is what the estimable Georgetown professor Patrick Deneen has become, in case you haven't noticed. Deneen's "What I Saw in America" is one of the best blogs out there, not least because much of what Deneen believes and writes stands in tension with the very notion of a "blog."
Here he is recently on the Great American Yard Sale:
quote:
In 1971 the nation no longer had the domestic supplies to allow us to sustain what we had already built, much less continue our now economically- and politically-essential growth. In spite of experiencing the dependency upon Arab tyrants that our oil addiction necessitated, we refused to heed the obvious loss of self-governance that continuation on our course now entailed. Rather than living within our means, we began selling the surplus value we had not created, but exploited, in our century-long fossil fuel burn-up. First we began selling our debt, the promise of any future growth of our national economy increasingly to foreign owners of our treasuries. Then we began selling our jobs, the outsourcing of work that allowed us to avoid paying the actual cost of products by exploiting human labor abroad. We began selling our military to regimes that proved cooperative or necessary, most recently a sweetheart weaponry deal for the Saudis (bought largely with petrodollars that we had been giving them in fistloads over the decades). Our economy seemed to hum along, the "market" growing every year as we continued to import vital and growing supplies of oil even as we increasingly sold everything of value overseas lest we have to face the reality that we had no domestic ability to sustain our growth addiction. We had to start selling off parts of the nation to keep what we still had afloat.
