even optimists...

[bifurcate:
to divide, or fork, into two branches]
-------------------------------

Yesterday by chance began reading some about industrial designer Raymond Loewy:

Never Leave Well Enough Alone,
(The Johns Hopkins Press)
autobiography of an industrial designer named Raymond Loewy, who moved to America from France.

[excerpts from the autobiography's Introduction, written by Glenn Porter]-------------


“The whole world admires and envies American products, American appearance, American quality.” The nation “should, and I believe will, take advantage of this receptive attitude,” he forecast. He lamented the fact that “no one has yet been able to make [democracy’s] high spiritual values of freedom, liberty and self-respect a ‘packaged’ item to be sold to the rest of the world.”

But consumer capitalism and American products offered “substitute solutions.” “The citizens of Lower Slobovia may not give a hoot for freedom of speech,” he asserted, “but how they fall for a gleaming Frigidaire, a streamlined bus or a coffee percolator.” Here was the key to victory in the Cold War, and to the extension of a democracy of consumption at home.

------ [end excerpt]
"The whole world admires and envies American products, American appearance, American quality." "...democracy's high spiritual values of freedom, liberty and self-respect"...

the idea of winning the Cold War -- and ending it -- and making life better here in our own country as well...those things he talked about there were familiar thoughts & ideas and beliefs we grew up with...The part about the gleaming Frigidaire meaning more to people than freedom of speech seemed a little harsh & cynical to me, but a person can see by reading the rest, where he was going with it.

"Lower Slobovia"...hmmmh. Who was he insulting with that phrase? I've heard that term before, but not much, or for a long time -- Wikipedia says,

Lower Slobbovia (also sometimes called Outer, Inner, Central, Upper or Lowest Slobbovia) is an imaginary nation used in conversation to denote a non-specific, faraway country—generally connoting a place which is underdeveloped, socially backward, remote, impoverished or unenlightened. First coined by Al Capp (1909–1979), the term has also been used by Americans to refer in an informal way to any foreign country of no particular distinction.

[end Wikipedia excerpt]

------------------------

The consumer-economy comments made me think of nyt book review this week:
[excerpt -- Jonathan Rauch's review of Time To Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent, author Edward Luce]

As was true of Japan a generation ago, only much more so, China's obvious strengths cover underlying flaws and weaknesses. Its government is corrupt, rigid and (of course) authoritarian. Its economy is rife with politically imposed distortions. Its schools, like Japan's, rely heavily on rote instruction, good for playing economic catch-up but not so good for taking the lead. Its infrastructure buildup, also like Japan's, feeds on an unsustainable diet of political cronyism and environmental depredation. And its message to the rest of the world is less "Give us your huddled masses" than "Give us your precious minerals." If I had to bet on one system being in decent working order a generation from now, it would be ours, not theirs.

No, this is not an argument for complacency. Luce is right: America's economy and political system are both in worse shape than they have been in a long time, and their dysfunctions seem to feed on one another. His more compelling case, and the country's bigger worry, concerns absolute decline.

True, declinism has been wrong in the past (and I was among those who said so). America has an almost miraculous capacity for self-renewal. Right?

This time, however, that's not so clear. In recent years, productivity improvements have decoupled from incomes, so that between 2000 and 2007, as the economist Robert J. Shapiro notes, "for the first time on record, the incomes of most Americans stagnated or fell through ostensibly good times." Men have seen their earnings drop and have been withdrawing from the work force. Inequality has grown markedly, with not only the incomes but the lifestyles and lifetime prospects of the top and bottom bifurcating. [Had to look up that word.]

No one is really confident of what to do about these things, any one of which would be a challenge. ...Even optimists need to wonder if this time America is entering its own lost decade, or two.
-------[end excerpt]

------------
------------
-------[excerpt from Jonathan Freedland's review of two books -- America and the Crisis of Global Power, author Zbigniew Brzezinski, and The World America Made, author Robert Kagan]

And yet the great surprise is how much they agree with each other, especially on what matters. They both insist that reports of America's decline are exaggerated.

["Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated."
-- Mark Twain]

Both note that the United States still accounts for a quarter of the world's gross domestic product, a proportion that has held steady for more than 40 years. Both note America's military strength, with a budget greater than that of all its rivals combined. As Brzezinski puts it, on every measure "America is still peerless."

Usefully, Kagan states that much of the current decline talk is based on a "nostalgic fallacy," imagining a golden past in which America was all but omnipotent.

There never was such a time, he says, not even during those periods now remembered as the glory days of American might. Still bathing in the flow of total victory in World War II, the country watched events in China, Korea and Indochina that, Dean Acheson lamented, were "beyond the control of the...United States." In 1952 Douglas MacArthur warned of "our own relative decline." Indeed, Kagan shows that declinism is as old as America itself:

in 1788, Patrick Henry was ruing the Republic's fall from the days "when the American spirit was in its youth."

Kagan's message is that America has been gripped by these fears before, only to bounce back: "Anyone who honestly recalls the 1970s, with Watergate, Vietnam, stagflation and the energy crisis, cannot really believe the present difficulties are unrivaled."
------ [end excerpt]

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