What Happened to You, America?

Imagine I were someone who fell into a coma, say, around 1969 and woke up again just today. Marvelling at all the technological progress in the intervening time, smartphones that surpass everything in the wildest science fiction films of back then, cars and appliances that talk to me all the time, machines that magically tally what I’m buying at the supermarket checkout counter, vehicles that know better than me where I am.

A wave of excitement sweeps over me: after waiting all my life for the future to arrive, could it be that it is already here? That the progress-conquers-everything future of films such as “2001, a Space Odyssey” is coming to pass?

I’ve just got to find out. Will set about right away to chew my way through all kinds of literature, magazines, new and old newspapers and, that heavenly blessing, this new thing, the breadth and depth of mankind’s knowledge in vast electronic repositories accessible, as they say now, online. Such delight.

And such wonders. The USSR is no more. The Berlin Wall is no more. We… won? Free world now planet wide?

But such despair, in short order. What a turndown.

This is not that imagined future at all. What happened to that beacon of progress, the country laying the signposts to that marvellous future? What happened to you, America?

You used to be the country everyone else wanted to be. The cradle of wonderful, never-ceasing inventiveness. Unparalleled economic prowess. The place where the American Dream kept coming true. The place of drive-in everything. The place of Woodstock and cool music and hippie girls.

Your cars were the epitome of what a car should be. Your airplanes, of what a plane should be. You were invincible. Come on, you conquered the Moon.

And then? You never went beyond that. You actually retreated. Now you can’t even send your own astronauts to orbit: you must hitch a ride in… Russian Soviet-era spacecraft. Even to loft your own intelligence satellites you need Soviet-era rockets. Moon conquerors indeed.

And your fabled cars? My, do they look old-fashioned today. An all-around automotive dinosaur feel. Your astounding lead in aerospace, the 747 Jumbo just having taken to the skies back then? Shrivelled. All your great passenger plane builders have been whittled down now to a single one, Boeing, playing second fiddle to a European… bus company? That took to the air? Airbus, anyway. (A commendably unpretentious name.)

Small wonder that your trade deficit tops half-a-trillion dollars annually. In good years, that is.

I seek in vain for the economically mighty thing you used to be. Not only did you lately infect the world with a serious case of financial rot, but your politics are so dysfunctional and your fiscal policies so… incontinent that you have just about shut down government once and come close to doing so again and again. And you are in hock to China for a whopping 1.3 trillion dollars.

And you not only lost the Vietnam War. You even celebrate the idea of a bunch of badly armed rebels taking on, and defeating, a mighty technological power. Good and evil roles reversed, granted, but the same kind of face-off. Star Wars, you call it. And a blockbuster at that.

That’s not even the worst of it. You, who had militarily rescued the world twice and hadn’t been successfully attacked by foreign fighters within your own territory since Pearl Harbour, were sent reeling in 2001 by an attack on your very heart by an army of… 19 people. Armed with pocket knives. Now, come on?

I understand you still haven’t sorted out that one, either. In fact, after gallantly sorting out the world in the twentieth century you seem to have completely lost your geopolitical touch in the twenty-first. Whatever hubris brought you to Iraq?

And then there is your peculiar love for guns. I mean, you always loved guns. But with the mass-shooting fad, 66 and counting and even once in a kindergarten, more than 270 million guns in a country of some 300 million, and the most gunfire deaths of any developed country, it looks like your love affair is getting a bit out of hand. And yet your passion for the things seems to only grow hotter.

True, there are still islands of brilliance. You are still the world’s most prolific producer of creative disruption. The World Wide Web was not invented in the US, but it was you who turned it into the game changer it has become. The things a smartphone does were cooked up in many places around the world, but it was one of your companies that transformed it into the Swiss knife of the digital age. Thank God then for the likes of Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and those Google wizards. You can still transform the world.

But what if your next trump card is… the Trump card?

That'd be a no-brainer: I’d rather go back to my coma.