Edward Luce’s book has been widely praised as carefully balanced and filled with evocative analysis and reportage. With a cast of dozens of academic, business and governmental thinkers, it wrestles with America’s relative economic decline, how the global economy is increasingly siphoning away America’s ability to innovate and manufacture, and a wide range of U.S. policy failures from education to healthcare to reinventing government. Too often Internet-entranced readers like me look for distillations to digest quickly, rather than dwell on the fascinating interviews, anecdotal treasure chest, and hard-nosed analyses in Mr. Luce’s detailed yet highly entertaining book.

How is the world going to end? The Last Myth starts out by examining the American fascination with the end of the world, and ends by explaining the consequences for maintaining this worldview.

Sometimes it seems like the term “American exceptionalism” could refer only to a politico-economic theory that says, “Screw everybody except me.”

It is hard to explain the hard Right’s hatred of health care reform any other way. Despite their phony spin about a government “power-grab” and such, what motivates them is a need to define themselves in terms of the anguish of others. They can’t be exceptional if others aren’t demonstrably unexceptional.

Thanks to last weekend’s “Values Voters” Summit, I am learning that I am not an ordinary gay American. Apparently I am Darth Vader: evil, out to destroy the Republic, and a threat to public health.

Yeah, we’re exceptional, all right.

If America is the best country in the world, how come we’re such a complete basketcase?

Just as a reminder, here’s what some of us are celebrating today on this wonderful anniversary of our country’s founding.