The Magnificent Ambersons: "The immortal epic of the decline and fall of a powerful family too obsessed with the splendor of the past to grasp the significance of the future."
That's the cover blurb on Booth Tarkington's 1918 classic, The Magnificent Ambersons, deservedly named as one of the top 100 novels of the century. Orson Welles made the movie in 1942.
Halfway through the book I couldn't help substituting "American nation" for "Amberson family." Try it with this paragraph from page 37:
"It was impossible to doubt that the Ambersons were entrenched, in their nobility and riches, behind polished and glittering barriers which were as solid as they were brilliant, and would last."
100 years later, there is more and more evidence that The Magnificent Americans are behaving as did The Magnificent Ambersons, with the same results.
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