Author Kurt Anderson penned a piece for Time, last week, essentially taking down Modern America since the Reagan Revolution. The piece is long, and goes all over the place, going between deep meta and more readily observable facts. Sometimes, its very much on point, and other times he goes way off in the reeds. In fact, that's the reason I skimmed it rather than reading through the whole thing, but one particular part caught my eye:

The reset button has been pushed. So what will be the protocols and look and feel of the America about to emerge?

Only six months ago, we thought we might be on the verge of a remarkable new era — thanks to the possible election of Obama. It is bizarre how secondary that epochal change now seems. It's as if Jesus had returned — but just afterward extraterrestrials landed, and as a result everybody stopped paying much attention to the holy dude. But it's also a perfectly apt and gratifying turn of events: candidate Obama positioned himself as a smart, steady character who happened to be black, and the economic emergency that helped ensure his election has pushed the fact of his race and its heavy symbolic freight into the shadows of public consciousness. Once the crises have passed, however, I think we'll rediscover the ramifications, small and large, of the enlightened national turn we made last Nov. 4 and start enjoying the dawn of a new era of racial reconciliation.

A big reason for Obama's election and high approval ratings is his privileging of the empirical and pragmatic ahead of ideological reflex. We have not, of course, arrived in a golden age of fair-minded, intellectually honest postpartisanship, as proved by the congressional votes on the stimulus package and the redoubled ferocity of brain-dead partisans. But a majority of Americans out in America are dialing back or turning off their ideological autopilots, thanks to the economic crises, Obama's approach and the post–Cold War realities.

It's as if it just never ends. Apparently, according to Anderson, the economy has already been reset, or, if it hasn't, when it does, it will not have been for naught or will not have mattered. Because, what will be more important is that our president's awesome glory and brilliance, which is now obscurred by this cloudy nuissance we call the Big Shit-Storm, will be once again be revealed during the Era of Blessed Reconciliation. Not only that, but our president's sheer awesomeness is only augmented by his apparent empiricism and pragmatism! He truly is the light worker! Ha!

Next, Mr. Andersen goes on with the idea that we all want and nead is to be led out of partisan slavery to the postpartisan Promised Land, and that only the election of Obama can do, and is doing, this. That is, that postpartisanship is not a means, but an end and destination. Well, I for one never hope to reach that end.

You know, I thought we'd be getting away from this fuzziness when we were faced, head on, with the realness of our economic and social situation, the dire reality that success means not only getting the economy running, again, but reconstructing it to run correctly, this time. One of the biggest false meme floating around is that this society simply needs a reset. We don't need a reset, we need a reconstruction.

The focus on the possibility of racial reconciliation is misplaced and overly simplified, at best. The possibility will mean nothing, absolutely nothing, if we simply decide to reset the existing weighted economy and society instead of reconstructing it as a better more fair economy and society for all. His focus on the racial aspect almost seems like a quaint distraction next to what this crisis has laid bare: that the masters of the universe will lay complete waste to the whole of humanity if only it means self-preservation for those masters.

So, Mr. Andersen, can we stop perpetuating the simplistic meme and myth that nothing's really broken, that our economic system is not fatally flawed, rather that Americans simply overextended themselves? And, finally, can we also stop pretending that the our racial reconciliation can happen without an authentic economic reconciliation?

Sheer meta awesomeness in simply not going to cut it given the times. Andersen doesn't get it. For all of his words, he and the rest like him still seem to be stuck in the "this too shall past" mindset resting on the hope that the election of our president, alone, will be enough. This has become organized religion behind another name.

Well, it's not enough; it'll never be enough, and if the same number of people continue to hold the belief, the belief that it is enough, we're through, quite frankly.