One of the joys of growing old is that you’ve seen this garbage before. Let me illustrate.

Newsweek featured the back of the Statue of Liberty on its May 12 cover. Inside it suggested in various ways that America is fading. It just won’t be so important in the world in the future.

If I was twenty I might take the article seriously. If forty, I would add a dash of salt. These days I simply chuckle. Because this story nearly writes itself every fifteen to twenty years.

In such stories America is always slipping from its pedastal. It’s grown too fat and happy. Or it’s grown unpopular and various people around the world hate us. Or our dollar is so weak foreigners will buy and sell all our assets. Or some other power is eating our lunch.

I cannot tell you how many times I have read such garbage. And every time another Chicken Little writes it, he or she insists that this time things are different. Sure they are.

In connection with this, it was Newsweek’s competitor, Time, that questioned whether capitalism could survive against Socialism and Communism. That was 1975. Some survival.

Another story that makes the circuit is what is going on with Venezuela and Hugo Chavez. He’s building a workers’ paradise. We may not like him, but the People do.