…that the Iraqi prisoner-abuse scandal is simply the most visible recent symptom of a decades-long decline in U.S. values; a decline driven, he believes, not by sex and liberals but by corporate power-madness and individual greed. Smith quotes urban historian Jane Jacobs:

“A culture is unsalvageable if stabilizing forces themselves become ruined and irrelevant. . . The collapse of one sustaining cultural institution enfeebles others, makes it more likely that others will give way . . . until finally the whole enfeebled, intractable contraption collapses.”