title: Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire
author:  Morris Berman 
description: In this provocative, scattershot jeremiad, cultural historian Berman (<i>The Twilight of American Culture</i>) likens America to ancient Rome on the brink. On the geopolitical plane, he contends, the United States is a belligerent, overstretched empire, saddled with huge deficits and a hollowed-out economy, vulnerable to terrorist blowback and, worse, collapse if foreign creditors finally pull the plug. The rot is cultural and spiritual, too: Americans are cold, alienated shopaholics immured in suburban anomie, each encased in a private bubble of iTunes and media noise and indifferent to the public good. Culprits include globalization, technology and, more fundamentally, the individualism and commercialism that is the bedrock of American identity. Because American civilization is a "package deal," the author considers it impervious to piecemeal reform and, given Americans' ingrained "stupidity" and willful blindness, unsalvageable. Berman's attempts to tie every American dysfunction to an all-encompassing sickness of soul overreaches, leading him to lump together serious issues like poverty and the Abu Ghraib outrages with trivialities like annoying cell phone yakkers or the "freedom fries" phenomenon, which he bemoans as "symbolic of an emptiness at the core." Often stimulating and insightful in its particulars, his indictment, like the jingoism it abhors, is too sweeping and essentialist to fully capture American reality. <i>(Apr.)</i> <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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  ## Praise for Dark Ages America
  
  
  “It is usual in sad reports like Professor Berman’s to stop abruptly the
  litany of what has gone wrong and then declare, hand on heart, that once the
  people have been informed of what is happening, the truth will set them free
  and a quarter-billion candles will be lit and the darkness will flee in the
  presence of so much spontaneous light. But Berman is much too serious for the
  easy platitude. Instead he tells us that those who might have struck at least
  a match can no longer do so because shared information about our situation is
  meager to nonexistent…. Mr. Berman spares us the happy ending, as, apparently,
  has history.”
  
  
  > —Gore Vidal, “President Jonah,” Truthdig.com
  
  
  “A resounding…indictment of all that is wrong with American culture, from
  arrogance to xenophobia and all points between…. Berman fires with both
  barrels at a culture that, he argues, is rapidly slipping into “second-or
  third-rate status” as an international power