Our arrogance will be our downfall

Don Powell, Las Vegas

Thursday, Oct. 24, 2013 | 2:02 a.m.

We’re in the grip of our own failures. Our failure to understand the world we live in. Our failure to understand our own foolishness. A government shutdown with almost a million innocent people thrown out of work. A refusal to honor our debts.

We are a dysfunctional, pompous, ignorant people led by a bunch of blowhards.

The Tea Party keeps spiking our drinks with arsenic but we keep gulping it anyway.

Alexis deTocqueville wrote that whenever he met an American (in 1831) that he was told that our country was the greatest in the world and then that person would saunter off to contemplate himself.

It would help if Americans would contemplate their vulnerability to chaos. And so we stumble across the world stage while other rising powers look back at us with pity. Don’t blame Washington. Pogo Possum had it right when he said, “We has met the enemy and he is us.”