QUOTE OF THE DAY: Martin Amis

'At one point, a character paraphrases a remark of Saul Bellow’s that since “the real modern action” is in America, it is the only place to be. Does the formulation still hold at a time when the U.S. has developed its own case of post-imperial anxiety? Possibly, Amis said, though there’s a major difference. For the British “the ideology that we call PC or level-ism actually sweetened the pill of decline. It was saying, ‘You haven’t got an empire anymore, but you shouldn’t have had an empire in the first place. We don’t like empires.’ It sort of soothed our brow. There’s no great fury about decline in England.” Americans, he thinks, will react differently. “They’re not going to be docile and stoic like we were.” What should we expect instead?” Amis’s replies are normally prompt, but this time he paused over his beer. “A fair amount of illusion.” — Amis in interview with Sam Tenenhaus, The Daily Beast 

The best explanation of Fox news, the Tea Party and America's drift to the right I have yet come across.