While America Was Sleeping - TomDispatch.com

While America Was Sleeping - TomDispatch.com Alfred McCoy, Rip Van Biden's America January 26, 2021 I'm 76 years old, so I have at least a modest feeling for what it must mean, at the age of 78, to enter the White House to preside over a disturbed, deeply divided, and unnerved country. Speaking personally, considering just my own energy levels and the information that my still-quite-functional brain regularly tosses out, I think it should be illegal for anyone to become president at such an age. Yes, I have not the slightest doubt that Joe Biden, a decent man, will be a startling improvement over Donald Trump on issues from immigration to climate change to the pandemic. Given Trump's record, how could he not be? Honestly, just about anyone on this planet would have been. But no less honestly, the man who was a senator for 36 years, vice president from 2009 to 2017, and who's yearned to be this nation's leader since he first tried to run for that office in -- take a breath here -- 1987, should, in my opinion, be thought of as a "used president" (as in a used car). Sadly, perhaps, it may be all too appropriate for just such a man, bringing into his administration a crew of retreads from the Obama era, to preside over a country that now seems to have a used, if not used up, feeling to it. As TomDispatch regular and historian Alfred McCoy, author of In the Shadows of the American Century, suggests today, we already live in what's a distinctly fading imperial power, a place that's no longer the greatest, most indispensable nation on the face of the Earth and, with such an aged president, it now looks it, too. In that sense, you might say that Joe Biden is just reality coming home. His very inauguration should have reminded us all that the disastrous "forever wars" the U.S. launched in the wake of the 9/11 attacks (and that he once supported) could never have truly stayed in distant lands across the planet. It should have surprised none of us that our "new" president was inaugurated in what many have taken to calling a "Green Zone" -- a term first used for the well-guarded part of central Baghdad, heavily fortified by the U.S. military after the occupation of Iraq started to go badly indeed. Inside just such an all-American version of that very zone in Washington, D.C., Biden was protected against his own people, aka "the terrorists," by 25,000 National Guard troops. Meanwhile, the casualties from that other totally botched "war" of this moment, the one against Covid-19, have been rising precipitously to staggering levels in an America whose politicians once loved to call it the globe's truly "exceptional" country. Now, it's exceptional for its pandemic cases and death rates. In short, none of this indicates that the United States, the former "lone superpower" on Planet Earth, is in anything but increasingly poor shape. Let McCoy explain. Tom While America Was Sleeping Waking from a Four-Year Fever Dream to Find Global Power Gone By Alfred McCoy After four years of Donald Trump’s fitful tenure, America is awakening from a long, troubled sleep to discover, like the fictional character Rip Van Winkle, that the world it once knew has changed beyond all recognition. In that classic American tale by Washington Irving published in 1819, an amiable but shiftless farmer strolls out of his colonial village to go hunting in the Catskill Mountains. There he happens upon a group of mysterious men, drinks deep from their keg of liquor, and falls into a long sleep. He awakens to find that he's grown a white beard down to his belly and his youth has withered into an unrecognizable old age. Walking back to the village, he discovers his wife is long dead and their house in ruins. Meanwhile, the sign above the village pub where he whiled away so many pleasant hours no longer bears the face of his beloved King George, the British monarch, but has been replaced by someone named General Washington. Inside, the convivial chatter of colonial days has given way to fervid electioneering for something called Congress, whatever that might be. Incredibly, Rip Van Winkle had slept right through the American Revolution. Click here to read more of this dispatch.