Excerpts from Second-Rate Nation

[dArKeR]

In 1999 I moved back to the States after living and studying elsewhere for nearly 30 years. During those years, my knowledge of current affairs in America was drawn from only a few mainstream media sources. Moreover, my short, occasional visits to my family in Texas, where I was born and raised, and to Washington, D.C., where I periodically consulted for the National Institute of Education, afforded only limited opportunity to bring myself up-to-date. Consequently, I was unprepared for what I discovered when I resumed residence after a lapse of many years. As I read, watched, and listened to media reports, I detected disturbing signs of fracture. And when my curiosity prompted me to delve beneath the superficial news of the mainstream media by recourse to the Internet, these signs grew to alarming proportions.


The numbers of Americans whom I now discovered to be suffering from homelessness, hunger, imprisonment, unaffordable illnesses, growing income inequality, job stress, mental disorders, poor education, lack of representation, and so on, struck me as oddly incompatible with the economic prosperity that I had heard about only a few years earlier as ushering in a new era of growth and utopia. In fact, the data seemed to inhabit a realm of reality remote from the preoccupations of the mass media, especially on television, where most Americans now gathered their news. And the deeper I delved, the more it emerged that, in spite of its posture of greatness, America was in fact lagging behind most other democratic, industrial nations on numerous indicators of national performance, a backward member of the advanced international community in all but gross wealth, military firepower, and an embarrassingly outdated reputation for justice, civil liberties, equality, democracy, and compassion for the downtrodden—a state of affairs that I painstakingly document in this book. Especially curious was the smug self-assurance with which the media, the nation’s leaders, and the great majority of the public ignored or dismissed the unequivocal evidence of the country’s slide into mediocrity, and either ignored or cast aspersions on anyone who tried to open their eyes to it.

http://www.secondratenation.com/free_excerpt.htm

I can't find this posted. I've been out of the loop for awhile.

This is me too 100% except I find America more dishonest and the people less educated than I remember. The part of 'more dishonest' are the people in the GOP, corporate leaders, prosecutors, ALL media outlets...

[greymattermom]

1. true

And most Americans have never been out of the country, even to Canada, so they believe that America is the greatest. I sometimes wonder who they think all those German tourists at the best spots are and Germans have time and enough cash to go to Florida in the winter and the rockies and grand canyon in the summer when they can't even drive there.