City Journal is a conservative, occasionally dense webzine former Enron shill Peggy Noonan called "the best magazine in America" and London's
Daily Telegraph "the Bible of the new urbanism." It's the sort of place David Brooks uses to tout Rudy Giuliani's presidential ambitions.
Occasionally, by accident, CJ gets it right. In the current edition Theodore Dalrymple, an acerbic nanny ("...the British are now a nation of drunken brutes, justly despised throughout the world...") visits Dresden. What he gets is a disturbing view of the future of America.
Sixty years after the end of the Second World War, the disaster of Nazism is still unmistakably and inescapably inscribed upon almost every town and cityscape, in whichever direction you look. The urban environment of Germany, whose towns and cities were once among the most beautiful in the world, second only to Italy's, is now a wasteland of functional yet discordant modern architecture...
For 20 minutes on the night of February 13, 1945 - four months before the end of the war - the Royal Air Force firebombed Dresden and utterly destroyed it. During the following two days, the U.S. Army completed the task. Mountains of charred bodies were committed to mass graves. Children were found - boiled - in city fountains where they sought refuge.
This diary isn't about Dresden or the morality of bombing civilians, even evil Nazi civilians. W.G. Sebald, the great German writer who died recently in England, answered that query eloquently with the simple retort: "And the children?"
As we ponder our American empire, an undeniable historical precedent confronts us: no empire has ever survived, and none have declined gently. That's something every German knows.
America could fare better. Yesterday, two dKos diaries pointed to a London Financial Times story about the rather profound threat we face should China decide to invest its capital in Euros rather than dollars. As London Yank revealed in Dollar Dump: Central Banks Shun U.S. Assets, that China is currently "funding" the American empire at the rate of $2 billion per day. The economic collapse that would certainly follow a change in Chinese monetary strategy might be easier for us to bear than an extended military adventure ending in massive defeat.
Either way, however, we Americans have some owning up to do. Bush and his Project for a New American Century cheerleaders are gambling our great-great-grandchildren will be left the task. The Germans are doing it now.
Walking with the widow of a banker through the one small square in Frankfurt that has been restored to its medieval splendor, I remarked how beautiful a city Frankfurt must once have been, and how terrible it was that such beauty should have been lost forever.
"We started it," she said. "We got what we deserved."
Dalrymple presents an interesting moral dilemma. If we profess patriotic fervor and pride in the achievements of our forebears, we deserve the shame for the obvious faults inherent in our efforts. That, too, is something every German knows. It is deep-seated in the culture.
I went to dinner with a young businessman, born 20 years after the end of the war, who told me that the forestry company for which he worked, and which had interests in Britain, had decided that it needed a mission statement. A meeting ensued, and someone suggested Holz mit Stolz ("wood with pride"), whereupon a two-hour discussion erupted among the employees of the company as to whether pride in anything was permitted to the Germans, or whether it was the beginning of the slippery slope that led to ... well, everyone knew where. The businessman found this all perfectly normal, part of being a contemporary German.
Dalrymple's article offers a German rationale for America's global expansion. Bush never claims he's exporting "America" worldwide. He says he's exporting "freedom" and "democracy." Dalrymple on the German version:
...since Germans are very powerful in Europe, by weight of their economy, their need to escape from themselves by absorbing everyone into a new collective identity will sooner or later be perceived in the rest of Europe as the need to impose themselves -- as a return to their bad old habits.
But the world is very different today. With vastly more efficient destructive technology widely available, a relatively powerless nation (can you say North Korea?) or an even less influential underground movement can threaten worldwide havoc. With the slightest nudge, we could unleash the sort of mutually assured destruction we heard about for the entire last half of the 20th century within our lifetimes.
Unless we organize ourselves effectively and educate our families, our neighbors and all our fellow Americans to behave responsibly, a future Dalrymple may write - in Chinese? - an epitaph for the American spirit as dark as this one for Germany's:
As I walked through Dresden, I lamented the loss of an incomparable city, while thinking how difficult it must be to be a German, for whom neither memory nor amnesia can provide consolation.