The Last Best Hope

Bill Bennet posted an article today taken from words he spoke on his radio show (which is a cheap way to get an article I suppose), in which he comments on VT shooting and the greatness of America (and somewhat apologetically flags up his forthcoming book).

We're talking about yesterday in Blacksburg. Some people, it hasn't come up on this show, because this audience wouldn't dare bring it up, but there'll be people saying, "Well, it's a sick society. You know, it's just a crazy, wigged out, sick society." I've got a book coming out today, not the best timing for a book, it's all right. It's a good book, America: The Last Best Hope, Vol. II.

He quote Reagan saying that America is great. I'm curious about that phrase Last Best Hope, though. I gather it goes back to President Lincoln saying "Freedom is the last, best hope of earth." Nothing wrong with that, but there is a sort of fatalism to the idea of a last best hope, isn't there? I mean applied to a concept like Freedom maybe it's not so bad; but applied to a nation? Do we really believe that we are basically it? That Europe is dead and won't be great again, and the rest of the world has no hope for greatness?

I suspect it is tied into the concept of the second coming and the apocolpyse, which implies that the plays about to be over (I'm not sure about that, but it's a popular interpretation. Because Christ is on his way back in the next few years (heck he's probably packing right now), there's no real time for Australia or Brazil or China to supplant the US. So we are it, more or less, by default.

All I can say is don't count your raptures before they hatch.