Something is rotten in the state of America. It is a great country, its achievements performed at height; but by some habit overgrown, some vicious mole that breaks down the pales and forts of reason, it has mislaid the pith and marrow of its attributes and lost its way. Its balance of payments traduced by other nations, its industry in decline, its ethics open to inconsistency, its people thrice taxed – federal, state and local. Into this costly enterprise has walked a new president, charming as a courtiers eye, eloquent with a scholars tongue, and intelligent as befits the new century; but it is moot if he can take up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. Let us breathe America’s faults quaintly so that they seem the taints of liberty. The defect is not that of the president - compared to the opposition he is Hyperion to a satyr - rather it is imbedded in the nation, by customs more honoured in the breach than the observance.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be

America as a nation and its families individually, live by borrowing. They live on borrowed money but more important on borrowed time. America’s consumers and its housewives want more than the nation can produce. She places a footprint on the globe that far outranks what low paid Chinese and Indians will grunt and sweat and bear under a weary life. A loan oft loses it and friend; China is concerned about the trillion dollars of American Treasuries it is holding.

Everybody know the trade statistics, but that is borrowed money; what about borrowed time? Aye, there’s the rub; borrowing dulleth the edge of husbandry. American capitalism no longer holds up a mirror to the world, nor shows the very age and body of the times, the form and pressure of a new dawn. I do not for a moment take away from it the foremost rank of its technique, the excellence of its universities, its creative spirit and the achievement of its enterprise. But American capitalism, the garden in which these flowers bloom, goes unweeded, it goes to seed and in decline it is possessed by things rank and gross in social and economic countenance. The Great Crash of 2008, through which we have not yet halfway past, sounds the death knell of the old world and the demise of the old order familiar for half a century. All the uses of this world seem weary, stale and flat and, in particular, unprofitable, to aging capitalism; overripe, the real economy capitulates to a hollow finance industry, which in turn has been propped up by $1.5 trillion in public money.

The obesity of its people, even the young, is a premature death certificate; but this too, too solid flesh, will not melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew! Life style is a personal and social problem, but at another level it is the marker of a global economic imbalance at whose heart America stands. Can this alert young president tell his people to consume less, can he tell them to change their lifestyles, desire less wealth and learn the virtues of a frugal life? He knows it, but neither he nor any political leader of a rich nation can speak this truth to the people. Politics in a democracy is not made of such stuff when congressional elections loom and the contest for a second term portends. So conscience does make cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pitch and moment, with this regard their currents turn awry, and lose the name of action. Realpolitik sets limits to the changes that a president can hope to achieve.

Frailty, they name is healthcare

What madness - the world’s wealthiest nation spends the largest percentage of its GDP on the healthcare industry (18%) and provides its citizens with the world’s worst healthcare facilities of all advanced countries! But the reform of healthcare looks increasingly like a lost battle; the defeat has the potential to cripple the administration for the remainder of the president’s term. Who are among the bitterest opponents of reform, who are present in strength among the disruptors of town hall meetings through which it was hoped to drum up support for reform? Prominent are the very benefactors of reform, the low income groups, and even from the 46 million without any cover. There is no method in this madness, none at all, and madness is such great constellations must not unwatched go.

Surely they walk too much in the sun! Among the charges aimed at the reforms, in perfect seriousness, is that it is plot to make America communist, and that national health in Europe hangs old ladies out on a rail to die. No exaggeration, so they did squeak and gibber in the streets, and I watched it on TV, in silent bewilderment.

Healthcare reform must tackle two equally important sides, coverage and costs. In to be or not-to-be dilemma the administration focused on coverage and as a sop to big business did not hammer costs. Industry declined the bait, taxpayers took fright of huge budget deficits, and the reformers lost support on both sides. In the meantime the faint hearted tweak the bold advocate of change by the nose, call him pigeon-livered and lacking gall. Perhaps, but what use is an unarmed prophet? Where is that army that poured out before November 2008, hot to do battle? It has surrendered the streets to reaction and to Republican. The fault lies in America’s radicals, its liberals and its once agitated youth; no sweet prince can sally forth to battle when his legions are in hiding. Perhaps November 2008 was such a huge victory that that act alone has exhausted history; it needs to stop, catch its breath, retreat a while, and move forward again at another time.

Hell is tenantless as all the forces of the healthcare-industrial complex have come to earth to scuffle and to salt away their carrion gains. Crooked insurance companies, hospitals and laboratories, wicked or charitable, but devoted to ever-testing and over-medication, fattening doctors, lawyers breeding maggots in malpractice suits, they have all put their leprous distilment together with Republicans, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and other goblins damned. It is the witching hour, the blasts from hell that corrupt the ignorant to disrupt reform, are nurtured by this hellish brew. The corpulent healthcare-industrial complex is no less evil and powerful than the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned against. The ghost that haunts this complex is the so-called ‘public option’; an insurance scheme administered by the state to run in competition against private schemes. What a strange eruption, to watch champions of the free-market stampede, when a public option comes on stage.

Foreign marts and covenants

The history of 21st Century will be the history of Sino-American relations and of global climate change; these two tests will shape the world in the next 100 years. In the Bush years blood and judgement were so badly co-mingled that the Administration was arrogant, revengeful, ambitious, and with more offences to its name than posterity would care to recall. The new administration has visibly charted a new course; it has shown sensitivity to climate change and a willingness to seek a new balance with China. America cannot be the very button on fortune’s cap forever; the two nations must learn to live in the middle of fortune’s favours, about per waist, her privates they. There is good reason to be optimistic about Sino-American relations, but on climate change, while these two nations must lead the way, still angels and ministers of grace must defend us if the earth is to manage the challenges of global warming that we seem unable to cope with.

America has for so long strutted and bellowed in its relationship with the Islamic world, neither Christian gait nor pagan virtue; nature’s journeyman seems to have imitated humanity abominably when he made its leaders. There is a change now; it is still plausive manners, but thankfully the new president has let discretion be his tutor, and wisely, not too tame a tutor. His words fly up and his thoughts remain below, the mark of an eloquent communicator. There is a cautious groundswell of expectation, but it will leave the Islamic world dispirited if action does not suit the word. Unfortunately, Israel’s intransigence, nay open defiance, must give us pause. In negotiations Israel shows one face, and outside it makes itself another. It aborts a two-state solution by wanton disregard of agreed restraints on settlements; it will not countenance a one-state solution which will swamp five million Jews with 10 million Palestinians. Palestine breathes contagion to the Middle East, graveyards yawn but the problem seems beyond resolution. America’s resolve is weak, cowardly, unpregnant of the cause, and like a whore unpacks its heart with words.

The prince and the president

Recently I heard a phrase that stuck: "Hamlet, unquestionably, is the seminal masterpiece of English literature"; I hope you forgive me then, when in this essay I coquette with its prose and dally with its poetry. More than the luminous imagery of the text, however, the magic of Hamlet is not, as is sometimes said, the tale of the fateful flaw of one individual, but rather that it stands at the cross-roads between the medieval world and the enlightenment. Is it nobler in the mind to do this or that? The burly morality of the medieval world would rather affirm gallantry and chivalry; what one to-the-manor-born must be seen to do. The European Enlightenment ushered in the man of conscience and scruples who is not passion’s slave. It is not the indecisiveness of personality but the paradoxical ambiguity of the age of reason that locates the play in the timeline of human civilisation.