Picture an apple named "America" on a shelf. Most objective observers have declared it rotten. Fewer than one in five citizens trust its integrity. Although it looks OK, it's no longer firm and sweet - more soft and bitter. Everyone is desperately looking for cures to get the apple back to where it used to be - the object of the world's desire - but nobody can put his finger on it. We wonder what's rotting the apple, but since we've been trained not to dig more than skin-deep into anything, we just throw up our hands and try to blame outside forces. Republicans, Democrats, socialists, conservatives, liberals, Tea Party, Greens, the rich, the poor, indifference, El Qaeda, President Obama, the House, the Senate, permisiveness, narrow-mindedness, religion, anti-religion, you name it.
It's a futile search. What's wrong with the apple can't be found on the outside. True, evidence of the problem can be dug up and we may well account for samples of the rot, but to discover the cause, we have to continue past the squiggle:
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