Brother Can You Spare a Regression Line?

My Fundamental friend draws my jaundiced eye to this report, cribbed from this Times story, to the effect that "81 percent of respondents said they believed 'things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track,' up from 69 percent a year ago and 35 percent in early 2002." And a little bit of calcium falls from the coral reef of my heart.

Not only is it a fitting sort of justice--proof positive that the great cosmic banks do indeed maintain some karmic balance sheets--for a nation whose habit of rollicking around the playground, kicking other kids toys and throwing mud in their hair, but it also reveals the plumb depths of our cultural depravity and intellectual incoherence, for what kind of perverse, thoughtless positivism leads a person to think that a country or a people has a "direction"? I think it's safe to conclude that in the public mind such direction consists of a shared sense of ever-expanding national prosperity, because from the moment our indoctrination education begins, that's what we're taught. "Progress is our product," as the saying used to go, and nothing so darkens the national mood as the thought that the relentless expansion of fortune might hiccup, let alone actually pause. Americans have no instinct to simply be, which accounts not only for our rampant unhappiness, but also for our inability to leave other people the fuck alone. I would like to believe that our present anxiety will lead to some reconsideration of the hocus-pocus empire we've constructed, will lead us back to some thoughts about community, but something tells me that comeuppance precedes wisdom, alas.