DAVID MICHAEL GREEN: THE SOLE REMAINING STUPID POWER IN THE WORLD

BY DAVID MICHAEL GREEN

I guess I really shouldn't be surprised at the human capacity for stupidity.

I mean, after all, we live in a world where almost the entire human race believes in all-controlling magic deities from outer space. Even though they manifestly never actually control anything. And they never actually appear.

Better still, every culture has its own particular Master of the Universe, and it never occurs to these six or seven billion souls what the simple fact of this embarrassment of competing divinities might imply for the very concept of believing that their particular one is the real deal.

Best of all, though, we hominids are unsurpassed at finding new and improved ways to murder each other en masse in the name of these very same peace-bringing deities.

If the nearly the whole human race is down for that, why should anything surprise me?

Still.

You have to stand in awe at the glory that is America in the early twenty-first century, though not, er, in a good way.

You're looking there at the richest polity ever in human history. It's the greatest military power ever to bestride the planet. It has been endlessly innovative on the technological front, from electricity to automobiles, to aircraft, space flight, splitting the atom, sequencing the human genome, to building the first computers then shrinking those room-size behemoths down to fit in your shirt pocket - only a thousand times more powerful (plus you can call your mom with it, too). This is country that, for all its multiple stumbles and bumbles, pioneered for the world crucial advances in democracy, human rights, diversity, tolerance, class relations, social mobility, civil rights and civil liberties (not so much in our treatment of other people, though - but that's another story). This is a country that succeeded in bringing mass prosperity to its people on a scale never seen before, creating a giant middle class where one of that proportion had never remotely existed before. Whatever else one can say about America (and, regrettably, there is a lot), its place in human history is secure. These are remarkable achievements individually, and they are astonishing collectively.

Which just makes it all the more jaw-dropping to watch such a country commit national suicide, and especially to do so for all the stupidest of reasons. And which makes it hard to imagine that the same country that can rightly boast so many great achievements is capable of such idiocy.

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