A man that rich couldn't be stupid. Or, Seema thought now, was that the grand fallacy of twenty-first-century America?

Hush, child. Don't be so hard on yourself. Everyone gets to start over again. This America, hon. One dream dies, you get another.

In America, the distance between wanting something and having it delivered to your living room is not terribly great.

And the looks on the faces of my countrymenpassive heads bent arms at their trousers everyone guilty of not being their best of not earning their daily bread the kind of docility I had never expected from Americans even after so many years of our decline. Here was the tiredness of failure imposed on a country that believed only in its opposite. Here was the end product of our deep moral exhaustion.

È questo che ammiro nella gioventù italiana, il lento scemare delle ambizioni, la consapevolezza che il meglio è di gran lunga alle spalle.Noi americani abbiamo molto da imparare dal loro declino pieno di grazia.

We lived in a country that rewarded its worst people. We lived in a society where the villains were favored to win.

After all, this is America, and you can swap out the parts of yourself that don't work. You can rebuild yourself piece by piece.

Michigan, with its delicious American name. How lucky one must be to live there.