Dominance feels good, doesn’t it?
It’s easy to love the Redeem Team. Four years ago, US Men's Basketball was a joke. Today we’re back on top. If nothing else, Coach K and Co. made patriotism hip again, much to the delight of anyone who can still remember the way things used to be.
They came; they saw; they conquered.
And they left no doubt as to just how keen we are to pound the tar out of the rest of the planet.
The defeatists groused that it couldn’t be done—that the American Empire was in decline, on the hardwood and everywhere else. So much for that. After Beijing, the Red, White, and Blue has its swagger back. Whether that swagger is warranted is utterly beside the point.
Beauty only matters in the eye of the beholder.
Humility only counts in the heart of the humbled.
The American Century may be over, but someone forgot to tell the Americans.
Exceptionalism always dies hard. Forget the credit crunch and the energy crisis. We’re just as mighty as we’ve ever been—or at least we are in our own skulls, which is the only place that’s really real. If you bury your head deep enough in the sands of history, even a has-been can come out looking like a superpower.
City on a hill?
Did it.
Manifest Destiny?
Ditto.
Making peace with the inherently limited scope of our power in an era of multipolar postnational geopolitics?
Well—the boys sure did look good against the Spaniards, didn’t they?
Everybody wants to rule the world. It’s not a neoconservative thing—it’s a human thing, a product of that longing which no man-made border has ever managed to contain. The problem with the US Men's Basketball gold is that it panders too pointedly to our most unfulfillable desires. When you’ve got nowhere to go but down, the last thing you need is a fleeting reminder of how sweet it is to be on top.
There’s no escaping those self-evident truths, Bubba:
That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness—and that Happiness is a whole helluva lot more enjoyable when it comes at the expense of some poor foreigner.
Because there's no hubris quite like jingoistic hubris.
And anyone who tells you the American people are ready to embrace the alternative has made the fatal mistake of only just saying, is all...
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