James Carroll Time-Saver: America is Rotten

The Globe’s James Carroll regularly writes op-ed columns* that utilize available newspegs to hammer home one of his key themes: the utter rottenness at the core of “America” and its rapidly approaching collapse. A tour through his back catalog yields lots of examples — disparate items like Christmas, soccer, and the Somali pirates all provide important insight into this theme.

So, to save the reader of today’s Globe the trouble of plowing through his whole column, just take your newspegs as the oil spill in the Gulf and General Petreus’ collapse during his testimony last week, then add the usual theme:

…..The two Washington hearings captured the widespread American mood of exhaustion and dread. The nation has been drastically confronted with its impotence on multiple fronts…..

…it was impossible not to take his momentary fainting spell as an omen. A national breaking point approaches.

At issue is nothing less than the inbred sense of American goodness — a faith on which President Obama himself depended……. the nation’s trust in itself can be irretrievably lost.

….The public debates are familiar enough…but the context within which they will reach crescendo is unprecedented…. But the nation itself is in a profoundly different place than last winter, that fickle season of political hope. This summer the American character will show itself for what it has become…..

I’ll provide regular James Carroll op-ed timesavers in the future.

*The criticism above notwithstanding, when Carroll sticks exclusively to religion, his work is quite good.