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The decline of the American empire continues

Three questions kept running through my head in the cool breeze of a November Phoenix evening.
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Three questions kept running through my head in the cool breeze of a November Phoenix evening. Watching the 'Merican mid-term election returns roll in like a red sea of abject Conservatism - necessarily capitalized, notwithstanding the lack of an actual Conservative party, due to this particular brand of populism having nothing whatsoever to do with any tenets of real conservatism - I couldn't help think I'd made an astute investment decision by procrastinating sending in my U.S. passport renewal, it having expired sometime in 2009 as it turns out.

My spirits were buoyed early in the evening when the news flashed that Christine O'Donnell had been trounced in the Delaware senate race. For those of you who don't follow American politics - and, having seen the light, I intend to join your ranks right after I file this column - Chrissy is the postergirl for both the Tea Party movement and institutional idiocy, a distinction requiring a finer grasp of philosophical nuance than I possess.

How dumb is she, I hear you ask? In her concession speech, having read the tea leaves and realized, even with her limited grasp of math, she wasn't a strong enough witch to bridge a gap of 16 percentage points between herself and her opponent, she proclaimed, "Be encouraged - we have won!" No, I'm not making this up. She rilly, rilly is that dumb.

Unfortunately, that was the last good news of the evening, if you happen to have a social liberal and fiscal conservative bent to you. From there on, Pink Floyd's Brain Damage keep looping through my head: "The lunatics are in my hall...."

In state after state, people with short attention spans gleefully handed the reins of power back to Republicans. Apparently there's a strong national longing here, a sweeping sense of sepia-toned nostalgia for the party that dismantled any sensible regulation over the country's banks, leading to the near-collapse of the world's economic system, plunged the country into two quagmires disguised as wars for reasons no one understands to this day, transferred the wealth of the nation to their already wealthy bankers, bagboys and hacks, and cheerfully followed a figurehead who couldn't pronounce nuclear. Ah, the good ol' days.

When it all became too much to endure - a point I knew I'd reached when Californians rejected a proposition to legalize marijuana and I found myself seriously thinking about flipping over to a rerun of Three's Company - I turned off the TV and wondered about those three questions. Has America reached its own tipping point of peak power? Just how dumb is my generation of swine? And, what's a guy like me, a lifelong political junkie with the aforementioned social liberal and fiscal conservative leanings, to do?

Ten years and a day ago, it was almost impossible to imagine the U.S. was at the dawn of a decline the likes of which the world hadn't seen since the Roman Empire imploded. The economy was humming along, the federal budget was in surplus for the first time most of us could remember and the most egregious things Bill Clinton had done were squandering too much political capital on gays in the military and letting Monica show him what collagened lips could mean to an outsized, middle-aged, philandering male libido.

A mostly invisible foundation had already been laid for the disasters to follow but there can be no reasonable argument those man-made and natural occurrences weren't fearfully exacerbated by Bush era neo-cons and their scorched earth policies.

The result is almost unthinkable. Today, the U.S. is a country in decline, seemingly unable to fix the simplest of problems, in complete denial of the economic consequences rolling at them with the speed and power of a killer asteroid, and still casting about for a door to a past that probably never really existed.

It's particularly chilling to hear Vic Toews, Canada's minister of public safety, rationalize ramping up spending for new prison facilities in the face of falling crime rates and imaginary, unreported crimes, by saying Canada isn't as safe as it was when he was a boy growing up in Leave It To Beaverland, North. That's one of the rallying cries of the red-state, right wing nuts elected from coast to coast down here this week. They want to turn back the clock and return to a place that never existed for real. A place where women were subservient, minorities knew their place and the world was their oyster. Amazingly, the entire country, gripped in collective longing for deliverance from the ugly reality of a jobless recovery and foreclosure signs popping up like mushrooms after rain, bought into this particular nightmare. I mean, in celebrity-obsessed America, has anyone seen the Beave lately? That's what happened to that dream. It got old, wrinkled and ugly.

I take no solace in America's decline. I'm not among those north of the border comfortably enjoying the schadenfreude of our neighbour's woes. Canada is still the mouse; the U.S. still the elephant. They sneeze, we catch cold. That reality hasn't changed.

But it appears as though my generation, the boomers, are dumber than even I thought. Dumb enough to embrace McMansions, dumb enough to invent and buy bigger and bigger SUVs, dumb enough to actually believe the person with the most toys when they die wins, dumb enough to drive themselves and the rest of the country into bankruptcy. And now, dumb enough to re-elect the people who most embody those qualities.

And why? Because they still can't grow up. They still believe a supernatural mommy and daddy are going to bail their sorry asses out. They buy into the myth they can have it all and pay for none of it. They get all Pavlovian when politicians say they'll lower taxes and cut government when only one of those statements are disastrously true. The kindest act the younger generations could perform right now would be national patricide. It may be the only way to save us from ourselves.

And what's a guy like me to do? Well, I think I'll take the 75 bucks it would cost me to renew my U.S. passport and buy a couple of shares of Whistler Blackcomb. I think I'll join the ignorantly blissful and stop even thinking global. Think local, act localer. I think I'll go skiing, keep doing volunteer work in my community, get even more involved and narrow my focus and vision to making life better in Tiny Town. How narrow? Emerald to Function. Sorry Pemby, sorry Squamish, you're off my radar. I'm burrowing in for the duration. Wake me for the apocalypse.