Read it all; excerpt:***
...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.
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?
ReplyDeleteI 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.
ReplyDeleteWhen 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...
ReplyDelete