View From a Baltic Balcony - Newsweek

[Stockholm]

By Howard Fineman
Newsweek

Aug. 15, 2005 - STOCKHOLM, Sweden—The large white yacht with no markings is roughly the size of Cleveland, and it is moored at a dock in the middle of this gorgeous city of islands and water, right across a harbor from my hotel. It’s trimmed in green neon, which at night gives the vessel an intriguing, vaguely ominous look. Everybody in town knows who the owner is: Larry Ellison, the American who gave the world Oracle, the data-base-management software. He obviously travels in grand style.

But, as an American abroad, I wish I could say that the Good Ship Ellison is symbolic of our nation’s current role in the world. Instead, the yacht reminded me of another ship here—the famous Vasa, an oak-hulled warship launched with great fanfare in these same waters in 1628, at the height of Sweden’s century of military domination in the Baltic. Top-heavy with cannons and rigging, the Vasa sank within a mile of her christening. Hauled from the muddy deep in the 1960s, she now stands miraculously intact in Stockholm’s most popular museum, a reminder of glory—and the folly of lashing the ambitions of a society to military conquest.

I am not a foreign correspondent, but, as a student, writer and traveler I have spent a good bit of time abroad. If I have a bottom line this time it is this: we remain in every sense the world’s only hyperpower, the only nation seriously reaching for the stars, the only nation with the stated goal of bringing peace and freedom to the entire planet, the only nation that, soon enough, will possess no single ethnic or racial majority. We are—and we will remain—the lead story in the news from Earth.

And yet, paradoxically, the world is moving on without, perhaps in spite of, us. On a two-week trip to Northern Europe, Scandinavia and Russia I saw more evidence than I had in the past that all the talk of America as “hyperpower” is misleading, even dangerous. Except in the sphere of military power we don’t really run the planet. And if economic and cultural trends continue unabated, all the gun ships and megayachts won’t matter, either. “Globalization” is real, but it isn’t quite “Americanization” anymore.

more http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8963549/site/newsweek/

[Why Syzygy]

1. sounds about right

green neon. That's all we've got.

Bully in the school yard. Ever see one succeed? I think not.

We would do well to learn from long standing civilizations.

Goddess have mercy.