Since it is book club day, I thought I’d mention a book or two.  I am reading Kissinger’s China and Friedman/Mandlebuam’s That Used to Be Us (TUBS).  They are recently released political tomes.  The first one is about China.  Duh!  And the second one is about the USofA and how it has slipped relative to China.  And the rest of the world.  It’s about how and why America is slipping. 

Kissinger tells us how it was – when China was ‘opening up’.  And F/M tells us how it is now that the US has lost it’s moral and ‘values’ compass at a particularly bad time.

Even though K’s China is history, it is such recent history it feels current.  And even tho F/M’s TUBS  is current, it reads as if it is a prophecy for the next year or so.  Both are published by the Time Warp Continuum.

I’m joking.  China is a Penguin book, F/M TUBS is Farr/Strauss.   

There is too much in both books to try to summarize here but a really interesting point for me was made by F/M.  They contend that one of the foundations of the American Dream Society (that everyone wants to copy) is a faith in government and social institutions.  The problem, it seems, is that we in North America are losing such faiths in droves. 

Of course, one of the foundations of the Chinese Way is complete supplication to and 99% percent faith in their government and institutions.  So, F/M may be on to something.

There are other significant factors at work in this global flux but the parallels between China and the USA are not as close in other areas as they are with regard to faith and belief in the basic social structures.  The Chinese are still adhering to the social contract and the USA, it seems, is not.

Makes some sense.  Wall Street is really just a manifestation of group optimism or pessimism writ large, they say. 

But the reason I mention it in my blog, this cerebral tangent of why things are the way they are, is because F/M wrote about – put into words succinctly – what I feel and what I felt strongly enough to remove myself to living off-the-grid.  So, in that way, it is relevant to this blog.   

They attribute the fall(ing) of our modern society to an erosion of ‘old fashioned’ values, a disrespect for leaders, institutions and government and a loss of ‘commonality’,  togetherness, community, national identity and all that sort of thing.

And they think we just might be going to hell in a handbasket after all.

The really funny thing is that I would ever feel that way.  I have never really felt as if I belonged to a community (the Liveaboard Community in False Creek a possible but weak and small exception).  I don’t think I ever really respected authority, institutions or modern values that much either.  And I only feel a sense of being Canadian when I am in another country or when yet another Federal/BC politician embarrasses me by speaking in public. 

How did I lose something I never thought I had?

Well, the answer is simple: it is not about me.  It is about the US of A, isn’t it?  Seems they were all on the same team til some indeterminate time after WW2.  Since whenever they went from ‘we’ to ‘me’ (the ME generation in the 80’s was when it was rampant and obvious – when did it start?), the foundations have been crumbling.  Since whenever they started saying ‘Gotta make a buck!’ instead of ‘how can I help’, they’ve lost their way.  Since whenever they opted for the short term instead of the long term, their future was doomed.  They went myopic while, at the same time, the world went global.

And wherever the US goes, we seem to follow.  

Or so says F/M, anyway.

Interesting.  I am not so sure that ‘out here’ on a tiny remote island is so much better than ‘out there’ in the madding crowd but there is no doubt old fashioned values show up here.  There is clearly a respect for our little institutions (emphasis on little) and there is no doubt that we have an identity (OK, not such a glamorous one, I admit).  We seem to have some of the basics for keeping it together.

We are the future! (don’t quote me)