An American’s distrust of welfare should come as no surprise. Public assistance threatens what is after all the central doctrine of capitalism: that the incentive to work is born of the burning desire to have, and then to have more.
The public schools of America long ago sank to a level of decrepitude guaranteeing them the sort of dogged scrutiny by blue ribbon commissions reserved for a “crisis” both intolerable and permanent.
Last year Americans spent $30 billion on illegal drugs, while their government spent $1.5 billion trying to shut down their sources of supply.
When a mysterious contagion known as Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome began to kill large numbers of people a few years ago, various moral authorities took solace in the observation that its victims, most of whom were homosexuals or drug addicts, seemed well chosen for divine retribution.
In an age when the peccadilloes of all the traditional idols, from presidents to Miss Americas, are gleefully exposed, athletes totter on their pedestals as the last American heroes.
The book, never a staple American product, seems destined to become a rare and precious object intended only for the cognoscenti who still know how to read.
Almost since its beginning, the nuclear age has defined itself as a tug of war between technicians and diplomats, a match in which the diplomats seem forever doomed to finish in the mud.
Eighty years ago this summer the birth of a new era was announced not by a star twinkling over Bethlehem but by a mushroom cloud rising over Alamogordo. By miraculous intellectual effort mankind had acquired the power to destroy the earth.
Crime long ago emerged as one of those peculiar phenomena of modern life – the permanent crisis.
In the ten years since the last Marine was plucked from the roof of the besieged U. S. Embassy in Saigon, “Vietnam” has come to stand for a good deal more than America’s first military defeat.
Disparaging television has long been a favorite national pastime – second in popularity only to watching it.
In the American religion there stands no icon more sacred than the “free market,” embodying as it does the belief that Americans must trust in the benevolence of unseen forces to fulfill their destiny of wealth and power. In times of economic unrest, however, when factories close down, workers lose their jobs, and towns become impoverished, the prayers to the mysterious market gods give way to cries of anger and disbelief.