There goes America’s soft power. We are now a corrupt pseudo-democracy where half the citizenry and politicians don’t believe in science, and who could care less about culture. It’s guns, and violence!

An interesting point of reference is to look across the Pacific. 50 years ago, the Chinese were busy destroying their national heritage when they had a madman in power who started the Cultural Revolution. In the last 40 years, what we have seen is that as China rises, not only are they content with matching the West in GDP and living standards, but in recent recent years, China’s government has poured billions into scientific research (with the aim of overtaking us), and they are vigorously promoting arts and culture (and exporting their values overseas), knowing full well that these are the things that actually define a great civilization,. And they just seem so determined in their quest to rebuild their ancient empire back to its rightful place in history.

In the mean time, the US is tearing down its own civilization. Trump is repeating the Soviet mistake of building a vast military machine well beyond what can be justified, while Americans are increasingly sick, increasingly uneducated, and basically becoming a laughing stock. Never mind that no one can eat missiles or tanks or aircraft carriers. While we rack up huge trade deficits with the rest of the world, we seem not to realize that we have long ago stopped producing what the world’s customers want, and the things we are good at making (weapons) simply don’t sell enough units to sustain a great civilization.