Financial Times columnist Edward Luce’s new book, Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent. Read his interview with Foreign Policy.
From the Amazon review.
His conclusion, “An Exceptional Challenge” looks at America’s dwindling options in a world where the pace is increasingly being set elsewhere. While many Americans believe that their country can and should retain its status as a global superpower, Luce sees this as an increasingly unlikely scenario, unless Americans themselves can stand up against the country’s increasingly plutocratic character. America has bounced back successfully from the shocks of The Great Depression and the Soviet launch of Sputnik, but Luce wonders if the next crisis in American confidence may knock it off the top-dog position for good.
As distressing as it is important, Time to Start Thinking presents an America in economic, social, and political crisis, in danger of losing its most defining and vital characteristic: its pragmatism.
Let’s see. We have a GSA apparently filled with looters at the top, a Secret Service seemingly comprised of drunken frat boys, a compromised government that continually bails out the corrupt and incompetent, a crumbling infrastructure, plus an ever growing security state. But We’re Number One, right? USA!!! USA!!!
But the kingdom is crumbling as we wheeze about our glory days while any semblance of working for the public good seeems a quaint idea from forgotten times. We may well be a nation of over-entitled spoiled brats.
“Why have a civiliization if we’re no longer interested in being civilized.” God Bless America opens May 11 and looks to be a Natural Born Killers for our increasingly dysfunctional and crumbling times.
That’s down-right scary, and I don’t scare easily.Â
Which one is scary, the Financial Times columnist’s book or the movie? Both?
The movie is a loaded gun in and of itself.