This article, on the inevitable 'end of empire' all thinking people have been waiting for...the naming of it, not the concept, which has been on our minds for some time now...is brilliantly crafted. From this morning's Times of London. (bold-face is mine)

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Rusty superpower in need of careful driver

Obama built his campaign on a positive vision, but in reality he will be the first US President to manage an empire in decline
Matthew Parris

How often does a leader know, before he asks us for our votes, what office will ask of him? He mouths the promises of the moment but history may have a different task in mind. The role may be glorious, it may be tedious, but - count on this - it will be different.

Barack Obama declares and believes that he will change America, and that this "makes possible incredible change in the world".

The accent throughout has been on the positive. Making things possible has marked the whole tenor of his campaign. Hope, optimism, ambition, confidence, reform amounting almost to renaissance - such has been his appeal. "Yes, we can" was a cocky, but not an empty slogan. A deep and swelling sense of the possible, focused on America's future but rooted in America's past, has dominated the struggle for the presidency. It would hardly be an exaggeration to call Mr Obama's promise transfigurative.

But maybe destiny has other plans. America's fate in the half-century ahead is not to be transfigured, but to be relegated. Steering your team through a relegation can be as important a test of leadership as handling a promotion, but it is a different test. Though he may not yet know it, the role for which the US President-elect has been chosen is the management of national decline. He will be the first US president in history to accept, and (if he has the gift) to teach, not the possibilities but the constraints of power.

The fate of his predecessor George W.Bush was to test almost to destruction the theory of the limitlessness of American wealth and power - and of the potency of the American democratic ideal too. With one last heave he pitched his country into a violent and ruinous contest with what at times seemed the whole world, and the whole world's opinion. He failed, luminously.

But maybe somebody had to. Maybe we shouldn't be too hard on President Bush for donning a mantle hardly of his own making but a well-worn national idea created in the triumph and hegemony of victory in the Second World War. Maybe somebody had to wear those fraying purple robes one last time and see how much longer the world would carry on saluting; to pull the levers of the massive US economy one last time and see if there was any limit to the cash that the engine could generate; to throw the formidable US war machine into two simultaneous foreign wars and test - and find - a limit.

Eight years later it's haemorrhage, not regeneration, that the Obama presidency will have to nurse as it looks ahead. Europeans tend to consider presidential prospects in terms of US foreign policy - and there's much bleeding still to do in Afghanistan - but the incoming president's dominating concerns will surely be domestic and economic, and the two are spliced.

As a keen amateur car mechanic I have, since the age of 16, been puzzled by something about America. Here was a nation crazy about automobiles and held out to me as the last word in modernity, innovation, capitalist dynamism and go-ahead technology in all that it did. But its cars weren't any good. I say "weren't" - we're talking 1965 here - because some commentary about the current woes of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler has suggested that it is in recent years that the US automotive industry has slipped behind; and it's certainly only quite recently that they've started losing a lot of money.

But the product, though always flashy, has been technologically inferior since the end of Second World War. While European carmakers were pioneering front-wheel drive, independent suspension, small diesel engines and efficient automatic gearboxes, the Americans kept churning out big, thirsty, fast-rusting, primitively engineered behemoths. Partly this was because fuel was cheap, but the oversprung American limo, loose-handling and imprecise, was always a pig to drive, too. At root the problem was lack of competition.

And when I visited America, first as a boy then as a postgraduate student (in the 1970s), what struck me was not the modernity of modern America, but its inefficiency and old-fashionedness. The bureaucracy was Stone Age, the postal service unreliable, medical and dental treatment twice the cost of private treatment in England, and government officials treated you like serfs. People lived richly and worked hard - that was undeniable - but in a parallel universe clumsily and wastefully managed, and beset with internal friction. You couldn't even get a bank account that worked properly outside your state; and, for all the ostentatious vigour of retail competition, there was a curious lack of diversity in product choice. Though infinitely more successful and politically free, it was in some indefinable way more like the Soviet Union than either country would have wished to acknowledge.

What (I now think) I was encountering as early as 40 years ago was an ageing empire, losing its edge, almost imperceptibly losing its immense economic momentum, but still indecently wealthy and impervious to the emerging challenge of competition.

Rather suddenly, all this has caught up with it.

Mr Obama's vision of change - love, brotherhood, welfare, green politics and a new spirit of idealism - could now prove as irrelevant to the challenges a new president finds himself confronting as is David Cameron's early compassionate conservatism to his stern message today.

Both men's first drafts of politics got them to the launch pad; neither will fuel their rockets after lift off.

Instead, Mr Obama will face hard choices about how much of what America does (and what Americans do) can be afforded any longer; the next four years may be the worst possible time for hugely expensive healthcare reforms, a generous helping hand to the world's poor or a new military surge in Afghanistan.

In 2009 the US national debt will surge by $2trillion: some 70 per cent of gross domestic product. In these circumstances the questions must be: What can we cut? Where can we pull out? What can we stop doing that we're doing now? Mr Obama's fight - if fight he must - will be with the forces of economic protectionism, with anti-immigrant sentiment and with organised labour feather-bedding, pension protection and job protection.

But first, and underlying all these scraps, Mr Obama will have to find a way of being honest with Americans about their country's fall from predominance. Reading, as I often do, the furiously chauvinistic online reaction from US citizens to any suggestion that their country can be beaten at anything, I quail for him.

We British know something about the loss of empire. Successive 20th-century prime ministers struggled both to manage relative national decline and to make it explicable to the electorate. It is upon this road that 21st-century American presidents must now set foot. Mr Obama will be the first. "Yes we can!" was an easy sentiment to recommend. "No we can't," will be a far, far harder thing to say.

Getting Back to the Garden

The Obama Presidency Symbolizes the Recovery of the Youth Within — Reconnecting Us With the High Ideals and Aspirations of Our Youthful Selves.

We are stardust, we are golden,
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden.

Joni Mitchell, Woodstock

For me, the seemingly eternal presidential campaign that ended with the election of Barack Obama turned on a single sting of images.

During the second debate between the two candidates in early October, the one with the ‘town-hall’ format moderated by Tom Brokaw, I found the body-language of the two men so compelling that at a certain point I turned off the sound on the TV and just watched them dance around the little arena surrounded by neat banks of well-dressed citizens. Obama was as sprightly and bright-eyed as a young spaniel. He stood straight and smiled disarmingly, and when he shifted his body position he glided easily from place to place.

McCain, on the other hand, his shoulders hunched up and his head bent, lurched around almost robotically. He seemed neck-less, stuffed into a too-small suit, a handicap that restricted his mobility and made his movements jerky. Over his tired eyes worry-lines waved like a fear-flag before disappearing into his thin white hair.

With the sound off, Obama appeared like a youthful Romeo; McCain a scheming, misshapen Richard III or worse, a furious Lear. I had made my own mind up months earlier, but this evening, I thought, not only clinched the election for Obama, but was what the election was really about. The next morning Tom Shales, the TV critic for the Washington Post, observed telegraphically what could not have been missed on the millions watching that night: ‘Brokaw looked old. McCain looked old. Obama looked young.’

What has unfolded in the past few weeks and months is nothing less than the stuff of myth. The great changing of the guard in our culture — and it is now a world culture — signals a renewed hope in the future and the recovery of our own youthful high ideals and aspirations.

In the world of symbols, dreams, and archetypes, the exhausted husk of the old yielding to the fresh energy of the young is a natural and necessary occurrence. It is Saturn, the old king, fading into the background so that Jupiter, the new king, can reign: the king is dead — long live the king! It is the Death Card of the Tarot, which signifies the transformation from the old and useless to the new and useful. It is the archetype of the Destroyer, — Shiva, Angra Mainya, Cailech, and all the other gods of Darkness — laying waste the past in order to make room for the next thing.

If we are to have a new world, the old world must die. The only other option is to cling to that which we know — and sink with it like the victims of the Titanic (another apt symbol for the end of the old way of doing things and no accident that the story of the ‘unsinkable’ ship has resurfaced, to widespread popularity, in our time) into the sea.

We may think it a coincidence that Barack Obama's grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, died the day before the election, but in the land of myth this event fits perfectly with the archetypal pattern of passing the scepter. In dream language, the grandmother stands for all the ancestors back to the edge of time; when she dies, the hero, leading on the new generation, can at last live fully and express himself in the world.

Without knowing it (these things are always unconscious), the greatest compliment McCain gave Obama during the campaign was to call him inexperienced. McCain, as the symbol of the ‘experienced’ — the old and used-up — was uttering his own death sentence and writing his own epitaph.

* * * *

The great transformational drama playing itself out on the stage of our collective imagination has a special meaning and a particular poignancy for members of the Baby Boomer generation, my generation. I was surprised to find out a few years ago that the 78 million boomers in the United States are only a small part of the estimated 450 million Baby Boomers world-wide, mostly in the industrialized countries, which is to say, in the countries involved in the mid-century world war.

The name of the revolutionary epic at hand is the Recovery of the Youth Within, wherein we who were born in huge numbers all over the world between 1946 and 1964 identify ourselves with the youthful new president and pick up, as if returning to a bookmark in a treasured volume we never finished reading, the elevated ideals of our own youth.

Those aspirations, forged in the furnace of the 1960s, were wrought from the burning desire to be wholly realized persons, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. The vision was an Aquarian dream of humankind as a vast interconnected tribe living in peace on a planet we had turned into a garden by our loving stewardship. It was about making ourselves and the world better, first by living personal lives of integrity, awareness, and depth, then by completing ourselves through service in the world: maturing to adulthood as a spiritual path.

The boomer generation grew up in a unique historical moment: at the end of World War II, when there was prosperity, a sense of expectation, and hope about the future. As the boomers came of age, they pushed every imaginable social hot button, expanding the universe of choices people have, from civil rights to women's rights to gay rights.

They became the most highly educated and wealthiest generation in history with a spending power of $2 trillion dollars a year. But they have spent far more than they have saved — much of it on themselves — part of a legendary self-indulgence that has a shadow side.

‘When you look at us, we're the most obese generation, the most drug-abusing — and we cause the most crime problems. We show the biggest increase in AIDS and new HIV infections,’ says University of California-Santa Cruz sociologist Mike Males. ‘The conventional wisdom is that in our youth we were a wild generation — all kinds of partying, drugs, and political protest. And then when we got older, we settled down and became very austere and clean living. But that's not happened at all. We’ve actually gotten worse as we've aged,’ Males says.

What became of the spiritually imbued promise of our youth? We had imagined a world where there would be ‘harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding,’ in the words of Hair’s anthem, ‘Aquarius.’ While we have grown in years, we may not have matured emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. Our entire generation appears to have gotten stuck in a kind of perpetual adolescence of self-absorption, greed, materialism, and laziness.

Can Democratic primary voters have seen in Hilary Clinton and her blustering husband the embodiment of that narcissistic and self-indulgent side of the boomer character, and rejected it? If so, it may be the first sign that we were ready to awaken from the long spiritual slumber into which we had sunk.

* * * *

This is the vital importance to boomers of the Obama presidency: he is the symbol of our recovered youth, and the promise of a second chance to change ourselves and, by so doing, change the world. Whatever we may be expecting him to do now that he is president, in a way he has already served the metaphorical purpose of the moment: simply by being there, he has brought all of us to a place where we can reclaim the Youth within and rise from there to a spiritual adulthood.

Whether we actually will pick up the journey we began long ago, before we were detoured by the psychopathologies of our leaders, which were our own weaknesses magnified and projected, remains to be seen. On election night the CNN exit polls showed that boomers (Americans aged 45-64) voted 50% for Obama (the future) and 49% for McCain (the past), indicating that we may be ambivalent about or afraid to commit to the challenge of restoring our youthful ideals. Will we rise up to finish the humanitarian, world-healing work we envisioned or remain comfortably on the couch? This one may be too close to call.

But the tide of the times, led by a man who also represents the integration of our shadow (Obama is half-black, half-white), could be so compelling as to be irresistible. We might imagine a loud rush of wings from all quarters, led by boomers all over the planet rediscovering themselves in the presidential avatar — us, but young. George Eliot says, ‘It is never too late to be what you might have been.’

Beginning the last third of our lives, we may at last be able to create the heaven on earth we imagined in our youth, when we had neither the resources nor the power to bring it about — by becoming fully realized, by becoming, finally, truly and in all ways adult.

If the election of Obama has taught us nothing else, it has brought home the clear and uplifting message, so woefully missing from the lexicons of recent occupants of the office: We can be better. We can make the world better. Yes we can.



Joseph Dispenza is the co-founder of LifePath in San Miguel and the author of several books, including God On Your Own: Finding a Spiritual Path Outside Religion. He is a Spiritual Counselor in private practice. joseph@lifepathretreats.com