Putting on the hip-waders

The neocons in power in Washington these days,
those who were delighted to talk about America as
the sole empire in the world following the Soviet
disintegration, will of course refuse to believe
in any such collapse, just as they ignore the
realities of the imperial war in Iraq. But I
think it behooves us to examine seriously the
ways in which the U.S. system is so drastically
imperiling itself that it will cause not only the
collapse of its worldwide empire but drastically
alter the nation itself on the domestic front.
...
As he says, in his analysis of the doomed Norse
society on Greenland that collapsed in the early
15th century: "The values to which people cling
most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions
are those values that were previously the source
of their greatest triumphs over adversity." If
this is so, and his examples would seem to prove
it, then we can isolate the values of American
society that have been responsible for its
greatest triumphs and know that we will cling to
them no matter what. They are, in one rough
mixture, capitalism, individualism, nationalism,
technophilia, and humanism (as the dominance of
humans over nature). There is no chance whatever,
no matter how grave and obvious the threat, that
as a society that we will abandon those.

Hence no chance to escape the collapse of empire.

Let me get my hip-waders on and see if I can slog
thru this shit.

This is probably the dumbest fucking thing I've
ever seen in print.

The "expert" (I was gonna say dipshit) that wrote
these words doesn't have a clue that these values
that were responsible for America's greatest
triumphs (the ones that were allowed to operate
for the period between 1870 and 1913 when there
was no empire) were abandoned. Their opposites have
been in place since then, creating empire then
virtually guaranteeing its eventual collapse. He
sees no parallels with the Soviet Union.

Nationalism doesn't belong in the author's grouping.
Empires develop and nuture themselves using the
nationalist flag-waving and song-singing to go
forth conquering those that don't comply with their
standards. Without it there's no empire, hence
nothing to collapse, no Borg mentality.

No, what rules now is The Collective. Empire is
the epitome of power, the collective mind-rape
in its final glory and all the pomp that goes with
it.

The article.