    45

    sup erjet that will make Boeing's 747 look like a minnow.  While our space

    program is bogged down in a comedy of errors, the Japanese are planning to

    develop hotels and resorts on the moon.111  Japan has also overtaken us as

    the nation that files the greatest number of breakthrough patents,112 and is far

    outdistancing us in the introduction of products using such American

    inventions as fuzzy logic.

    More ominously, 45 countries are accumulating the necessary elements

    to manufacture nuclear weapons.  Five of the seven nations with the lead in

    building the bomb--Iran, Libya, North Korea and Algeria--see America as

    their major enemy (the other two--Taiwan and South Korea-- regard us with

    a more tolerant eye).  And ballistic missile delivery systems for these

    weapons are becoming nearly as easy to obtain or manufacture as .22 caliber

    pistols.

    There are other surprising areas in which we have also fallen behind.

    We think of ourselves as the healthiest nation in the world with the best

    quality of medical care.  But the citizens of 11 other nations can expect to live

    longer lives than we can.113

    And we often feel we have the highest standard of living.  But that

    ceased to be the case quite a while ago.  The citizens of at least nine countries

    earn higher per capita incomes than we do.  And those nations that tower

    over us in the personal affluence of their inhabitants include such minor

    powers as Brunei, Kuwait, Canada, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Nauru,

    Qatar, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates!114

    We are blind to much of this.  And, despite admirable exceptions like

    the coverage of our lag in education, our media frequently fails to report it.

    What's  worse,  as  we  saw  a  few  pages  ago,  some  groups  want  to

    fossilize us in a featherheaded recreation of a past we can never recover.

    Academic champions of "multiculturalism" idealize the backwardness of

    third world cultures and often bluster furiously to prevent a

    technologically-driven movement into the future.  Other self-proclaimed

    champions of the public interest are attempting to stop critical areas of

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