This subject is complex, but we see here a variety of the wrongminded underlying metaphors that misguide our thinking and expectation… the United States is not a person, does not ‘think’ at all, and isn’t the kind of entity our language and thought pretend it to be … so ‘it’ doesn’t exist in the terms we are accustomed to think with, and therefore… ‘we’ (another largely nonexistent entity) are incapable of thinking or responding intelligently… to damn near everything.
“The United States, long accustomed to thinking of itself as the best, most efficient, and most technologically advanced society in the world, is about to be proved an unclothed emperor. When human life is in peril, we are not as good as Singapore, as South Korea, as Germany. And the problem is not that we are behind technologically, as the Japanese were in 1853. The problem is that American bureaucracies, and the antiquated, hidebound, unloved federal government of which they are part, are no longer up to the job of coping with the kinds of challenges that face us in the 21st century. Global pandemics, cyberwarfare, information warfare—these are threats that require highly motivated, highly educated bureaucrats; a national health-care system that covers the entire population; public schools that train students to think both deeply and flexibly; and much more.”
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