Fall of Empire or Trains, Planes and Automobiles

Lately I've been thinking about the rise and fall of empires. My interest in literature tends toward that of the British empire and its subsequent decline. There is an amazing and varied library of work that comes of the breaking of the English spirit and the rise of the spirits of its former colonies.

America... had such potential as an empire. When it was founded it was fresh, virginal and new. It was uncorrupted and unspoiled. There was food and resources in abundance. Forests rang with the wing beats of birds and plains roared with the hooves of bison. The skies were free and clear and blue. The wind whispered of hope.

But an old sewer bred new diseases. Along with hope came outdated ideas and fractured dreams. But despite this handicap, America thrived and became a world power. Into the 20th century it grew. In part I would attribute this to the expansion of the railroad. With it came the spread of ideas and the ability to communicate in a timely fashion. Riding the rails... you get a sense of a country and the people that inhabit it. Further, the economic and commercial abilities that came with it helped grow the country into an superpower with it's wealth of resources.

Even during the Great Depression, it was a big open country with the promise of a better life just around the next corner.

But then things soured. My guess was it was the invention of commercial air traffic. Business class spread the wealth. But travelling salesmen wanted consistency. There's a Denny's on every highway out of town. Every airport looks more of less the same. There are no particular wonders of creation at any easily reached destination. Somewhere in the skies between New York and LA you miss the fields and farms and people and the forests and children fishing shoeless under a shade tree and the hum from the earth that beats in all our breasts like the heart of humanity. You miss America. It becomes a homogeneous wasteland of Walmarts and McDonalds and airport lounges and graffiti decorated alleyways and garbage strewn highways and big screen TVs. All you remember is the rainbow wigged freak holding a sign on the sidewalk as being the only definition between one day and the next. You could go to sleep in Phoenix and wake up in Springfield and never know the difference. The rooms at the Holiday Inn in Indianapolis are exactly the same as the rooms at the Holiday Inn in Seattle like some kind of wormhole on earth that you'd never known you'd gone through but for the time difference. Art and music and culture have become a hodgepodge of crap. And no one gives a damn. While America still holds world power status, no one really seems to care what goes on over there. Ideas have gone sour but no one wants to import more milk. It's easier to take what they want than to pay for it, to nurture it and reap it. No one learns from the fall of empires. They simply build new ones on the ruins of the old, building an impregnable fortress on quicksand. America is no longer a country. It's a stopping point on route to greater destinations. But in the end, all walls fall down.

The next great empire? I bet most of you said China. You'd be wrong. China might be making big business on the backs of foreigners, but it seems to have little interest in anything outside it's borders beyond money. The next great empire is.... drum roll please.... the Internet.

Violence and You

I have been rethinking my view that violence on TV and in video games is desensitizing toward violence in young people. I never believed it before and I don't believe it now. If anything, I think it is a lack of real violence in today's world that desensitizing. Let's face it, despite what you hear about on the evening news, you don't see a whole lot of real life violence in your daily routine, soccer moms notwithstanding.

In the old days, you got to see a lot of it. Daddy went off to war but the war was in the next field and you found his body surrounded by hundreds of other bodies later on that evening.

You used to butcher your own dinner.

Daddy had too much to drink and took his frustration at the world out on Mommy. Sadly, you might still encounter this.

These days you see it all through the TV. But it's distant. It's far away and over there and someone else. It's not a window or a picture frame. The bodies on the evening news are no different from those in the latest high octane thriller. They're somewhere else and that's movie makeup.

But that's precisely the point of desensitization, you might say. Maybe. But one imagines watching your father get cut to ribbons from across the battlefield might be a little more traumatic. And logic says you're far less likely to go out and kill someone if you're sitting around the living room playing the latest bloodbath FPS than if you're hopped up on PCP and getting into bar fights.

On a semi-related topic, I hear tell in the news that Canadian soldiers returning from Afghanistan are having difficulty readjusting to Western life. They're picking fights, assaulting strangers and wives and generally giving a bad impression of the very professional business of killing people. It seems the training the army provides is too good. The people that have been there and killed other and seen their friends die are disassociating from reality. Is Jack Bauer to blame for violence on the home front? Or are we? Of course, it could be those nasty terrorists.