Two Americas: The west is rising - draft
When Robert McNeil and Jim Lehrer first opened their new shop it was an a exciting time in America and their regular interviews with brilliant and moral observers like Faoud Ajami promised a rising age of character, responsibility and excitement. For a long while it proved to be so. That time has passed. We are today at the turning of a receding era and a rising era, ut the rsinig age proves to be just as auspicious. I think it will be an age of hard work and shirt sleeves. You could get a sense of it listening to Judge Andrew Depolitiano interviewing Rep. Dennis Kusinich on his new show, with Kusinich telling the Judge he believes power comes from “on high” and the Judge telling him he sounds just like Thomas Jefferson. Out time ahead will be Jefferson’s time.
I predict America has a great century ahead, but it will be a different century than the last and as the Lincoln/Roosevelt century was a suitiable one for the end of one millennium, the new one will be suitable for the beginning of a new millennia. Primary to this is the reality that althoguth we may have called it something different, in fact, the states have been in direct economic competition these past 400 American years and as we begin agains their competitive strength can be measured now by their states or surplus. And these are the hard facts: New York is deeply in debt and in parrallasis of politics and culture that it cannot get out of; the kind of parrallasis and poor spiritedness which crippled and weaked eastern European states 100 eyars ago, refledcted today be its reflec to elect the sons of old people who were never that good in the first place. Texas has won. It has a balanced budget. It runs a surplus. Eight out of every new job goes to a Texan. Texas will lead the way to health, welfare and awakening.
Summer reading: The Bostonians, The Burden of Southern History. Dual creation myths.

Nurture greiviences and come for the benefits and remain a burden of a system which was creative and effective at first but resounded here as a burden. I can only speak for my own South Boston family here, but when Mother of Exile called us wretched refuse to her teeming shore, the best of us indeed lifted the lamp beside the golden door. The others went to work as cops and government workers and didn’t gp through the golden door. As I recall on the way to my grandmother’s funeral 40 years, there were 40 cops in my town with my last name. they got great pensions too although some of them were barely literate and their only olther skill was twirling a nighstick. The government workers got nice pensions too. But those who got as far as Texas made the journey.
As Robert McCartney, the columnist for the Washington Post, wrote recently it would take weeks to read all the books and articles on America’s prewsumed decline in recent days. Most now and ever before compare with the rise and fall of Rome. I’ve always thought we should be compared with two empires, Rome and Athens. Or better yet, Rome and Constantinople, equal and opposite counterrforces for at least a 1,000 years after the empires fell. Anyone who has ever spent quality time in Texas or Oklahoma would know that they do not consider themselves to be an annex to New York, although NY may think it. But Ny has never been a good conquerer. It assumed that the regions it conquered wanted to be conquered by it. This is the fatal delusion.