SOTUS: Slouching to Irrelevance

So in an act of coincidence I finished Andrew Bacevich's "The Short American Century", which by the way, is a must read for anyone interested in the deeper meaning of collapse, and caught some of the President's State of the Union Speech. I could not be struck from the following from the book written in 2012:

"Obama's fulsome homilies enable Americans to postpone an inevitable disenchantment with their "blessed way of life" for the decline of imperial hegemony will be the pivotal episode of the twenty-first century. The horsemen of of this apocalypse are already visible and galloping at an accelerating speed, with mounting levels of personal, corporate, and government debt; military over extension that cannot be maintained without unpopular conscription, further fiscal indenture, and greater damage to an already disfigured world image; ecological destruction whose repair is routinely subordinated to the imperatives of business; and an economy whose injustice and indignity become ever more glaring and pernicious. Still profoundly enchanted by empire as a way of life, Americans and their leaders may try- with pecuniary ingenuity and perhaps great violence- to prolong the imperium of consumption. Yet even if they appear to succeed, their victory will be brief and Pyrrhic, for they will have purchased their triumph in the currency of fear, denial, and death."