Fall of the American Empire

Mr. McKenna and I have been telling you this for years, but we don’t rate. Now Newsweek gets it: American empire is dying. Well duuuu-uuhhh…

Of course, Newsweek, being Newsweek, spins it all as “endangerment” and “loss.” I see it for its potential, exactly as I’ve been saying for years: how it ends will be determined not by what the MSM says about it or what Obama or his corporate henchmen tell us it all means.

It all hangs on us: if the American people stand up and embrace the fall of our empire as a blessing, then we will emerge from this as a greater, stronger, and freer nation than perhaps we have ever been.

This was the message I heard in the Berlin speech of Obama the candidate, which brought me and most of Europe over to his side. I wonder what happened to that guy, the one who said, “Partnership and cooperation among nations is not a choice; it is the one way, the only way, to protect our common security and advance our common humanity.” When did “Wall St. banks” replace the word “nations” in that sentence?

No matter: for even if he had not fallen into the vest pocket of Goldman and Citi, it would still be up to us to ensure that the collapse of American empire would be celebrated, encouraged, even loved.

The story of the past decade in American politics is how power and the lust for empire brings a nation inevitably to its knees. The story of the past year is how fame, power, and adulation can corrupt even the best of men. Imperial America must die for the world to live and our species to survive into the 22nd and 23rd centuries. The Imperial Presidency must die so that our native intelligence, energy, and resources once again become our major export, and not the body bag. The death of empire will bring new life, a resurrection of sorts, to our country.

The ancient Chinese understood the synergy of misfortune and opportunity: in fact, they had a single ideogram that represented both words, both ideas. Just as remarkably, their word for “crisis” incorporated the ideograms for “danger” and “opportunity.” They would remind us that the past year has been a period of economic and geopolitical “danger-opportunity.” And when it comes to the fall of an empire, the danger is modest compared to the vast potential of the opportunity.

Newsweek, being the print organ of a major corporation, cannot understand this. But we can. Watch the video below and then consider how the nations represented by those falling empires are doing today (in case you have trouble reading the labels, pink is the British; blue the French; orange the Spanish; and green the Portugese empires; the year is in the lower left). That’s the potential, and it deserves to be made kinetic, actual, and enduring — this time, for the bloated bubble of American empire.

Visualizing empires decline from Pedro M Cruz on Vimeo.

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Footnote: if I sound a little fed up with my President, check out what a certain Nobel laureate economist has to say at the Times.