A bunch of lonesome and very quarrelsome heroes

I will first confess, mea culpa, that I’m always doubtful when I see headlines that say “Collapse Imminent.” I’ve seen them every other week since I have lived in the US. I’ve come to the conclusion that anticipating collapse is an American past time. Perhaps because we are aware of how much we have, and how well we live. Perhaps it’s a sense of “this can’t go on.”

On the other hand nations do collapse, and I lived through a controlled, slow collapse where the statistics looked much worse tha...