The Hero Created Himself; The Celebrity Is

As Individuals And As A Nation, We Now Suffer From Social Narcissism. The Beloved Echo Of Our Ancestors, The Virgin America, Has Been Abandoned. We Have Fallen In Love With Our Own Image, With Images Of Our Making, Which Turn Out To Be Images Of Ourselves.

Historians Will Not Fail To Note That A People Who Could Spend $300 Billion On Defense Refused To Spend A Tiny Fraction Of That Total To Keep Their Libraries Open In The Evening.

I Write To Discover What I Think.

America Has Been A Land Of Dreams. A Land Where The Aspirations Of People From Countries Cluttered With Rich, Cumbersome, Aristocratic, Ideological Pasts Can Reach For What Once Seemed Unattainable. Here They Have Tried To Make Dreams Come True. Yet Now... We Are Threatened By A New And Particularly American Menace. It Is Not The Menace Of Class War, Of Ideology, Of Poverty, Of Disease, Of Illiteracy, Or Demagoguery, Or Of Tyranny, Though These Now Plague Most Of The World. It Is The Menace Of Unreality.

Until Now When We Have Started To Talk About The Uniqueness Of America We Have Almost Always Ended By Comparing Ourselves To Europe. Toward Her We Have Felt All The Attraction And Repulsions Of Oedipus