court justices in Bush v. Gore, as horribly immoral as their respective conduct was, are, after all, just individuals. And we will always have monstrous people in our society. But it’s quite another thing when this nation and its institutions, by not punishing these individuals in any way whatsoever, in effect tells them that their conduct, though not commendable, was permissible, tolerable. If the United States of America can actually overlook the horrendous conduct of Bush, Starr, and the five justices, what does that say about this country? What does it say about what we’ve become? And in these circumstances, under what theory do we remain a great nation?

Can we still be a great nation when, in running for the presidency, it is considered to be politically unwise for a presidential nominee to talk about “helping the poor”? Fritz Mondale certainly learned that reality in spades. Challenging Ronald Reagan in 1984 on the issue of “compassion” and “fairness” and speaking often of “the poor,” he won only one out of the fifty states. When John Kerry ran against Bush in 2004, not only, of course, didn’t Bush talk about helping the poor, but I am unaware that Kerry ever once allowed the word “poor” to come out of his mouth, only speaking, over and over again, of his concern for “the middle class.” The closest I ever heard him get to the poor was when he once referred to those “aspiring to the middle class.”

When America was still a great nation, FDR and Truman spoke often of the plight of the poor and helping them. For instance, FDR said that “the test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” JFK, among other references, said in his inaugural speech on January 20, 1961: “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” On November 8, 1963, just fourteen days before he was assassinated, he told the Protestant Council in New York City that our nation could not “long endure the growing gulf between the rich and the poor.” Why would such political rhetoric sound foreign and completely out of place in modern-day America? And LBJ had his “war on poverty.” He said, “The richest nation on earth can afford to win the war on poverty.” What happened to the soul of America that it is now a political negative to speak of helping the poor?

Indeed, as early as 1991, a U.S.-European poll published in the Los Angeles Times showed that America had already lost the compassionate state of mind it was once so well known for. Very tellingly, although the poll found that “most everyone [in the civilized world] feels that the state has a responsibility to take care of poor people who can’t take care of themselves,” only 23% of Americans did. In Britain and France, the figure was 62%. In Spain, 71%; Italy, 66%; Russia, 70%. The closest to the United States was Germany, but it was still at 50%, over 100% more than the United States.

How can we still be a great nation when, though we are the richest nation in the world, almost 40 million Americans, nearly 15 million of whom are children, exist below the poverty line ($19,000 annual income for a family of four)? How can we be viewed as a great nation when, among the eighteen leading industrial nations in the world, we rank number one in the percentage of our population living in poverty?

How can we be considered a great nation when the United States is the only major industrialized country in the world that does not provide health care for all of its citizens? Indeed, though we are, again, the richest of all nations, close to 50 million Americans have no health insurance. A typical horrible consequence? USA Today reported in July of 2006 that among those in America without health insurance who have cancer, “nearly 70 percent have missed or delayed care for the cancer, and 43 percent went without vital prescriptions.”³³ This, of course, is inexcusable for the richest nation in the world. For those uninsured cancer patients who are paying for the treatment they need, their life savings are being depleted, giving rise to this type of terrible dilemma that no American citizen should have to face: A father (or mother) with advanced cancer and young children has to ask himself if he should go through his children’s education and limited inheritance money to delay his death. His family naturally tells him yes, he should. But he has to wonder, doesn’t he?

While we’re talking about health insurance, what kind of nation are we that can’t find the money to provide health care for almost 9 million of its children, but can find all the money in the world—over $1 trillion thus far—to finance a war against a nation not our enemy and no threat to us?

What kind of a nation do we have when millions of Americans are homeless on the streets, yet Cuba, one of the poorest of countries, provides health care for all its citizens and does not have homeless people on the streets? One might say, “Yeah, but we have freedom here, and Cubans don’t. Which is more important?” Not only won’t that argument get you a cup of coffee, it won’t even entitle you to a sip of water at a public water fountain. What about the fact that England, France, Sweden, etc., also have medical care for all their citizens and no significant homeless problem—and the people in these nations have the same freedoms we do?

How can we still be considered a great nation when, although throughout most of the twentieth century we ranked number one in giving (as a percentage of our gross national income) to the poor nations of the world, today we rank number twenty-one, second to last among industrialized nations?

A 2005 CNN Gallup poll showed that 95 percent of Americans were “proud” to be Americans. (Only 1 percent was not.) But under what theory? The willy-nilly theory?

How can we be a great nation when justice is so wildly disproportionate in America? When the super rich defraud investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars, they usually don’t spend one day in jail for it. This is so because normally either nothing is done about their fraud, or only a civil action (not a criminal one, as should be the case) is brought against them by the likes of an Eliot Spitzer, and they have the corporations they run pay civil fines for their criminal conduct out of the corporate treasury. And yet, average citizens who steal as little as $500 are always prosecuted and, upon conviction, routinely serve jail time, sometimes state prison time. On those very rare occasions when corporate executives are prosecuted and convicted, they virtually always get very short sentences that bear no relation to their crime, and they serve their sentences not in real prisons but detention institutions that resemble college campuses with barbed wire around them. Is that how a great nation, committed to equality, treats its citizens?

Speaking of corporate executives, what kind of an America have we become when, although millions of Americans struggle for a crumb, corporate greed in today’s America has gone far, far beyond what anyone could have ever imagined in the America of yesteryear? We know that many workers today are being laid off by big corporations, or their health care coverage is being reduced or terminated, or they are losing their 401K retirement plans. Yet we hear and read every day how corporate executives are pillaging millions upon millions of dollars from the corporate troughs (to the direct detriment of the stockholders) in wildly excessive salaries, bonuses, stock options, perks, and severance packages, often at the very same time their corporation is going under. I’m not talking here about the great number who receive obscene yearly compensation of $20-25 million. That’s small potatoes to these CEOs, for whom too much is not enough. While the minimum wage in America is around $6 per hour, and while the president of the United States is paid only a yearly salary of $400,000, many of these corporate predators—already leading a highly luxurious lifestyle of multiple mansions, private jets, and servants—are making, are you ready, $100 million, $200 million, even $500 and $600 million a year!! And even this is not enough for them. Last year, for the first time, three corporate executives were paid from $1 to $3 billion for the year, thousands of times the salary of the president of the United States.

I know that greed is a condition that most people unfortunately are afflicted with. But America seems to be taking greed to vertiginous heights. The above corporate greed is an example. I think we can all agree that Marx notwithstanding, it is not only wise but fair to pay a CEO of a company much more than the average employee, because he is far more important to the economic health of the company than one single worker, and has much, much more responsibility. The question is how much more. J. P. Morgan, one of the leading industrialists of the twentieth century, and someone whom no one would consider to be an enemy of wealth or capitalism, said that a reasonable ratio of executive pay to that of the average worker would be twenty to one. And, indeed, that’s what it was in 1968. Do you know what it is today? The last figures I saw were in 2003, but the ratio was an incredible 531 to one!!! Can you imagine that? What was it in some other major countries of the world? Japan’s CEO pay as a multiple of employee pay was 10:1. Germany’s was 11:1; France, 16:1; Britain, 25:1. The country next to the United States in CEO pay was Brazil at 57:1.

I guess we can’t put a cap on corporate pay, since that would be un-American, and with all the inherent sins and vices of capitalism, it has proven to be better than any other socioeconomic system man has devised. But when the average CEO in today’s America makes 531 times as much as the employee with the lunch pail, what does that say about the country this nation has become, one that, more than any other nation in the world, seems to be losing the ability to distinguish between its needs and its greeds.

America, for better or worse, has been the leader of pop and cultural change throughout the world for many years. Other nations take their cue from us. What type of a nation do we still have whose movies are routinely laden with profanity of the worst kind and gratuitous, unrelated-to-the-plot grunting sessions of sex in bed or against the wall; whose movies are now actually starting to show people sitting on a toilet going to the bathroom; even, unbelievably, wiping themselves—something, of course, we all want to see very badly. A nation with a very rich heritage of great music whose past Academy Awards for best song in a movie went to songs like “Over the Rainbow,” “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” “White Christmas,” “It Might as Well Be Spring,” “Love Is a Many Splendored Thing,” “Secret Love,” “The Way We Were,” and many more such songs, yet whose 2005 Academy Award for best “song” in a movie, believe it or not, was a rap song (meaning, not even a song or music at all since rap has no melody), “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” about a pimp and his black and white whores? Whose teenagers, polls show today, treat oral sex as almost the equivalent of mere kissing?

America has changed, hasn’t it? And is there any question it’s for the worse? Deploring, for instance, the Bush administration’s decision not to follow international law in the area of torture and the rights of terrorist defendants at their trial, retired general Wesley K. Clark, formerly the supreme commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, said, “It was America that led the creation of the Geneva Convention, and now we’re walking away from it, from the very values we espoused.”

I may be wrong in what I’m about to suggest here, but are many of the American soldiers Bush sent to war in Iraq reflective of a coarser and more cruel America than we once knew? I always thought that soldiers went to war because they felt it was their duty as American citizens to do so. I can’t recall hearing or reading in the newspaper coverage of the Korean or Vietnam wars (or in any of the literature or movies about these wars and World Wars I and II) that American soldiers were having fun killing the enemy, not just doing their job. Yet, in a number of articles on Bush’s war in newspapers as well as magazines, there is reporting of just that.

In an article in the Los Angeles Times about a marine sniper’s unit in the battle of Fallouja in 2004, the two reporters wrote that “on the roof of a U.S. military compound, Marine snipers cranked up the volume on their CD player so they could listen to the music of Metallica as they fired at their foes.” Can you imagine that? One sniper (snipers, we all know, kill the enemy with just one shot from a distance far away), a corporal, referred to his job in Fallouja killing Iraqis by saying, “It’s a sniper’s dream. I couldn’t ask to be in a better place. I just got lucky.” In other words, this soldier was just having the time of his life killing young Iraqi men. It apparently didn’t have anything to do with any duty he had. In another article about Fallouja, a private said, “None of us have ever actually fired a shot before. We’re all itching to do that.” In other words, actually eager to start killing people.³⁴ As USA Today reported about American soldiers on the first day of the Iraq war: “Impatient for action, troops welcomed news that air strikes had begun. ‘OK, we’re finally at war,’ said Pfc. Todd Carter [not real name], 19, of Chattanooga, Tennessee. ‘It’s time to get serious and light some people up.’”

And who can forget the photo taken during the battle of Nasiriya—in March of 2003, before Hussein’s army fell in the “war” that lasted but twenty-one days—when young Iraqi neighborhood civilians in T-shirts and tennis shoes (not the later insurgents) picked up rifles and tried to repel the irresistible advance of American forces (supported by the precision bombing of jets and the gunships of tanks) whose objective was to conquer their homeland. Virtually defenseless, their few grenades bouncing off the monstrous Abrams tanks like plastic toys, they were slaughtered. The photo showed young marines standing over a stack of Iraqi corpses, taking photos of each other, and with their thumbs up, smiling broadly for the camera. What part of America did these marines come from? What families did they come from?

But maybe it was always this way. Maybe, further, some British soldiers fighting in Iraq are the same way. But why do I have the sense that this type of attitude among many young U.S. soldiers is new and very “American”?

 

 

Charles Wilson, the president of General Motors in the 1940s and early 1950s, coined the phrase “As General Motors goes, so goes America.” And this was true for most of the twentieth century, GM being the biggest corporation in America—in fact, the world. But today, not only isn’t General Motors the biggest corporation in the world, it’s not even the biggest auto manufacturer. In 2006, and for the first time ever, Japan’s Toyota overtook GM in auto sales.

As far as science is concerned, in an October 13, 2005, New York Times article it was reported that “last year, more than 600,000 engineers graduated from institutions of higher education in China, compared to 350,000 in India and 70,000 in the United States. Recently, American 12th graders performed below the international average for 21 countries on general knowledge in math and science. Chemical companies last year shut 70 facilities in the United States and marked 40 for closure. Of 120 large chemical plants under construction globally, one is in the United States and 50 are in China.”

General Clark notes that although we are presently the world’s only superpower, it is just an illusion that this can never change. He points to the tremendous economic development in China and India, countries that have “four or five times America’s population,” and says this could result in these nations attaining superpower status in the foreseeable future. “Scale is one of the most important laws of economics, and they’ve got scale over us.”

In some other signs of national decline, America now ranks number 9 in the world on the Adult Literacy Scale (survey by Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development); number 12 on student reading ability (OECD); number 37 (France is number 1, Italy 2) on the Healthcare Quality Index (World Health Organization); number 17 on women’s rights (World Economic Forum Report); number 29 on life expectancy (UN Human Development Report); in a real surprise, number 48 (Norway and Iceland are tied at number 1) on the Journalistic Press Freedom Index (Reporters Without Borders); number 13 on the quality of life survey (Economist magazine); number 45 on the Environmental Sustainability Index (Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy; Center for International Earth Science Information Network of Columbia University); number 3 (the UK pound sterling is number 1 and the fifteen-nation European Union euro number 2) in overall currency strength (Financial Times Stock Exchange); and number 32 in its infant mortality rate (Save the Children Report).

I haven’t the faintest idea why America is in decline, not being a sociologist or even a student of contemporary history. But there can be no question that by the most important standards of measurement we are in a perilous descent. I know it has been inculcated in us that America is the greatest nation in the world, blessed by nature and by God, and therefore nothing can ever topple us from our pedestal. But just how many areas of moral failure and cultural degeneration can a nation have without losing its preeminence and/or the right to have the appellation of greatness applied to it? Arnold Toynbee, the nineteenth-century British economist and social reformer, said, “An autopsy of history would show that all great nations commit suicide.” How far has America already traveled on the road to self-immolation?

Although the evidence of our decline is overwhelming and multi-fold, one fact alone, all by itself, proves that it has occurred—that we elected George Bush president twice, someone totally unfit for the office, and a virtual embarrassment to this country in every other way. Someone who actually is the object of scorn and hatred throughout the civilized world, almost assuredly the most hated president around the world, by far, in U.S. history. Bush is so reviled, in fact, that when he visits some nations (like Germany) great pains are taken to avoid all contact by Bush with everyday citizens, and to prevent him from even coming close to the thousands of demonstrators out on the street (holding signs calling Bush evil, a terrorist, and a murderer).

What a tremendous difference there is between Bush and past American presidents like FDR, Eisenhower, JFK, and even Bush’s father, George H. W. Bush. When Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, with the lone exception of China, the entire world mourned. Indeed, it was said that more people mourned Kennedy’s death than that of any other human in history. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in torch-lit marches in the great capitals of the world, and peasants in the dustiest little villages of South and Central America wept as if they had lost a member of their family. Remarkably, despite the fact that it was at the height of the Cold War, even Russia and all its satellite countries behind the Iron Curtain took his death almost as hard as America did. Nobel Prize-winning novelist John Steinbeck was in Warsaw, Poland, on a cultural tour of Iron Curtain countries for the U.S. State Department when news of Kennedy’s death reached the Polish capital. He said that the “great sorrow” among the Polish people over Kennedy’s death “was the most fantastic thing I ever saw. I’ve never seen anything like it. The Poles said they’d never seen its like either, for anyone.” That was when America was a great nation, and its leaders were men whom one would expect to lead it.

The Iraq war “was a betrayal of world opinion,” said German novelist Peter Schneider. “We are much more doubtful of America’s high ground.” Sabin Will, a recent German high school graduate, said that “we always thought America had high moral standards. We don’t anymore.”

I maintain that it would have been virtually impossible for someone like Bush to be elected president throughout most of the twentieth century in America, and impossible for him to have been elected in England or any European country. Impossible. But here in America, it happened, twice. Only because we are a nation, as I say, in serious decline.

Einstein once said that there are only two things that are infinite: the universe and the stupidity of man. And he added that he was only unsure of the former. If the majority of people, everywhere, are stupid, are they more stupid and ignorant in America? As the London Daily Mirror asked in a large headline after George Bush’s 2004 reelection: “How can 59 million people be so stupid?” If people, even those far away, could see that Bush was a very dangerous joke, why couldn’t we Americans?

It is terribly, terribly, terribly scary that this nation is so abysmally and profoundly stupid that it could easily be talked into going into a deadly war with a nation that wasn’t our enemy and as much of a threat to us as you or I.

There is little question that we are less intellectually inclined than people in European nations. Not only do they read serious books more than we do, and get their news from the best source (newspapers) more than we do, but intellectuals themselves are looked up to more in these countries, even revered as celebrities in France. Who are America’s intellectuals? Has anyone even bothered to draw up a list so they can be identified by name?

Other signs that America is not just less intellectual, but at least, for whatever reason, acts less intelligently than these other nations is that Americans, more than all other people in the Western world, love to wave the flag and be blindingly patriotic (love America or leave it; my country, right or wrong). This is not a mindset that is conducive to critical thinking.

Another more ominous sign is the increasing religiosity of America. While Europe has for the most part virtually discarded organized religion—increasingly, priests are being utilized, for instance, only in a ceremonial capacity for things like weddings and funerals, and churches are closing throughout Europe because of very low attendance—America is the only nation in the Western world (including nations like Canada and the United Kingdom, which are thought to be more similar to the United States) that is becoming more religious. Indeed, the biggest-selling books in America for the past several years (with sales figures in the millions of copies) are religious ones dealing with the “rapture,” which, I’m told, is the time, coming soon within our lives, when Jesus will return and sweep all born-again followers, from their homes or cars or wherever they are, into his embrace, and he will take them to heaven, leaving behind on earth the heathens who will destroy each other in the Book of Revelation’s Armageddon or Apocalypse, their souls burning forevermore in hell. Some estimate that close to 40 percent of Bush’s total raw vote in 2004 was provided by self-identified evangelical Christians, a great number of whom subscribe to such beliefs. If all of this isn’t evidence of grinding stupidity, what is? Unbelievably, a 2004 national poll found that 71 percent of Americans said they actually “would die [and hence, it would seem, kill] for their God/beliefs.” Isn’t that big-time scary?

Until a few years ago, I never, even once, had anything but a secure feeling living in America. It was better than that. The thought never even entered my mind, once, of being frightened about living in America. But believe it or not—and others have told me they feel the very same way—I now do not feel 100 percent secure in America. It’s beginning to be a scary (however slight) country. You can’t have what Ken Starr did to Clinton, and what the Supreme Court did in Bush v. Gore, and what the Bush administration did in Iraq happen without its having an alarming effect on you, at least not if you’re a sentient person.

Despite all the danger signals, America remains today, fortunately, a civil society. And I feel there are three main things keeping America that way. One is our incredible wealth. It’s always easier to be civil when you’re economically fat. Two: most Americans are Democrats, Independents, or liberal or moderate Republicans, and none of these groups is dangerous. And three: our wonderful constitution, an exceedingly powerful document, with its amendments, which continues to serve as a judicious guide to all well-intentioned people and, so far, as a severe impediment to those of ill-will. But it has to be noted that the U.S. Constitution is only what those who warm the bench say it is. At present, we have two right-wing zealots on the bench; two right-wingers (we’ll know later if they are zealots); one normal, moderate Republican; and four ordinary, sensible people. So we have four justices who are frightening or potentially frightening, and five who are not.

America should realize that if one of the five retires or dies, and Bush (or any conservative successor of his) appoints one more right-winger to take his or her place, America, incrementally, will become a different nation, for the worse, to live in. We are that close, just one justice , from waking up in the morning to a new America. Hypothetically—and I’m not saying five right-wing justices would necessarily make such a ruling—if a search and seizure case came before the court in which the police, though having time to get a search warrant, broke into an American home without one, and the court held that this was not an “unreasonable search and seizure” under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, America would change overnight.

The principal enemies I see to a brighter day for America are the right wing, which mostly consists of people who are not only rotten from the top of their heads to the bottom of their feet, but who also successfully appeal to the worst and most base instincts of many outside their group; religious fundamentalism, which is necessarily hostile to a pluralistic society, has always been the source of intolerance and wars through the years, and which can only increase the nation’s ignorance and intolerance if it continues to rise as it has here in America; and the entertainment world, mostly Hollywood, which insists on poisoning our culture with the filth it increasingly spews out to the nation’s youth and the rest of us.

I have no idea if there is going to be a pendulum effect or if the descent into our oblivion will continue.

Clearly, America is a nation that has lost its way. But although I don’t know why, I have a sense that we can one day again be a nation that causes people around the world to look up to (as they always did, and still yearn to), not down on. Maybe I am a victim of the very kind of propaganda I’ve decried and attacked other people for being duped by in this book. But I just feel that there is still something special about America. That the greatness we once knew and lived by, and the qualities of leadership, fairness, and moral authority that made us the great nation we were, have not died like the rest of the past, but they are still miraculously stored and continue to inhere in the nation’s metaphorical soil to be used as protoplasm for its revival.

Because of our heritage, and the unparalleled rich diversity of our people that gives us so much strength, I think it is still within our grasp (though I have no idea how to bring it about, and do not want to resort to platitudinous utterances) to once again be the respected leader of the free world, the land of opportunity like no other, the most generous nation to the world’s needy population, number one in everything, whether its heavyweight champions, the tallest buildings, or Nobel Prize winners, a nation whose expansive image will again be embodied by the words written on the Statue of Liberty to other nations across the sea—“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”