USA

Elon Musk has told a tragic and hilarious story about his run-ins with the government when he was trying to get SpaceX in the air. It’s the kind of thing that explains why America’s greatness is slipping, and the world will suffer for it.

In her relatively short lifespan compared to the world’s other nations, America has generated an extraordinary number of new ideas or refinements on old ideas. This explosive creative energy has rescued humankind from the stagnation of the old world. And yes, the beauties of the old world as much as the next tourist, but the reality is that, for the most part, the operating theory was that because what they’d done worked, there was no need to change.

In 1968, the film Planet Of The Apes ended with the then-shocking shot of a half-submerged Statue of Liberty, revealing that the future dystopian world was none other than our own. The revelation has been part of Western consciousness for quite some time. The Bible continuously warns that if the Land does not have its Sabbaths, the Lord will impose them. It is a fixture of Western consciousness that some day the West, like every other civilisation, will die.

Every Victorian reader understood allusions to The New Zealander, a rhetorical figure in Thomas Macaulay’s 1840 essay. He was a traveller to a long-vanished civilisation, and gazes, uncomprehendingly, on the ruins of St Paul’s Cathedral. At around the same time, Marx believed that capitalism was a necessary stage of decay, from which communism could come into being. We see his prediction proved correct — in Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela and, now, in the United States. But his vision was of decay-into-perfection; rather than into chaos, savagery and dissolution, which we see to be the case.