http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucru/20110602/cm_ucru/teddyrooseveltsawthiscoming;_ylt=AhvNge6Z0sm8pb_sF58S82Cek3QF;_ylu=X3oDMTNua2szY2htBGFzc2V0A3VjcnUvMjAxMTA2MDIvdGVkZHlyb29zZXZlbHRzYXd0aGlzY29taW5nBGNjb2RlA3RvcGdtcHRvcDIwMHBvb2wEY3BvcwM4BHBvcwM4BHNlYwN5bl90b3Bfc3RvcmllcwRzbGsDdGVkZHlyb29zZXZl
NEW YORK--Why did our political system become so corrupt and unresponsive? How did we end up with such a rigid, Old European-style class system--in which you can't get ahead unless you were born that way? America: What Went Wrong?, a 1992 paperback by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, went a long way toward answering those questions.
It may be, however, that America was doomed long before then.
The historian Edmund Morris recently published the final entry of a magisterial trilogy about the life of Theodore Roosevelt. Though frequently listed among the greatest American politicians today, TR was an "accidental president" who ascended to power thanks to the murder of William McKinley. His blustery and impolitic style--his supporters called it speaking truth to power--would never have allowed him to win a presidential election.
Roosevelt sussed out the perils of unregulated capitalism early on. "The great corporations which we have grown to speak of rather loosely as trusts are the creatures of the State, and the State not only has the right to control them wherever need of such control is shown but it is in duty bound to control them," he said in 1901.
No president since Nixon has followed TR's advice. The result of unbridled corporate corruption is disparity of wealth worse than much of the Third World, and 20 percent unemployment.
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Roosevelt spent his last years hurling scathing critiques of Woodrow Wilson's reluctance to enter World War I on the side of Britain and France. Nearly 100 years ago, however, the bellicose Roosevelt harbored no proto-neocon-like delusions about American exceptionalism--the nauseating combination of high-blown rhetoric and gutter-rat real-world actions that characterizes foreign policy of the United States and sparks outrage around the globe.
"He scoffed at the hypocrisy of Wilson's grand-sounding phrase 'self-determination for all peoples' [in Wilson's Fourteen Points], noting that the President was in no hurry to grant liberty to Haiti or Santo Domingo." Both were under U.S. military occupation.
Were such self-awareness in greater supply in the U.S. today, we might not be fighting wars of aggression on three fronts at the same time we're lecturing other countries about sovereignty and human rights.
Roosevelt's martial spirit was his blind spot.
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Mad Poet Strikes Again.
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