Gregg Easterbrook’s recent op-ed piece in the WSJ argues, correctly IMHO, that much of this negative outlook can be laid at the feet of modern journalism in this era of the 24x7 newscast:  Desperate to attract and retain viewers and readers for their advertiser masters, modern journalists tend to take the maxim “if it bleeds, it leads” to new depths.

The “History” Channel is having a flood marathon at the moment. This is what you get, I suppose, from a culture that was entertained, in it’s youth with cries of “Danger! Will Robinson! Danger!.  Personally, I love roller coasters.

Years of enviro-engineering are coming back to haunt us in the present.  Changing the courses of mighty rivers (Mississippi and Everglades, for example) and building on the flood plains is just the most obvious. And now nature is trying to reclaim what we have taken away.  Interesting.

Is everything spinning out of control?

Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and against terrorism.

They forgot to mention dogs and cats living together, and mass hysteria. So who ya gonna call?

How this article could wax on about everything falling apart in the secular world and totally ignore the equally dire collapse of morality and ethics in our society, nation and culture is completely beyond comprehension.  It seems to me, from a prophetic posture, that we have this civic and economic collapse precisely because we are having a moral and ethical collapse.  The two are of a piece.  Frankly, today’s lectionary tells not to fear, at least not the civic and political collapse but to truly fear the moral and ethical collapse.  The one may kill my body but the other is definitely killing our souls.  I fear the collapse the article doesn’t mention…morality… far more than I fear the collapse of what it does mention…the economy , and blah, blah, blah, etc.

Sort of stunning this passes for journalism… Is the US facing tough times - of course. Gas is expensive; but I’ve yet to see a line similar to the 1970’s. Home prices are falling; a needed correction. Wars without end? There are bad spots (Iraq, Afghanistan, some places in Africa), but generally things aren’t nearly as bad as they have been or could be. It reminds me of Hurricane Katrina coverage (a tragic event with enormous economic displacement), which tended to treat the event as it were somehow either (a) a devious Bush administration plot or (b) a moral judgment on the US. Where was the same reporting in 2005 when 35,000 people (almost 20X Katrina) died in Europe because of a heatwave? Or for home-gamers with short memories, just look to China and Mynamar for downside potential.  This AP story is very, very poor reporting - vague, no sense of scale or context.

Curiously, and slightly off topic, one piece of major news featuring US decadence and falleness is BO’s reneging on a promise to embrace (and his previously stated belief in) public financing for presidential elections. Even David Brooks covered it, so it has a NYT stamp of respectability.

But #6, things are falling apart, and we can see clearly that “the center will not hold.” Do the best lack all conviction? My entry is not a statement of hopelessness, but a declaration that, starting most clearly with the Baby Boomers, the value base on which America rests has undergone a tectonic change. We used to think that knowledge existed when there was a one to one relationship between the thing experienced and the perception. This is no longer true, and this shift attacks our fundamental grasp of reality.

  At present and little by little, the value base is embedded in the concept that the perception is the reality, that what we now call virtual reality is both metaphysically and ontologically primary. The source of knowledge, to put the matter another way,  is no longer outside ourselves, but from within. This is why the new generations speak of how they feel, for this is internally generative. The world derives from this concept; solipsism has acquired universal strength.

  You may well wonder that in a world of scientific method, so imprecise a metaphysic should arise, but scientific method, talked of by many, is not a generative power. Rather, it MAKES the things which certify and justify the virtual world as primary and real. Precious few know how a cell phone works or how the internet works, but they know that this is where their feelings flow to the others in the virtual world.

  It is also certainly true that, when I survey this radical shift in the real, I find it very much like insanity.  Larry

Fascinating how selective the crises-list of these two journalists. No mention of two issues most adding to the anxieties of Americans: the rise of the homosexualist wave (as it compromises marriage, church and family life) and the rise of illegal immigration. So much for the credibility of their reporting/honorable intentions.

#8. AS to the homosexualization of America, precious few either see it or care much if they do. It is true, though, that this process is a remarkable one, maybe even a unique one. What are the causes? Why now? Why so persistent and so successful? TEC in this case is simply oone of the officers in what is now a very large army.  Larry

Larry, No. 9,
It seems clear to me that the practice and spread of homosexuality is largely a cultural phenomenon, foisted on us/promoted in the same way as, say, electronic games or types of movies/television shows, or fashion.  Unlike fads in games and clothing, however, homosexuality is hardly reversable; for most of those afflicted, homosexuality becomes an emotional-economic-social-political-(religious?) imperative. Read the sections on wide-spread Grecian homosexuality in Robin Lane Fox’s “The Classical World.” Homosexuals were not just one in ten or one in twenty, but made nearly a clean sweep, at least in military and higher social circles. Proportions like that speak not of genetic disposition (i.e. they were born that way), but of successful mass cultivation of the practice and its maintenance by cultural and situational imperatives.
And I beg to differ with your view: I find the spread of the institution of homosexual marriage about as worrisome among the American people as some of the other concerns described by the authors. I would guess that being homophiles themselves, and partial to illegal immigration, they simply left those two phenomena out of their enumeration of troubles troubling Americans. Best. Dick