This conclusion is now inescapable: America has become a swarming bin of lunatics, and that would have been fine if Americans were confined to their own borders.  Let them howl, rend, and tangle amongst themselves in their boundless madness.  The unacceptable facet of this situation is that these psychopaths control a global military, mercenary, surveillance, and subversive intelligence network of historically unprecedented vastness, and as a direct result of this limitless capacity for coercion, also believe that every other place and people on the planet is subordinate and must submit to American dominance. 

America has been spending fantastic amounts of resources to develop ever more efficient weaponry at least since the Second World War when it mounted to the throne of God with its development and deployment on Japan of the atom bomb.  The hubris inspired by the bombing (and the word 'bombing' is virtually a euphemism) of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians went on to intoxicate the nation.  That hubris has driven America to become a military-corporate-financial world Empire ever since, and this fact is effulgent in the words of Harry Truman, August 6th, 1945: "It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East."  Since 1945, America has seen itself as The One Big F@!#ing Hammer, and every other nation and people on the planet has looked to it like, and had damned well better act like, a nail.

Invariably, articles and posts decrying the disappointing real state of affairs in the United States present their observations in terms of temporal equivocation. They write that this mythical collective of unified Americans known editorially as "we" need to change this, that, and everything else about the current state of affairs in America "before it's too late."

Regardless of whether the observation takes in America's rampant social and economic inequality, the stark injustice of its legal system, its decaying and neglected infrastructure, its abandonment of public education, its grossly overpaid and opportunistic government officials, its greedy and ruthless corporations and banks, its institutionalized bigotry, its over-extensive and coercive global military, its intrusive and subversive "intelligence" operations, its support of undemocratic client and puppet regimes and suppression of those "rogue" regimes that to do not submit to America's global capital empire, and other facets, the time-frame is always placed safely in the future. None of these suboptimal states have really happened, yet. They will always and ever be looming in the unreality of potentiality.

It is a rhetorical means of ontological etiolation. The being, the actuality, of the thing is drained away to leave only the words.  The reality of the matter is flattened and rendered impotent, moot.

This always results in the naïve and impotent admonition that if "we" do not "wake up" and act together, and soon, to change things from the ground up, these awful states of affairs could, some day, come true.

But, this and that dismal state of affairs already exists, and many have existed for years, decades, even centuries, and this is blatantly obvious to anyone whose mind is both ideologically unclouded and well-educated enough to recognize it.

In the minds of such authors and so, too, in their audiences, these dismal and even shameful states of affairs are still looming, impending, still not yet actually happening. We are still those pure and unsullied Americans that populate our mythology, our white-washed history, and who comprise our national identity as we cognitively observe these things that we have done and are doing from a secure psychic and moral distance, as though "we" hadn't yet committed them. It is an amazing cognitive maneuver of self- and social and cultural absolution and expiation.  A moral defense mechanism and carte blanche means of self-justification.

It is also the basis of utter irresponsibility and hypocrisy, and it is built-in to the American mind.