Cast of millions

摘要

Lamenting its own decline has long been an American weakness, the nervous flip-side of being a country so apparently blessed. From preachers warning the earliest colonists that God was angry with them to Jimmy Carter's doom-laden "malaise" speech of 1979, the fear that America's best days might be behind it has never been too far from the surface. More recently, the worst recession since the 1930s and the relentless rise of China have precipitated a particularly bad case of funk. The astonishing outpouring of adulation for Barack Obama was one result of it; the longing for hope and change a symptom of deep-seated anxieties.