Collapse of the American Empire: Swift, Silent, Certain
Read it all; excerpt:
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...Ferguson's final message about America's destiny comes from Foreign Affairs: "Conceived in the mid-1830s, Cole's great five-part painting has a clear message: all empires, no matter how magnificent, are condemned to decline and fall." Throughout history, empires function "in apparent equilibrium for some unknowable period. And then, quite abruptly ... collapse," a blunt reminder of the sudden, swift, silent, certain timetable in Diamond's "Collapse" where a "society's demise may begin only a decade or two after it reaches its peak population, wealth and power..."
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Do you understand yet?
Tempus fugit.
posted by Concerned American | 1:22 AM
3 Comments:
Not that there is much comparable between the USSR and the USA but I have been wondering how the Russians fared after the Soviet collapse?
I don't exactly recall, but thier world didn't completely fall apart with barbarian hordes rampaging across the land did it?
I am inclined to think our "adjustment" will track along a line similiar to thiers. We're not Rome.
wl moses
I have been trying to create a graph that charts certain way-point markers that can be used to determine where an empire is on its timeline. I'm not being very diligent at it, but I don't think it matters much, because if I ever do get to publish it, it will be of no more value than a post-mortem prognosis.
When an author like that gets to the 'and the humans will disappear from the earth and the earth will return to being a Garden of Eden' bullcrap, he loses me completely, no matter how good the lead in was...
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