ARE AMERICANS READY FOR POST-AMERICAN CENTURY?

Patrick Smith, Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2013) ("Ours is a singular moment, for the American century is behind us now." Id at 2. "A people given to emotional judgments and occasional fevers, Americans have from the start been trained to accept simplistic myths as truths. In consequence, too many of us are lovers of 'history,' with quotation marks, but take little notice of history." Id. at 7. "I am hardly the first to consider the opening ten years of our new century as America's lost decade." Id. at 13. "Myth is a contaminant; in relation to historical thought it is a corruption." Id. at 30. "Americans did not invent the phenomenon of history without memory. [] But if Americans did not originate it they would over time exhibit a somewhat extreme and prolonged case." Id. at 40. "History without memory is history without time, meaning it is unsusceptible to reinterpretation or change from one generation to the next. It is fixed." Id. at 41. "When was it that Americans began to place more faith in science--science ad the power deriving from it--than in democracy? The question is key because the elevation of science was so essential in creating what I am calling Cold War man. It was science and machinery that won World War II, and the lesson was not lost among the victors. it would be difficult to overstate the extent to which scientific programs altered humanity's relation with the world in the years afterward. This was when Americans began to discover that in science lay security--or at least a seductive illusion of it. Once the thought took hold, it is remarkable how expendable democracy would at times become." Id. at 99. "One of the bequests that comes to us from the nineteenth century is a feature of the individual one finds nowhere else. Action is quite consistently favored over thought or consideration. The latter two, indeed, are somewhat suspect. Heroic Americans, then are heroic for their deeds, not their thoughts or ideas: They act, they assert their wills, accordingly to mythologically derived identities." Id. at 167. The thrust of this collection of essay, to put it in the form of a question, is whether Americans are capable of weening themselves of their myths and being grownup in the post-American-century world? "Do Americans want a future that is different from the present or the past? This question is key. To put it another way, is it possible for Americans to maintain a self-respectful notion of national identity with a new, dis-illusioned history of themselves? Can Americans remember differently--and therefore advance differently, without the nationalist and exceptionalist identity that carried them to 2001? " Id. at 179.).