There above the Imperial United States of America at it's height! I was there I saw it I lived it. The was justice there was hope there were miracles we were going to the stars everyone prospered.
Well most everyone.
Nothing like it had happened before nor will ever happen again. This is why the myth of those times has such power. This is why our culture has spread all over the world.
The Glory of Empire.
It happend I saw it I was there!
We didn't have to force it on the world, like the Romans Brits Chinese or fucking French. They took it ran with it they fucking wanted it still do.
Even though our greatness is gone never to return.
Our cities now rot our children hungry prisons full water poisoned.
Yet we are the greatest Myth of all human history. 10,000 years from now our tales will still be told, and the truth of our existence wondered at as we wonder of Atlantis.
Our last Emperor is an illiterate disturbed buffoon.
This is the proof of our end. So it was with every other empire. Yet they will still sing Doo-wop a thousand years from now.
Ain't it the truth. How well I remember that all too brief era that ended with a thud. Since around 1980 we have been heading straight to hell... faster and faster.
ReplyDeleteEmpires usually last anywhere from a few thousand to a few hundred years. The Chinese thousands, and coming back. The Brits a few hundreds.
ReplyDeleteImperial America half a lifetime.
Just 1945 to 2001. '01 was when it really ended. Though historians might mark the hit on JFK. That was when the seeds of our current hell were solidly planted, and now bear rotted fruit.
Pam Am - the *only* way to fly. Or so a toucan told me.
ReplyDeleteThe Moon landing now half a century behind us, and Woodstock too, buried deep in the past century - we'll never see such incandescent hope again. Around 1980, as Anon rightly says, we took the road to Milton Friedman's Big Rock Candy Mountain and sure enough it turned out to be the road to hell. On this road there are no sign posts, no sudden turns or warnings, just a subtle relentless trickling down. We passed the point of no return long ago.
Today I found an article where Daniel Ellsberg says the fix was in by the end of WWII. The military security complex wanted to keep fattening on wartime budgets, so they invented the Cold War. Now we've got Cold War 2.0. Still, we could probably have turned it around had we acted decisively, say, 40 years ago.
You know what did in Pan Am? Square windows. They built planes with them. Due to major problems that resulted, at great expense they tested for stress points in the design, and it turned out to be the corners of the windows. But by then it was too late.
The hippies were right. We stayed square and militaristic for too long.
Kevin, I think you have outlined the situation quite accurately.
ReplyDeletePam Am didn't learn from the Brit post war Comet.
ReplyDeleteThe first Jetliner in the early 1950's. They had square windows as well. Their planes began imploding...literally on a regular basis. This gave the entire jetliner business to us Yanks,...though we learned nothing.
Square window with a small fix.
It was cheaper than designing anything new. This foreshadowed the Pinto. Thus were the seeds of our fall.