David Shribman has been writing worthwhile columns for decades. At COTTonLINE we've been citing his work for the past 13 years.
Today he writes what could be an elegy for this country we love. He compares the post-World War II period in the U.S. to the decades preceding World War I in Europe, as a halcyon period we will wistfully recall as we mourn its passing.
He quotes Canadian author Stephen Marche's 2022 book The Next Civil War which takes this gloomy view.
If the American experiment fails, and it is failing, the world will be poorer, more brutal, lesser. The world needs America, the American faith, even if that idea was only ever a half-truth. The rest of the world needs to imagine a place where you can become yourself, where you can shed your past, where contractions that lead to genocide elsewhere flourish into prosperity.
Shribman follows this with his own sad conclusion concerning our present state and trajectory.
Whatever your view of the causes of the current domestic dystopia, the past several decades in American life — despite the ups and downs of the economy, the crimes and misdemeanors of various politicians, the comings and goings of crises — have been, as Fromkin wrote of pre-World War I Europe, a kind of Eden.The United States was admired around the world, its culture embraced across the globe, its people generally pleased with their circumstances, its rough edges becoming smoothed, its rights being expanded, its blind spots on race and class being subject to the liberating light. Sadly, in this August, it is clear that summer’s over.
Here in the high country Shribman's column feels very timely. The sunlight has begun to take on that slightly amber cast that says autumn approaches.
