England Ascendant

About a year ago, I wrote a script for a graphic novel called “Doctor Falk,” which I’m trying to talk a pal of mine into drawing. It’s about a scientist of the supernatural who lives in London.

The story is loosely based on the life of a real person. There actually was a guy named Chaim Samuel Jacob Falk. He was born somewhere in Eastern Europe (opinions differ as to where), fled (for various supposed reasons) to London in the 18^th century, and set up shop as a magician, sorcerer, and wonder-worker—a “practical Kabbalist.” Sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it’s not. The fact that it isn’t is sort of the kernel of the story.

That’s where the resemblance between the real guy and the character I made up end. Beyond that, I’m proud to say I did absolutely no research whatsoever.

I let another friend of mine (I do have more than one) read it for his opinion. After he finished it, he looked at me and said, “Boy, you really have a thing for England, don’t you?”

Here's a sketch I did of Doctor Falk with a proper Holmesian pipe. 

His reaction surprised me, because that genuinely wasn’t what was in my mind when I wrote it. Dr. Falk—the real Dr. Falk, and, by extension, my character—actually did flee his shadowy origins in Eastern Europe to live in London. Consciously, I didn’t think of England as anything more than a backdrop, a setting, the place where Falk does his weird stuff. So I re-read my own script (which I hate doing. Benjamin Disraeli once said he had a horror of reading his own books: “It is worse than masturbation”) in light of his comment. Turns out he was right. I do have a thing for England. It’s as obvious as the nose on my face.

Unwittingly, I’d peppered “Doctor Falk” with all kinds of quotes, allusions, references, and homages to England and the English imagination. Falk himself veers perilously close to being a pastiche of that most English of characters, Sherlock Holmes: the cold, tweedy, sexless, emotionally-deficient, quirky, yet heroically patriotic and morally upstanding wizard of Baker Street. The central conceit of my story—a brilliant eccentric living in the center of London whom desperate people consult for help—would not have been possible without having read Conan Doyle’s. Matter of fact, I actually ripped off a few lines verbatim from Holmes (“This looks like one of those tiresome social summonses that calls upon a man either to be bored or lie,” and “[I am going] To smoke. It is quite a three-pipe problem, and I beg that you will not disturb me until morning’) and stuck them in Falk’s mouth.

Here's a sketch I did of Doctor Falk in his study, a
subterranean chamber underneath his shop.

And along the way, I shoehorned in bits and pieces from Shakespeare, Disraeli (like I did a few paragraphs above. Did you notice?), The Lion in Winter, Dickens, Smollett, Thackeray, Tintin (not technically English, actually—created by Herge, a Belgian, but lots of the stories take place in and around Tintin’s friend Captain Haddock’s country-home of Marlinspike Hall. Come on. Does it get any Englisher than that?) and Robert Louis Stevenson. Falk goes to Stonehenge, hobnobs with British aristocrats with names like Lord Aethelthwaite, the butchers of Hogbristle Square (okay, I made that place up, but it sounds an awful lot like the kind of place you’d find in England), and is finally rescued by the brave sailors of the Royal Navy.

Even more revealing is a squib of a paragraph I stuck in the creative brief, to give a bit of a visual guide to the artist:

The London where he lives is a gloomy, foggy, dark, Gothic place with tons of weird little details half-hidden in the fog and darkness. It’s exaggeratedly English, Dickensian—quirky and eccentric, full of grotesque people and stone buildings leaning over at crazy, dangerous angles; silhouettes of castles and cathedrals against the moon. Signs advertising the kinds of shops and places that people THINK might exist, but don’t really; streets with ridiculous Englishy-sounding names like Dunwhistle on Tyne, Old Baptist’ry, High Harlotry, Hogbristle Market, etc. A decent amount of ravens and the kinds of places where ravens might live.

In other words, England as imagined by someone who’s never actually been to England.

Essentially, this script that I wrote about a profoundly non-English guy—a (probably) Ukrainian Jew—is a paean to Great Britain. A tribute to England. Why I was so struck by this, I don’t know. It should have been obvious.

I once had a professor, Fred Stopsky, whose parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland, who said that the first time he went to England, it felt like home. It struck me, because here was a guy who had not a dash of England in his background. His family’s trajectory had been a straight shot from the shtetl to Brooklyn. And yet, England felt like home to him. And I remembered his remark as I reconsidered my funnybook script, because he’s right. Even if we’ve never been there, somehow, for most Americans, England is home.

I could pontificate on the power of a shared language (although the English might debate whether we actually share a language at all), on the cultural bonds between Brits and Americans, or on the idea that Great Britain and the United States constitute one great Anglo-American commonwealth, irrespective of different governments and the ocean and centuries that separate us, the central thesis of Kevin Phillips’ book The Cousins’ Wars. I could mention the interesting hypothesis that the American Civil War was merely the last battle of the English Civil War, that epic struggle between the industrious, middle-class Roundheads and the aristocratic Cavaliers.

But all that aside, there’s no denying how deeply and profoundly the English imagination has influenced, and continues to influence, the American one.

The typical bookish American child, as I was myself some millennia hence, spends very little time in mythical America and a hell of a lot of time in mythical England. Sure, we’ve got Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, and cowboys and Indians—all red-blooded American kid stuff. But we spend far less time rafting down the Mississippi of legend than we do in the England of legend.

Instead, we travel with the Pevensie children through the wardrobe door to Narnia or join the Fellowship of the Ring in Middle-Earth which, while, admittedly, are non-existent countries, are still about as British as it gets. Or we travel with Alice down the rabbit hole or though the looking-glass. Or we picture ourselves standing on Platform 9 ¾ , donning black robes and attending Potions, Care of Magical Creatures, and Herbology with Harry, Hermoine, Ron, and Neville at Hogwarts, that perfectly idealized version of an English public schools. Or we check each candy bar we open for a golden ticket that’ll let us tour the Chocolate Factory with Charlie.

When we get a little older, we move up to Robert Louis Stevenson and Daniel Defoe (whose characters we identify with as fellow-Brits marooned on distant islands, and, with them, we dream of returning to the Blessed Plot) and Sherlock Holmes and John Galsworthy. We wish there really was a Drones Club where we could hang out with Bertie Wooster and have Jeeves sort out the disasters of our own making and pick out our clothes for us. We wander the dusty, crumbling hallways of Gormenghast with Titus Groan. And we take Neil Gaiman’s hand, and let him guide us across the vistas of his imagination, a world that may initially appear as terrifyingly phantasmagoric as any we’ve ever seen, but which, at its foundation, remains as comfortingly and as unalterably English as Surrey.

The truly geeky among us graduate to Doctor Who—not even human, but nonetheless about as quirkily, and stereotypically, English as a guy from Gallifrey with two hearts can be, what with his long scarves, tweedy coats, bow ties, and cricket gear. Our sense of humor derives, almost in totality, from Monty Python, part of that great old British music-hall tradition. And we remain glued to our screens to see who dies next on Downton Abbey.

I suppose that’s why, when, as a high school graduation present, my grandmother (whose own family history mirrored that of Professor Stopsky) took me to England for a week, it hardly felt like I was in a foreign country at all. I felt as though I was coming home, back to the very place that had spawned the imaginary landscape in which I’d spent my childhood.

This is not to say that we love the place unreservedly. There’s a lot about English history and culture—and current policy—for progressives like myself to despise. We can detest what was done in the name of King and country during the colonial period. We can mock their outdated class system and deride them for being a bunch of effete crumpet-monkeys. We can blame them, with some justification, for how they handled their custodianship of Palestine, resulting in many of the headaches the Israelis and Palestinians now suffer. We can discern, in the New Atheists’ (like Dawkins and Hitchens) disdain for the religious tendencies of the less advanced peoples of the world, echoes of the same arrogance and certainty of British superiority of colonial times. And we can excoriate the cowardice and hypocrisy of Tony Blair and his servile second-fiddle role in Dubya’s sacred mission to stamp out terrorism in the wrong country. And those of us of Irish descent have a hell of a lot to hate the Brits for.

But regardless of the tragedies of national histories,  if you’re an American kid who likes to read, you simply won’t be able to escape become a citizen of the England of the imagination. Even if you’re from one of the countries and peoples who suffered under the colonial boot, eventually it’ll suck you in. Ask Salman Rushdie who, his Muslim Indian roots notwithstanding, is about as properly British as a guy can get, from his posh BBC accent to his penchant for two-tone Oxford shoes he mentioned in his memoir Joseph Anton—a strangely revealing choice of footwear, if one puts any stock into semiotics at all.   

As justified as our anti-England vitriol may be, we simply can’t help but be Anglophiles at our core. How can you hate, in any consistent and thoroughgoing fashion, the place that spawned you, that gave form and landscape to your imagination, that informed your sense of story, and peopled it with the best characters ever created?

Peter S. Beagle, in his foreword to The Fellowship of the Ring, wrote, “We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers—thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams.” Maybe that’s England’s final triumph, its most fully-realized colonization. It may be a second-rate power in the temporal world, reminiscing about the day when Victoria Regis et Imperatrix ruled an empire on which the sun never set, but “Rule Britannia” never stopped playing in the empire of the imagination, and probably never will so long as the species survives.

Now you’ll pardon me as I reflect on this with a spot of tea.

Calling King David Gay Is Kind of Silly.

Although I’m a nonbeliever, I still enjoy reading the Bible. Why this is I don’t know. It may be the connection I feel with people whom I like to imagine are distant ancestors. It may be for the same reason that Simon Dubnov, the great historian of Russian Jewry and a nonbeliever like me, kept a Bible on his bedside table: as a talisman, a symbol. 

It may be just because it’s a cool text: a breathtakingly ambitious collection of old legends, half-remembered stories, snatches and bits and pieces of God only knows how many old tales and songs from forgotten kingdoms and families and people, all massaged into a more or less cohesive whole. How this book came to be is a fascinating story in and of itself. In recent years, I’ve enjoyed fewer books more than Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman’s Unearthing the Bible and David and Solomon, which compare the Biblical record with the archaeological one. Not surprisingly, there are some pretty serious discrepancies. But finding out that much of the Biblical record is baloney doesn’t lessen its import for me. Instead, it deepens my appreciation for the nameless writers and editors at the court of King Josiah who compiled the thing. As a writer of fiction, I appreciate the talents of other writers of fiction, and whatever else those guys (or possibly women) were, they were talented.

Or maybe it’s just that the Good Book, whether or not one believes in its divine origins, has some good stories.And the best of them is the David story. 

I'm not the only one who says so. The David story has inspired geniuses from Michelangelo to Joseph Heller to take a stab at it. The story has inspired artists in every generation, and so universal that everyone on earth can identify with some aspect of David.

I get this. People like to see, in stories and characters, aspects of themselves. It makes us feel less alone. But one thing that irritates me is when people claim that David was gay.

This is a pretty old and prevalent theory. Lots of people do this for lots of different reasons. Liberal Christians and Jews make the claim, most likely, to emphasize the welcoming, nonjudgmental, big-tent nature of their congregations. Biblical detractors, on the other hand, throw it like rocks at more traditional believers as an insult to one of the Bible's most sacred heroes. 

More serious thinkers also fall into the same trap. Jonathan Kirsch, the author of King David: The Real Life of the Man Who Ruled Israel, certainly thinks David and Jonathan had a thing, going so far as to cite homosexual relationships between bandits (as David became, after fleeing Saul) in other cultural contexts as an indicator of David’s own proclivities and behavior. 

But for whatever reason people do so, they’re wrong to do it. I don’t say this out of homophobia. Far from it. I don't care who’s gay, bisexual, or straight. Our society’s current obsession with the topic strikes me as nothing more than prurience, and an invasion of people’s, living or dead, privacy. I object to gayifying David because I believe, strongly, in historical accuracy and in respecting the text. 

First off, there is absolutely nothing in the text suggesting King David was gay. Yes, he was close friends with Saul’s son Jonathan. And okay, there is that one line in David’s famous elegy to Saul and Jonathan after their deaths (Saul’s by suicide) in battle: “Very pleasant has thy love been to me, Jonathan, surpassing the love of women”). Okay, sounds gay by our lights, but then again, we live in a post-Freudian age.

You could parse the whole David story, line by line, or scrutinize David’s own words, in search of evidence of his homosexuality. Maybe you could make a compelling or even convincing case for it, based on what’s written about, and purportedly by, him. 

But it would be a complete and utter waste of time, for one simple reason: the Good Book is, as I mentioned above, largely malarkey.

The fact is that we know precisely one fact about King David. One. One fact. That fact is that he existed.

We know this because of a stone fragment of a victory arch—the “Tel Dan Stele,” so named because it was found at an archaeological dig at Tel Dan in Israel—erected by the Aramaean king Hazael, boasting about his victory over “The House of David.”

That is the extent of extrabiblical documentation for David. (There’s another busted-up old piece of rock, from a victory arch erected by King Mesha of Moab, which may or may not refer to the House of David. So okay, there’s maybe two. But there’s only one concrete, universally-accepted piece of evidence that doesn’t occur in the Bible for David.) And it doesn’t even refer to him specifically, but rather to his descendants, his “House.”

That’s it. We know he existed. Period. We don’t know anything else. We don’t know if any of the Bible’s claims about him—that he was red-haired, that he was a shepherd, the son of a guy named Jesse, a crack-shot with a sling, or a songwriter of Bob Dylan-esque ability—are true or not. We don’t know if he actually killed a giant named Goliath (the Bible itself is a little confused on this score. There’s a verse claiming that someone named Elchonon killed Goliath. So much for Biblical inerrancy) in the service of King Saul. We don’t even know if there was a King Saul.

But we do know that a lot of what the Bible says about him is false. Thanks to archaeology, we know that there actually was no great United Empire under David. The region of Judah was, in David’s time, a sparsely-populated scrub country, inhabited by semi-nomadic tribespeople who lived in villages which rarely exceeded 50 people. Jerusalem, in the time of David and Solomon, was no magnificent capital of an empire the size of Maine. It was a tiny hamlet of no importance to anyone whatsoever. It barely existed.

In the absence, then, of any trustworthy evidence, we are forced to treat King David the same way we treat King Arthur: as a fictional character who may or may not have been based on a real person. Thus, in order to judge whether claims of David’s homosexuality have any merit, we need to consider the author’s intent.

I’m always half irritated and half amused by people who write long, scholarly essays purporting to have detected a homosexual subtext in Frodo and Sam’s relationship, or in that between Holmes and Watson, or that between Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson, because I have little to no doubt that neither J.R.R. Tolkien nor Arthur Conan Doyle nor Bob Kane intended their creations to be gay. Nor, for that matter, do I believe that the anonymous author(s), or compiler(s), or redactor(s), of the David story did. 

Finkelstein and Silberman make a convincing argument that the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, was largely slapped into its present configuration during the realm of King Josiah of Judah. And yes, there was definite authorial intent there. But it wasn’t sexual. It was political. The Bible was crafted to give legitimacy to, and justification for, Josiah’s territorial ambitions: he wanted all of Israel, northern and southern kingdoms both.  

Thus, Israel—the northern kingdom—is portrayed in the Bible as a renegade, rebel state, ruled over by asshats like Omri, Ahab and Jezebel, the descendents of the illegitimate dynasty of Jeroboam. Judah, the southern kingdom, on the other hand, was ruled by Josiah, a good and Godly man, the descendent of God’s own anointed king, to whom God had promised an everlasting kingdom.

Which pretty much worked out like all of God’s other promises. But that’s another topic.  

At any rate, in that light, the friendship between David and Jonathan takes on a completely different character. David also married Saul’s daughter Michal. And took over his kingdom. Which indicates that the authorial intent was not a homosexual relationship between David and Jonathan, but rather a progression of Saul losing everything to David: his daughter, the loyalty of his own son, and eventually, his kingdom.

Considering, moreover, that homosexuality was already considered an abomination punishable by death in Josiah’s time, it’s hard to believe that a gay relationship between David and Jonathan was really what the author intended.

Me personally, I could care less if David, the actual person, was gay or not. Wouldn’t bother me if he was.  He might also have been fat or thin, tall or short, hunchbacked or upright. He might also have had one eye, twelve fingers, a vestigial tail, or a twenty-two inch shmeckel. Sure, they all sound ridiculous, but there’s as much reason to believe any of those as there is to believe he was gay—which is none at all.

He may very well have been gay. Plenty of people have been, are, and will be. But to claim that he was on the basis of what’s written about him is nothing more than pushing an agenda, and an abuse of the text. The chances are that we’re never going to know anything more about the historical person of David than that he existed.

And frankly, it’s better that way. Pablo Picasso once said that “Art is a lie which tells the truth.” David’s story, even if it never took place (or did so in a fashion radically different from what the Good Book tells us) is a perfect example of this. As per what we know about Judah and its inhabitants in the time of David, he was, most likely, a minor tribal chieftain—just one of the innumerable, ten-for-a-dollar petty Bedouin sheikhs who’ve been crisscrossing that region since time immemorial. It’s the imaginary David, the legendary David, whose story moves us, inspires us, captivates us, and whose universality speaks to all of us. His story is one of courage, love, betrayal, tragedy, and redemption. It’s a testament to the power of fiction and of art.  

The Minute Progress Becomes Political, You Can Kiss Your Country Good-bye.

Right after the Civil War, St. Louis was the place to be. There was a victory mood in the air. The city’s staunchly anti-slavery and pro-Union Germans had kept it, and the rest of Missouri, out of the Confederacy, and their side had won. Progress was ascendant. The town was booming—all kinds of stuff was flowing down the river to rebuild the South, people were going west in greater numbers than ever before and passing through the Gateway City on their way to do it, and all that commerce was generating unheard of amounts of wealth. The city was the fourth largest in the United States. There was serious talk of moving the U.S. capital from DC to St. Louis. City boosters like Logan Reavis wrote books like, “St. Louis—The Future Great City of the World,” in which he predicted that St. Louis, the great city at the very center of the greatest country in the world, would quite possibly grow into the greatest city in the history of the species. The future was so bright you had to wear shades. St. Louis had nowhere to go but up.

Or so it thought. But something happened. The mood of the city changed, a shift in mindset best expressed by St. Louis’ postwar mayor, German-born Henry Overstolz, who shot down a proposal to install streetlights by saying, “Vell, ve got a moon, ain’t it?”

What happened? Complacency and politics set in. St. Louis turned up its nose at the railroads—no one could imagine that the river, the original source of the city’s wealth, could ever be superseded by the Iron Horse—and let Chicago take the lead on that one. Things were good enough, weren’t they? Why change anything? Why install streetlights? Ve got a moon, ain’t it?

The city became conservative and rigid, with predictable results. The 1880 census revealed that St. Louis’s hated rival to the north, Chicago, had overtaken St. Louis in population. It was a body blow to city’s collective ego. Chicago continued to blow its doors off in every conceivable way. And my city began the long, slow decline to where it is now—a second-tier Midwestern city with nothing particularly remarkable about it. The city, once flush and vibrant with immigrants—in 1860, over half the adult population was foreign-born—ceased to become a destination for new Americans. Right now, it’s got the lowest percentage of foreign-born residents of any major metro area in the U.S. And it shrank. The City of St. Louis has lost population in every census since 1950, and the metro area is now 19^th in terms of population.

And as went St. Louis, I fear, so goes the United States.

There have been prophets of doom foretelling the country’s downfall since before the country even existed, and it’s possible that, at the age of 42, I’m falling into the thought patterns of the elderly, insisting that things used to be better, but they suck now. Could be. But I just can’t shake the feeling that the U.S. has peaked, and that the long, slow decline has now set in.

I’m starkly reminded of this every time I read another article about how Denmark, Germany, Norway, and China and India are passing us by in alternate energy research and implementation. Twenty-two percent of Germany’s energy now comes from renewables—a quarter of that comes from solar power. The country is the leading photovoltaics installer in the world. The Germans have even more ambitious plans: 50% of their energy will come from solar power by 2020, and 100% by 2050.

The Danes are right there with them. They have also set themselves the goal of being completely independent of oil by 2050. India’s not far behind, either. The country is a leader in wind power as well as solar—its growth rate for wind-generated energy use is the fastest in the world. China’s also kicking our asses. Seventeen percent of China’s energy comes from renewable resources, and it has the world’s largest number of hydroelectric generators.

Watching the rest of the world move this direction should be deeply embarrassing to every American. Especially when we find ourselves still mired in two wars, Iraq and Afghanistan, which have precisely dick to do with our national security, and everything to do with controlling Mideast oil reserves. Especially when we’re still convulsing ourselves over whether the Keystone XL pipeline should be built, even after a disastrous Exxon pipeline leak in Arkansas shows that oil pipelines are nothing more than environmental disasters waiting to happen. Especially when the Gulf is still recovering from the catastrophic BP oil spill. Especially when we’re so desperate for oil that we’re now reduced to squeezing the shit, drop by drop, out of tar sands and seriously considering “fracking”—pumping high-pressure caustic chemicals (including lead, mercury, hydrochloric acid, and a bitches’ brew of other toxins) into our groundwater in hopes of busting open the shale to get the natural gas inside.

And while the rest of the developed world blows our doors off in science and math education, we in the United States continue to wrestle with whether or not we should give horseshit nonsense like “Creationism” and “Intelligent Design,” which is unmitigated nonsense for numbskulls, equal time in public schools along with the Theory of Evolution. Essentially, we’re arguing over whether we should make ourselves stupider than ever.

I genuinely don’t know why this is the case. I don’t know what turned the country of entrepreneurialism and innovation into a country where adherence to outmoded, worn-out, and frankly ridiculous modes of thought is almost religious. I don’t know what turned the country of Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Jonas Salk into the country of Donald Trump.

It’s possible complacency and smug self-satisfaction had something to do with it. Maybe we just drank our own Kool-Aid about being the biggest, the fastest, the richest, the toughest, and the coolest for so long that we figured the rest of the world would never catch up, and we could sit on our laurels. But I suspect the real cause is more pernicious than that.

Money gets into politics, and then suddenly, somehow, things that just shouldn’t be political got politicized.

Take energy, for example. I cannot, for the life of me, understand why oil is a political issue. But it is. Conservatives love it, liberals hate it. But I see no good reason why energy should be a right-left divide. If you’re using something that’s toxic, causes cancer, takes zillions to get out of the ground, involves your country in fatal adventures overseas, and which you’re running out of, then looking around for another energy source shouldn’t be a political issue. It should be common sense. It is the height of stupidity to remain dependent upon oil. But oil producers got involved in conservative politics, and suddenly, oil fetishizing became identified with conservatism. Conservatives abandoned common sense, adopted oil dependence as one of their shibboleths, and now viciously attack anything that calls oil production or consumption into question. Drill, baby, drill! Build that pipeline! Or else you hate America.

How about eating healthy? Not eating pink slime—ground-up, shit-containing, ammonia-treated meat—shouldn’t be a political issue. This should be an issue on which every American can agree. It’s utterly disgusting, as well as dangerous. We shouldn’t be eating it. We shouldn’t allow this abomination against our bodies to even be produced.

But food production is big money, and you can use big money to buy off elected officials. Once again, something utterly vile and stupid became identified with conservatism, and conservatives, once again, abandoned common sense and now scorn and deride those of us who’d prefer our hamburgers to be shit- and ammonia-free as a bunch of latte-drinking, effete elitists.

The problem is that the powers that be—the corporations that control American politics—have a vested interest in keeping things just the way they are. They don’t want change. They’re doing just fine. And they can afford to buy off our parties and our politicians, who have now turned the engines of their donors’ profits into sacred articles of conservative faith.

I can't, however, through all the blame on conservatives. Those of us on the left have done important causes--causes that should not be political issues--a great disservice by turning them into political issues. We've claimed the monopoly on environmentalism, sensible gun control, healthy eating, healthcare, GMO labeling, and a myriad of other issues. These shouldn't be liberal issues. These should be issues that all Americans should care about, and about which all Americans should be able to reach consensus. But by painting these issues with the "liberal" brush--or by allowing them to have become liberal issues--we've pushed tons of potential supporters away. 

The end result is that the idea of progress itself has become political. Instead of leading the world in innovation, big chunks of America now actively hold it back. Now the very idea of moving forward is under attack. Science is either discredited or ignored, innovation is viewed as suspect, and anything that could possibly lead to the betterment of the species is attacked with all the ferocity of a pit bull on HGH. Far too many Americans are terrified of progress. We used to delight in discovery. Now we’re afraid of it. It’s a pathetic thing to see the country that used to set the standard for the rest of the world in technological achievement become a bunch of sniveling cowards, terrified of the future and doing our best to keep it at bay.

Throw this phenomenon into the mix along with a healthy dose of complacency and smugness about your incontestable, eternal “We’re Number One” status, and you have a recipe for decline. Which is what America is doing.

I suppose there’s an odd comfort to be taken, though. I suppose as the lights dim over what used to be the greatest country in the world, we can take refuge in the fact that “Vell, we still got a moon, ain’t it?”