There won’t be any introspection.
Empires, like fortunes, are lost slowly and then all at once.
I’m afraid what is coming is going to fall on every American fairly equally like the snow on the graveyard at the end of James Joyce’s “The Dead”
Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
