Too many curves point downward, too many of the measures of civilization fail. We bask, still, in the waning sunset of a dying greatness, but it won't last. Maybe our time is over. A flourishing economy can hide many evils, and does. Computers grow faster, cellular telephones proliferate, and the Internet, perhaps America's last great contribution to the world, advances apace.
Employment is high, masking for the moment the rot beneath.
Decline, if it comes, as it comes, will be comfortable, a moral and spiritual sump instead of a time of starvation. Yet it is decline. Society coarsens around us. Courtesy withers, vileness flourishes, foul language pours from the radio and the screens that circumscribe our lives, along with witless violence, grotesquerie vying with bloody grotesquerie, with perversion, sadism, and casual murder. We no longer avoid the gutter, but bathe in it.