45
sup erjet that will make Boeing's 747 look like a minnow. While our space
program is bogged down in a comedy of errors, the Japanese are planning to
develop hotels and resorts on the moon.111 Japan has also overtaken us as
the nation that files the greatest number of breakthrough patents,112 and is far
outdistancing us in the introduction of products using such American
inventions as fuzzy logic.
More ominously, 45 countries are accumulating the necessary elements
to manufacture nuclear weapons. Five of the seven nations with the lead in
building the bomb--Iran, Libya, North Korea and Algeria--see America as
their major enemy (the other two--Taiwan and South Korea-- regard us with
a more tolerant eye). And ballistic missile delivery systems for these
weapons are becoming nearly as easy to obtain or manufacture as .22 caliber
pistols.
There are other surprising areas in which we have also fallen behind.
We think of ourselves as the healthiest nation in the world with the best
quality of medical care. But the citizens of 11 other nations can expect to live
longer lives than we can.113
And we often feel we have the highest standard of living. But that
ceased to be the case quite a while ago. The citizens of at least nine countries
earn higher per capita incomes than we do. And those nations that tower
over us in the personal affluence of their inhabitants include such minor
powers as Brunei, Kuwait, Canada, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Nauru,
Qatar, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates!114
We are blind to much of this. And, despite admirable exceptions like
the coverage of our lag in education, our media frequently fails to report it.
What's worse, as we saw a few pages ago, some groups want to
fossilize us in a featherheaded recreation of a past we can never recover.
Academic champions of "multiculturalism" idealize the backwardness of
third world cultures and often bluster furiously to prevent a
technologically-driven movement into the future. Other self-proclaimed
champions of the public interest are attempting to stop critical areas of
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