Is there hope for the shock and awe nation?

Once upon a time, America was the "no problem" nation. Our can-doism was what set us apart. In a geopolitical sense attitude translated into altitude. We willed ourselves to the top.

Arrive in tiny wooden boats to a hostile continent vaster than our imaginations and actually occupied by the descendants of hundreds of ancient civilizations? No problem. Not for us. We’ll seize that continent, eradicate the rightful owners and call it progress.

Genocide not enough? Let’s build our early agrarian economy on slavery. Sure it’s an abomination, but we’ll only need it for about a hundred years. 

Once the industrial revolution took root and the California gold rush gave us a good reason to build a national economy linked by rail, we became intoxicated by scale and the wealth it brought. Was competition crushed in the process and were politicians corrupted? Maybe baby … but that was all wind in our sales and after all, didn’t a rising tide lift all boats sooner or later … or most of the boats anyway? Or at least the big boats with mahogany and brass fittings and personalized linens?

We built an empire and then started to remake the world in our image. We won two hot wars and a cold one. We had that Vietnam hiccup and were unable to bring tiny Cuba to its knees, but hey, every irresistible force has an off day. And soon after that it was morning in America again, we kicked ass in Grenada, reclaimed Kuwait, and made it safe for autocracy, and then we really got going declaring victory and celebrating a future in which the Americanization of the world was inevitable.

9/11 was a setback but our response was typically "no problem." We will send the world’s largest and most powerful army to the other side of the world to stomp out our enemies.  International laws, distance, borders, facts, and morality be damned.

We were the shock and awe nation. We had the Jesus of Suburbia on our side and nothing could stop us.

So how come it feels like now we’re just that subliminal mindfuck America instead?

Shock and awe turned to "mission accomplished" and then into a mission in which success was measured by how quietly we could back our way to the exit.  

We made up for that with sending the troops into Afghanistan but this week we had the uncomfortable scene of decent, honorable, well-intentioned folks like the president, his cabinet, and our military leaders producing a status report that sounded like a good old fashioned two thumbs up, V-for-victory American success story but actually offered a stark reminder as to what the old World War II vintage acronym SNAFU actually stood for.

The President said we were on track to meet our goals. But either he was deluding himself or trying to delude us or, alternatively, he was implying that our real goals in Afghanistan were to become bogged down in a quagmire with unsavory, unhelpful non-allies and no chance of producing any lasting material political change on the ground.

And then if that didn’t send home the new can’t-do reality, today we learn that the ultimate corporate symbol of America’s indomitable spirit has fallen on hard times. No, not GM or Chrysler. They’re recovering … for now. (And honestly, what’s so American about cars anymore, anyway? Pretty soon we’ll all be driving Geelys anyway.) No, this was a company that was so quintessentially American that we let it do what only governments could do before, gunning down innocents overseas in the name of patriotism, the flag and the Dallas Cowboys.

Once the company was called Blackwater. But that was before the scandals and the killing of 17 civilians in Baghdad and the lawsuits and the bribery and the weapons charges. Now it is called Xe Services. But even though company spokespeople asserted the name had no meaning, they were just being modest. Blackwater means to the past decade what IBM meant to the go-go years of the 60s or Standard Oil meant to the Gilded Age. It was a symbol of what made George W. Bush’s America so darned special. And yet … with all that reckless gunplay and greed and corruption … it also spoke to some eternal, enduring part of our national character, don’t you think?

The sale of the company (well reported by Andrew Ross Sorkin and Ben Protess in today’s New York Times business section) "came as a result of worries that the State Department would stop awarding contracts to the company so long as" it’s slightly bizarre, former Navy SEAL, right wing, morally disoriented owner Eric Prince continued to own the company.  

However, buried beneath the unhappy news that this special symbol that combined the Horatio Alger spirit with that of 70s headline-grabber Lieutenant William Calley, there is a sign that perhaps all is not lost.

The Times article notes, that the people who seem to be on the verge of buying the firm are very closely associated with Prince and that under the terms of the pending deal he would receive a buy-out that would give him an on-going interest in the company’s performance. What’s more, they apparently hope that after the deal, they can then repackage the company not as a provider of private security (read: army-for-hire) services but as a source of training for the U.S. military. 

When you think about that, it’s all pretty breathtaking. Play a shell game with the ownership, change the stationery, and then make the case that we ought to hire a company that has broken every rule in the book as a trainer for young troops. The can do spirit is not dead after all!  Just when you thought it was impossible, those wonderful guys who gave us Iraq are giving us something new that is awe-inspiringly shocking.