Is Bill Maher Predicting The End Of The World?

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Bill Maher, the comedian and abrasive political satirist, wrote a book earlier this year: New New Rules (How everybody but me has their head up their ass).  The link takes you to a Amazon Kindle application that lets you read the foreword.  This post is more about the review of the book by one Herbert Calhoun.

Mr Calhoun appears to take the view that Bill Maher is a prophet foretelling the doom of America as we know it.

Trying to describe America, in my very humble opinion, is like the proverbial blind men trying to describe an elephant.  I have been for thirty years decrying the fact that there is no national health care system, but for thirty years my friends have told me that it would never work.  Why?  After all, they have it in Britain, and in Asian countries, and it works, despite the rampant corruption in those countries.  Because America, they say, is too big.

Well, America is hardly bigger than India, with close to half a trillion souls (half of them as sick as dogs).  But, as far as I can tell, in India there is still a sense of national identity.  (Those of us who live outside India can't really analyze that phenomenon, but I suspect that it is waning, and only survives in part because of the presence of America on the one hand, and Pakistan and China on the other.)  In the USA, national identity is entirely different, and corruption is also entirely different than it is elsewhere in the world.  This is an important point, which many Americans will grant right away, without quite understanding the actual differences.  Our national identity is bigger and better than any other national identity, we will say, thinking that we have fought harder for it, and we have forged it in the face of massive waves of immigration for several centuries.  Well, at least two.  (Our corruption, we will be thinking, is also bigger and better than you'll find anywhere else.)

Many liberals --among them Bill Maher-- as well as many conservatives are gazing on current events with horror.  If you read Maher's book (which I haven't) you will probably see the reasons why both sides of the political divide are horrified.  It appears that many American institutions are being subverted.  It used to be that you could depend on real estate investments.  No longer.  It used to be that a new President could solve at least some of the problems identified by one party or the other.  No longer.  It used to be that new technologies would reliably result in jobs in America.  No longer.  It used to be that if you were educated enough, you could always find a job.  No longer.  It used to be that in both parties, at least one of the candidates was someone whose ideals you could identify with.  It used to be that every spring you could depend on a flood of young people flooding the employment market with high idealism.  We could depend on Europe as a market for our high-tech exports.  We could depend on snow every winter.  We could safely take a vacation in Mexico.  We could board a plane flight in 2 hours.

Some of us have obviously been taken by surprise.  We are better than this, they cry, thinking of the conditions that have changed due to shenanigans on Wall Street and in Washington.  It has been a long process, but some of us are just beginning to realize that the murder and mayhem in Mexico is driven by the huge drug profits in America.  But wait; can a few little black kids skulking in parking lots account for all that drug money?  No; it's wealthy folks whose drug habits are never in the news.  Rich Americans are spending more money on drugs than ever before.  They're just a lot better at not getting caught.

Lots of things are alarmingly different.  Health care is gradually getting worse in the USA.  For the very rich, it is true that more diseases can be cured today that in earlier decades.  But it is useless for us middle class folks, because inexplicably our deductibles are going up, and our treatment limits are going down.  Education is worse, because teachers increasingly have to cope with students who don't really do any work at home, so that the few who do their homework feel that they may as well stop doing it.  It's a vicious spiral based on a weird understanding of "fairness".  Teacher, be fair: kids who don't do their homework are people too.  Dean, be fair: kids who don't study deserved to pass, too.  They did pay their fees, after all.  We didn't pay $200K to your school just to flunk out, you know.

But it is not the end of the world; things will keep spiraling towards chaos, but we will keep inventing ways of avoiding total disaster.  But we're going to see a sequence of disasters that are just a little this side of total.

Is it fair that a few of us should keep our fingers in the dikes, while the rest of us just use our indignation to march around doing nothing?  Well, it's always been that way.  The average citizen has always been noisy about his or her rights, but not about his or her responsibilities.  A few have always gone about cleaning up everybody else's hamburger wrappers and cigarette butts.  A few of us have always organized those study groups at the end of the semester, and helped our dysfunctional buddies to learn their periodic freaking tables.  Is it fair?  It's just what makes us us.

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