As long as we’ve had writing, every generation worries that the next generation will face a decline. Certainly in some periods this opinion has had ascendancy and in some periods it’s receded. I remember studying Augustine in Western Civ as an undergraduate and the poignancy of his desperately wanting the best of Roman custom preserved when the barbarians were at the gate. In Augustine’s time, at least, the pessimism was warranted. Perhaps Yeats composed the poem from which this blog draws its name in a similar time:

That “ceremony of innocence” is a recurring theme for Yeats–although he wrote “The Second Coming” in the Wasteland period immediately after the First World War and before the gyre had truly begun to widen. In 1920 prosperity compensated for the feeling of progress’s shattered illusion. Likewise, the post-Cold War 1990s with all their talk of the End of History have some similarity to the 1920s, the 1929 Crash then, paralleling 9/11.

Ahh, for the days when the American hyperpower’s greatest concern was whether our leader had procured a blowjob from a young intern! Today’s problems seem so much more critical, the American collapse so much more abrupt, as though Obama is the American Gorbachev, exposing all the fissures long hidden under an ephemeral illusion of strength.