O’Hagan wrote that “many a Londoner [is] seething at the
subprime-mortgage disaster in America.” To convey the qual-
ity of British anger at the Americans responsible, O’Hagan
cited F. Scott Fitzgerald’s description of the lethal disregard
of The Great Gatsby’s Tom and Daisy Buchanan: “They
smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into
their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that
kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess
they made.”
America’s decline was evident on other fronts as well. Unim-
proved by the No Child Left Behind policy, our mediocre pub-
lic schools have made the United States much less competitive,
especially in math and science. A third of all American children
and half of its minority children do not graduate from high
school. And then there was the psychic wound of watching the
city of New Orleans—the birthplace of that most American of
art forms, jazz—all but destroyed by Hurricane Katrina and
government incompetence. Even as this country grappled with
uncharacteristic self-doubt, other nations were feeling newly
empowered. No country is jacked up higher on its nascent
sense of global clout than China. Every few weeks another of
the highest skyscrapers in the world opens in Shanghai. China
recently passed the United States in Internet users: 253 million
Chinese are now on-line, compared to 220 million Americans.
The point, of course, is not that China now holds the record
for computer use, but that China is now embracing on a
breathtaking scale the technology that defines our time. In a
sense, the symbol of this shift away from American preemi-
nence was the triumphant 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.
The most watched event in television history, the Beijing
Olympics mesmerized 4.7 billion viewers worldwide.
Epilogue to the Twentieth-Anniversary Edition