THE LAST HAPPY BIRTHDAY? By Jim Kent

You don’t stop having birthdays just because the birthdays stop being happy. Your Friends-and-Relations, a dwindling but faithful corps, say you happy birthday every year, but with diminishing conviction. Paradoxically, fewer candles start to appear on the cake—not because you’re getting younger but because the cake’s carrying capacity is now exceeded by the traditional candle count, so each candle now stands for five years, or ten, maybe even twenty if there must be few enough

candles for you to blow out. This can go on for quite a while, and then it doesn’t.

It seems to many of us that the United States may have had its last happy birthday in 2025, or maybe 2024. Nations don’t disappear instantly either, unless they’re physically or politically overrun by others -- even the doomed island states will only gradually sink beneath the waves. So we’ll gather around the television or its successor to sing the old songs and recount the tales of past glories, long after anybody else cares or even remembers.

The important question is not now, nor has it ever been, when a particular polity or culture will dwindle into irrelevance and then out of existence. So far they all have and eventually they all will. The important question is how we’ll be talked about when it’s over. In the Boy Scouts we were admonished to leave the campground cleaner than we found it — not necessarily perfect, but better. So has our country done that?

It’s been clear for at least the last half-century that the US is on the way out. Despite occasional flashes of adequacy and even brilliance, we have been moving along what I’ve taken to calling the iron law of decline: When you get rich you get selfish; when you get selfish you get scared; when you get scared you get stupid; and eventually you become proud of being stupid, although you don’t put it in those words. The law is fractal — it applies to countries, and to companies, and to families and to individuals (although it’s not as iron as the name implies -- there are rare exceptions, but we are not in that number).

Sooner or later, then, the last happy birthday was going to come to the United States. This is based on millennia of experience and volumes of evidence, and shouldn’t be thought of as pessimistic. All that’s happened lately is that the timetable has accelerated. We will not be able to reverse it more than temporarily, but we still may be able to influence how we’ll be talked about. That’s where the pessimism comes in, because just now It looks like we’ll be the punchline of an unfunny joke.

That isn’t inevitable. If facts still mattered, we could remind ourselves and our successors that despite our blindness and our blunders, we really have left the campground cleaner than we found it. We could get to work remembering and admitting our blindness and blunders, and applying ourselves diligently to tidying up after ourselves. We could stop being afraid of shadows and go back to being realistically hopeful.

This will require us to be honest with ourselves and others and courageous in our choices for our future; to remember that opponents do not have to be enemies and to be generous in our thoughts and in our deeds; and to think past the next few years to the next few generations. I’m not sure we can pull this off — if it were easy, everybody would already be doing it -- but even though that statue in the harbor has been sorely neglected of late, there’ s a dance in the old dame yet.