If you had told me, five years ago, that on the fifth anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in history Ground Zero would still be nothing but an enormous hole in the ground, I wouldn't have believed you -- just as I wouldn't have believed that a major American city could be thoroughly trashed by a Category 4 hurricane and then left to moulder in the mud for a year while various federal, state and local bureaucrats and hack politicians tried to make up their minds what to do.

I would have said that while those kinds of things can and do happen in Third World kleptocracies or decaying Stalinist police states, they're simply not possible in the richest and most powerful nation in history. Even if the voters could somehow be bamboozled into accepting such incompetence, the wealthy elites and corporate technocrats who own and operate the world's only remaining superpower would never stand for it.

You can learn a lot about a country in five years.

What I've learned (from 9/11, the corporate scandals, the fiasco in Iraq, Katrina, the Cheney Administration's insane economic and environmental policies and the relentless dumbing down of the corporate media -- plus the repeated electoral triumphs of the Rovian brand of "reality management") is that the United States is moving down the curve of imperial decay at an amazingly rapid clip. If anything, the speed of our descent appears to be accelerating.

The physical symptoms -- a lost war, a derelict city, a Potemkin memorial hastily erected in a vacant lot -- aren't nearly as alarming as the moral and intellectual paralysis that seems to have taken hold of the system. The old feedback mechanisms are broken or in deep disrepair, leaving America with an opposition party that doesn't know how (or what) to oppose, a military run by uniformed yes men, intelligence czars who couldn't find their way through a garden gate with a GPS locator, TV networks that don't even pretend to cover the news unless there's a missing white woman or a suspected child rapist involved, and talk radio hosts who think nuking Mecca is the solution to all our problems in the Middle East. We've got think tanks that can't think, security agencies that can't secure and accounting firms that can't count (except when their clients ask them to make 2+2=5). Our churches are either annexes to shopping malls, halfway homes for pederasts, or GOP precinct headquarters in disguise. Our economy is based on asset bubbles, defense contracts and an open-ended line of credit from the People's Bank of China, and we still can't push the poverty rate down or the median wage up.

I could happily go on, but I imagine you get my point. It's hard to think of a major American institution, tradition or cultural value that has not, at some point over the past five years, been shown to be a.) totally out of touch, b.) criminally negligent, c.) hopelessly corrupt, d.) insanely hypocritical or e.) all of the above.

It's getting hard to see how these trends can be reversed. Maybe they can't (which would explain why all empires, at least so far, have eventually declined and fallen.)

Overall, I think he's right, although I could mount a minor defense for at least some of New York's go-slow approach to rebuilding is justifiable (and a lot isn't).

The bigger picture is that we do seem to be in our decline, and that downward spiral is only going to be exascerbated by the melded neo-con/corporatis (not to mention authoritarian) policies of the Bush Administration. Their clientele (Big Bidness and the rich -- religious fundamentalists aren't really their clients, they're their cannon fodder) will prosper in the short run, but in the long run almost everything that's being done is undermining both our long-term survival as a powerful (the powerful) nation, and our ability to re-make our society in ways that would allow a new equilibrium.

I'm not an economist, nor a historian of economics, but it seems to me that the last time this happened, it took the Great Depression (to tear things down) and World War II and its aftermath (to build things back up again) to remake the structure of society in ways that made us more viable. Now, BushCo has worked very hard to, one by one, undermine or undo that structure, in the hope of returning to a previous one, a sort of hard-core economic nostalgia tricked out with an iron fist.

P.S. While I'm basically sympathetic with the arguments of those that say we need to tear down the bi-polar political structure we now live in (i.e. the two-party system), I'm impatient with the idiocy of thinking such a campaign, however mounted (grassroots, Netroots, Wildroot -- whatever) can conceivably be successful. But even if it had the possibility of succeeding in the future, concentrating on such near-term unrealistic tactics as a third party is bound to fail, which then leave us with the Republican party still in charge and things getting worse and worse at an accelerating pace. That's why I say that anyone who is opposed to the things that Bush is doing, and the people he fronts for, and the policies he stands for, must be doing whatever they can to help elect Democrats.

I have no illusion that with the Democrats in power everything will get better, but I do know (from experience) that with Democrats in charge, the pace of the damaging of the country will lessen considerable, and will, in fact, only proceed in fits and starts. As Billmon says in another post:

On the other hand, I definitely have to agree with Bacevich that America's problems go much deeper than the Rovians, notwithstanding the destructive effects of their radical proclivities (to borrow a phrase from Mario Cuomo). Bacevich:

Those who think that merely throwing the rascals out will remedy our problems are deluding themselves.

It's true, but you have to start somewhere.

Right, so let's work on throwing them out and stop with all this posturing bullshit about not voting or going third party. If you're not part of the immediate solution...