Transformation

One wonders how the behavior of institutions effect social thinking. Clearly our leaders are mendacious and inept. But what must be implanted in the minds of people when they see the likes of O.J., Robert Blake, Jon Benet, and Epstein come to such clearly unjust conclusions. Does that scar the civic sensibility?


                                       Transformation

First two paragraphs of an article in the WSJ by Gerard Baker exclaiming the sudden change in America's fortunes:

At the end of the 20th century, the U.S. had won World War II and the Cold War, liberated half the planet from history’s most dehumanizing ideologies, advanced a free-market capitalism that had led more humans out of poverty than any economic system ever devised, and given the world the richest bounty of intellectual, cultural and scientific capital since the Enlightenment. Americans could—and did—look at themselves and the nation they had built with immense pride.

Twenty years later much of the country’s political leadership, almost its entire academic establishment, most of the people who control its news and cultural output, and a good deal of its corporate elite view America as an irredeemably malignant force for enslavement and oppression, a uniquely evil power founded on an ideology of racial supremacy. These Jacobins demand that Americans repudiate most of the nation’s history, tear down the icons of its creation, and engage in a cultural expurgation of its sins.

And the final explanation:

This country hasn’t passed from great to evil in two decades. America hasn’t failed. But Americans have been failed—misled by inept and deceitful political leaders, deserted by predatory and mercenary corporate chiefs, and, above all, betrayed by a parasitic cultural elite that exploited American freedom to trash the country. It isn’t America’s history that needs to be repudiated. It’s its present.