Mad Dogs and Comfy Sofas
BLOGIRADE
by James Killough
Properly speaking, American Empire is a furniture style, nothing more. There’s always a lot of fretting when we get involved in world policing actions. We are becoming an empire. Or we are already an empire but it is waning. Bret Easton Ellis’s article Notes on Charlie Sheen and The End of Empire is a fun piece of writing and an eccentric take on Sheen, but it’s merely a flight of fancy by a fiction writer. The American Empire is really just a sofa in the Red Room of the White House.
His Majesty Obama tries to relax on an Empire sofa without thinking about Napoleon.
What set me off on this crusade is an article today in The Daily Beast by Peter Beinart, America Doesn’t Matter Any More. This is a rather sensational title for an article that doesn’t really delve into America’s relevance much, other than to muse on our current military strategy in Libya and how Obama is taking a Jeffersonian approach overall to the actions there and in Afghanistan. But the sentiment is implicit in the title. It bemoans our loss of supremacy, and preys on our insecurity that somehow we will lose our position as head of the class with the highest GPA, the perennial valedictorian. Hogwash.