Zakaria updates his analysis of America now

Fareed Zakaria, the editor-at-large of Time and a CNN pundit, has updated this excellent book from 2007 and stuck to his perceptive thesis. The book is “not about the decline of America but rather about the rise of everyone else,” such as China and India. He upbraids Americans for initiating globalization and then turning inward, paralyzed by ideological rants and rages and practicing poisonous paranoid politics as theater. We are cocooned when we should be globally concerned.

Zakaria describes a world of economic growth and fills his pages with stunning facts and figures. The world’s biggest mall is in China. So is the largest casino. Terrorism works only if we feel terrorized and is a sideshow to economic expansion. The collapse of the economy in 2008 is still with us. America is still creative and inventive, but inequality’s burgeoning, the debt is horrendous, 50 percent of our Ph.D.s are foreigners (he sees education as “America’s best industry”), and our self-image remains corrosive and defeatist.

Zakaria smoothly works in all his information in this page-turner of an analysis and remains optimistic, giving us new perspectives on other countries, their cultures, and their expectations. “Asia” is a western construct. “India” is a geographical term. Economics should always trump ideology.

We will not go the way of the British Empire since we dominate the globe, “turning abstract theory into practical products,” but we “are borrowing 80 percent of the world’s surplus savings and using it for consumption.”

Sam Coale ( samcoale@cox.net ) teaches literature at Wheaton.

The Educated Imagination » Blog Archive » The Globe Theatre

The theatre as a metaphor for the universe was extremely common in Shakespeare’s day, and one reason was that the universe was assumed to have been intelligently designed by its Creator, and intelligent meant having some relation to human life. . . Similarly, the stars are not just up there: they have been put there to influence the character of living things. . . In so designed a cosmos all facts and all ideas are linked together, potentially in the human mind, actually in God’s. The image of a totally participating theatre begins to take shape. All facts and principles have their assigned and ticketed places, and step forward on the stage when needed. Courses in the training of memory were taught in which you constructed a theatre-shaped encyclopedia in your mind, and remembered something by pulling it out of its numbered place in your auditorium. The scholar who did most work on these memory theatres, the late Dame Frances Yates, was convinced that the design of the Globe was influenced by them.

Resources for Teaching English, 11-14

Harper's book of facts, a classified history of the world; embracing science, literature, and art

William Shakespeare, poet, dramatist, and man

The facts and backgrounds of literature, English and American

The World almanac & book of facts