Dan Greenfield write in his blog Sultan Knish The Unverifiable World.

Excerpts:

Our civilization is sophisticated enough to deconstruct everything but incapable of constructing anything. We’re still capable of a certain amount of technological innovation in the consumer realm, but outside of it we have slowed down to a crawl. Anything that can make life more convenient and entertaining for the individual in the urban and suburban cradle is shooting forward, but anything larger than the individual has ground to a halt.

The Federal budget is bigger than ever, but the space program is dead, military innovation is limited and the infrastructure is crumbling. Between 1900 and 1960, the state of the country was transformed with big projects and big ideas. In the next 60 years, the home was transformed by consumer electronics and the family fell apart. The city decayed and was replaced by the suburb. The great national projects were no longer dedicated to building the country, but to massive social welfare.

Intellectually the implosion was far worse. Everything was deconstructed and nothing was constructed. The objective was replaced by the subjective. Reason was replaced by emotion. Canon made way for trend. Dada’s aggressive need to destroy everything for the sake of destruction became the motivating principle in literature, architecture and art. Each new revolution in the senseless existed only to make what had come before irrelevant, only to then be destroyed in a new revolution. Each new revolution was more subjective and less structured, a secret language into an individual psyche that could only be decoded by the artist, rather than a meaningful communication of values to a society.

HKO

There is certain irony here that the more the rights of the individual are compromised by the state the less grand our concerted efforts seem to be, and the less we as a society seem to benefit.  We have transitioned from a nation of accomplishments to a nation of dependency, whether it is the Life of Julia who cannot move forward without the help of her government or our crushing debt that depends on foreign lenders.

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