twilight zone

As Obama replaces a commander who failed in Afghanistan with another destined to, and the sound here in the so-called Homeland of that distant and senseless conflict subsides into a monotonous background hum, like traffic noise from the street, I'm re-reading for perhaps the third time Morris Berman's masterful analysis of our national collapse, "The Twilight of American Culture." Since it is "based on a comparison between Rome in the late-empire period and the contemporary situation in the United States," and uses arguments heavy with concrete historical detail, "Twilight" can hardly go wrong, and it doesn't.

In a preface to the 2006 edition, necessitated by the first edition's having been published 15 months before the 9/11 attack, Berman analytically divined our future as well as the meanings of events of the recent past, declaring that "George W. Bush is but the tip of the iceberg here" when assessing the reasons for America's growing weakness and declining influence. "The problem is systemic," he continued, "...and is not going to go away by means of a 'regime change' at home." He thus establishes himself as one of the few who dealt calmly and perceptively with both the wild elation and subsequent emotional deflation of the Obama phenomenon even before it happened.

Make no mistake -- this is a deeply pessimistic analysis of our national situation and prospects, yet Berman was surprised (and so am I) when e-mail response to the book was "emotionally positive." People smart enough to read it and understand it appreciated that someone at last punctured the fake piety surrounding our role in the world and national destiny, by demonstrating that "America has no real future, that it (is) going through an inevitable end-of-empire phase..."

He offers no solution other than a type of dropping out he calls "the monastic option," pursued by individuals who want to preserve some measure of truth and beauty in their lives. In short, he's talking about simply living differently -- differently than we have in the recent past, differently than our parents did, and differently than the Lords of Empire, Bank of America, and Exxon-Mobil want us to.

Now more than ever, this is the book to read. It's written simply and straight-forwardly, but I find its learning curve, while easily comprehensible, fairly steep and formidable.