epitaph...view from afar

Sitting at home typing while The Simpsons, Family Guy & American Dad play on Fox in the background.
It strikes me that some of the heights of American culture can be found watching these shows: satirical animated characters siphoning pop references through subtly subversive commentary, stained with a deep desire to laugh at the caricatures we’ve become in Dubya's America. Self-abnegation as art. Cartoons as windows of self-criticism. A civilization's decadence arrives completely when its best financed artistic endeavors exist to provide self-mockery...

China at the moment is in a much different state of awareness. There is no sense of that despair, in its place is a realization of the raw potential of billions of lives seeking self-actualization. The country has a limitless horizon, growth as far as the eye can see, and a desire to replace 200 years of humiliating colonialism and communism with a vision of a civilization on the ascent. This latest incarnation of China is still forming, still evolving, and they are in a far better situation at the outset of the 21st century than the USA... Next to the Chinese, we Americans look washed up and way past our prime, like Rocky stuttering around after the brain damage he suffered from going 12 rounds with that Russian caricature Ivan Drago, surviving only on a brutish ability to keep taking shots straight on the chin...we're a mess out here in the US...riddled with internal contradictions and beset with carefully orchestrated paranoid campaigns designed to profit from the mental incarceration of frightened people... classes have become stratified, as hypocrisies have compounded. our attention spans are shrinking while our waistbands balloon. we are primed for the inevitable fall from our post WWII perch atop the food chain. Within 10 years, China's economy is projected to expand, until it's larger than the USA's. A 2 billion-strong Chinese nation is right around the corner. It's only a matter of time before we start seeing the world's attention shift accordingly....

…but these are only my feeble opinions, from a progressively jaded man…
…pieces of distorted perspective from the shifting sands on which I stand…