It’s fairly interesting to start off the Fourth of July with Fareed Zakaria explaining to Terri Gross why America will not be number one anymore. I know for a fact that Fareed Zakaria was not born here, and I’m pretty sure that Terry Gross is the Canadian version of the Manchurian Candidate. In fact, it is entirely possible that the whole NPR operation is a mouthpiece for elements of the Canadian underground that wish for their neighbor to the south to go ahead and legalize pot and make health care universal so that all the stinking hippies will go back home. They (the stinking hippies) are not so bad in the winter, but in the summer months they can be absolute hell, what with all the funk that has built up over the course of 5 months or so.
But saying that the level of body odor in Toronto is related to the funding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is sort of like saying that the level of employment is related to the maximum marginal tax rate. Right-wingers love to talk about how lowering the marginal tax rate will create jobs, a theory which has yet to be borne out by experience, while leftist like to point out that job growth was strongest when marginal tax rates were highest, a historical reality that proves coincidence as much as causation. And if you don’t believe me, ask Fareed, who’s assessment is, also, that that jobs and tax policy have a very tenuous relationship, if they are related at all.
But what, if anything, does this have to do with America being number one? Well, there is this: default. We have never done it. Like a young family starting out, we bundled all our debt into one package and paid it off. That was Alexander Hamilton’s great invention, and he was right. Our national credit score hit 800, or whatever is good. It’s been there ever since, because whenever we took out a loan to, say, acquire new territory or help out a friend who was going through a rough patch, everyone knew we were good for it.
The problem is that we have to continue to stay good for it. We have to say to the people from whom we have borrowed money, “Yes, we will borrow more money, maybe from you, maybe from other people, to pay that shit back. We’re good for it.” As you have probably heard, we are having a spot of trouble saying that. For this, the Congress wants to blame the President and his proposals for future spending, when in fact the issue is the Congress and what they have already committed to spend. Ack!
So, there are other areas beside the national debt in which our supremacy is threatened. The question is, why is that so threatening. In the upcoming Presidential election season, it is almost impossible to imagine that a candidate would stand up and say, “It’s cool, we don’t need to be first in education, science, manufacturing, or technology. C’s get degrees, after all.” It’s a farce that candidates have to promise to defend American primacy on all points, especially when there is one on which we have a lock: our principles.
When it comes to free expression, social mobility, opportunity, and equality, America was first with the most. Not perfectly, not universal, but still very real. Our strength is in our diversity, our persistence, and our hope. That what continues to attract the Fareed Zakarias of the world to us, and with their help we will continue to have more optimism for the future than any other nation on Earth. Happy Fourth of July.