You probably do not even realize how EXACTLY your post matches criticisms I have heard and read twenty, thirty, and even forty years ago.

Risk-taking “venture capitalists” (of a sort: capitalists in our sense did not exist, and business was looked down upon by the wealthy) were present in the Roman Empire, although not to the same degree: they may be our saving grace.

“Everyone else,” however, does not encourage me about the future, given the results of the 2008 election.

To be sure, we are fighting rising mediocrity in our politics (look at how many truly mediocre – and worse – politicians from both parties are dominating our country: who voted for them?), in the schools, in the workplace (e.g. recall that the Empire State Building was erected in 13 months: compare that with the 12-years needed to rebuild Ground Zero; locally it is taking 3 years to rebuild a 3-mile stretch of freeway) and in the kulcher (300 channels and theaters with 24 screens of mainly endless mediocrity – and worse.)

And yet all of that could be rendered irrelevant, given a large minority of energetic and creative people – as long as they are not forced into mediocrity by laws promulgated by the mediocrities in governments small and large.

We will see if the trend shows signs of reversal with this year’s election.

The world looks to us and our language.

We must strive to excel, individually and as a nation.

Robert Heinhein grasped the future. I read his second-hand books as a 14-year-old.

Poverty is something I knew. Not as a bad thing but as, today, a point of reference. Poverty is not bad. Expectations mean more.

Here’s how I see America:

Bond clippers
Funders (hedge fund managers, venture capitalists)
Guys like Bill Gates
High-income guys and gals
Working stiffs
Everyone else

America is not headed to the shredder. It’s headed to the unknowable future.

These phenomena are the “dark side” of the same civilization that brought us Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, Edmund Burke, Jefferson and the other American Founding Fathers, Frederic Bastiat, the Austrian School of Economics, Churchill, Adenauer, von Kuehnnelt-Leddihn, Russell Kirk, Reagan, etc.

In the first century A.D., Tacitus wrote an ethnological study of the Germanic tribes, contrasting their lifestyles as morally superior to the increasingly decadent Romans. The Empire coasted under the 5 Good Emperors into the disastrous 200′s, whose destruction – self-inflicted for the most part through civil wars – would lay the groundwork for the future decline and fall in 410-453 A.D.

With the Romans in the 300′s, it would have been hard to find a Roman citizen lionizing the decline of their civilization, especially among those who thought it was declining. Ausonius did his best against the trend of decline, as did others, but the external barbarians and a host of other internal problems proved to be insurmountable.

We will discover in the next decade whether America wants to reverse its fairly recent – and self-inflicted – decline, or whether it will join with its internally generated barbarians and rejoice in the cancerous spread of Mediocrity.

Mew

As hackneyed as the phrase sounds ,
how do we “Get The Word Out”, and not appear Semi-Rabid to a layperson?
To be seen as part of a solution?
There is scarcely a person participating on this Idea Exchange blog that cannot recall some recent event that indicates ‘our downhill slide’.
The increasing sense of foreboding is here, and it is now.

….and on some days it scares ‘the everloving snot’ out of me.

I’m no coward,and try not to be an alarmist, but what we see here is A Reality.
Only a fool would fail to see this truth, as Erick so distinctly does.

Are we truly history, repeated? Have the Hordes arrived and we just don’t know it yet?