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When Americans experience a sense that the world we live in is not what it should be, we’re often scolded for not being thankful for all of our material abundance.  Indeed, we are extremely blessed to live in an age with plenty of food, infrastructure, and novelties, and we accordingly enjoy a standard of living beyond the wildest dreams of most of our forebears.

That said, there’s a nagging sense that, for all that abundance, things are amiss.  There’s a strong tug of to that undercurrent among conservatives today.  Material abundance is great, but it hasn’t addressed deeper moral problems or battles in the culture wars, because those problems aren’t materialist in nature—they can’t be.

Even within the plane of the material world, things seem a bit off.  That was the crux of my post about the new Mustang, a redesign so beyond the scope of the name “Mustang” that it’s ludicrous to call it as such.  Everywhere we look, there seems to be disintegration and decay—of value, of standards, even of size.