Sometimes you read something and you just can't get it out of your head. Like this paragraph from an article in this past Sunday's Times Magazine:
The sheer number of projects under construction and the corresponding
investment in civic infrastructure — entire networks of new subway systems,
freeways and canals; gargantuan new airports and public parks — can give
the impression that anything is possible in this new world. The scale of these
undertakings recalls the early part of the last century in America, when the
country was confidently pointed toward the future. But it would be unimaginable
in an American city today, where, in the face of shrinking state and city budgets,
expanding a single subway line can seem like a heroic act. “In America,
I could never do work like I do here,” Steven Holl, a New York architect with several large projects in China, recently
told me, referring to his latest complex in Beijing. “We’ve become
too backward-looking. In China, they want to make everything look new. This
is their moment in time. They want to make the 21st century their century. For
some reason, our society wants to make everything old. I think we somehow lost
our nerve.”
The thought that the United States has lost its collective nerve, just as the entire world is in full swing modernization, is astonishing.
But the line that really gets me is this one: "we've become too backward-looking." Something about that line resonates with me. Look around you. Everything in the US feels like a throw-back. Musically, we're stuck in an infinite loop of the 50's through the 80s. Time travel entertainment almost invariably goes backwards. Even "modern" entertainment shows like Battlestar Galactica has a grungy, weathered feel. The issues being debated in our government are mostly issues aimed at maintaining the structures and practices of the past. Mention how far behind the US is in technological penetration (net usage, wireless speed, mobile phone coverage/usage) and people look at you as if you're insane.
This is the United States, we seem to be saying, we're #1.
This is a post-World War II mentality. The Baby Boom generation, bless our little plaque-filled hearts, grew up in an era of cultural, economic, political and military ascendancy. We've (my generational companions and I) always felt that we were the zenith of all things cultural.
"We can change the world, Re-arrange the world," Crosby, Stills and Nash told us. And, we did.
The problem may be that once we did, we seem to have thought we were done. Everything was supposed to stay in place, just where we put it. Just as the rest of the world, Asia in particular at the moment, is leapfrogging into the next era, we're busy debating whether or not we should provide our citizens with universal heath care (cleverly stigmatized as "socialized medicine"; how idiotic, ever hear anyone call it "socialized police protection" or "socialized highway construction"?), distracting ourselves from the kinds of challenges (like national debt, Social Security insolvency and biotechnology innovation) that will soon put us in a position we haven't experienced since the pre-World War I 20th century: behind.
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