Is America The Next Argentina?

The parallels are instructive and interesting.

We have no crystal ball. We have been in deep economic hurt with legions of the unemployed and house foreclosures. Some people look at government policies, past, present, and possibly future, and worry that we are seeing only the tip of a tidal wave to hit us in this century. Consider this:

Christopher Hitchens with Angel Wings

English-American author, essayist and journalist, Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) had a career over four decades. In 2005, a Prospect/Foreign Policy poll voted him the world's fifth top public intellectual. He appeared on talk shows and lecture circuits, and was columnist and literary critic for The Atlantic, Free Inquiry, The Nation, Salon, Slate, Vanity Fair, and World Affairs. He was a media fellow at the Hoover Institution. He was also an atheist.

On learning that Christopher Hitchens was dying of cancer, Reverend Rick Warren prayed  that the atheist repent and see that the disease was visited on him by God for disbelief. "I loved and prayed for him constantly and grieve his loss," said Warren, then adding, "He knows the truth now."

Despite the prayers of Warren and other Christian evangelists, Hitchens never changed his views. As Art Levine put it, "The vulgarity of the idea that a vengeful deity would somehow stoop to inflicting a cancer" on Hitchens "boggles" the mind, especially because Hitchens caused his cancer by a "long, happy, and prodigious career as a smoker of cigarettes and drinker of spirits."

You're Not My Momma: Capgras Delusion

In a traffic accident, David Silvera was thrown from his car and landed on his head. He lay in a coma five weeks. When he awakened he discovered he lost the use of his right arm but felt he remained intact mentally. He kept his intelligence. He was not psychotic, not emotionally disturbed. He read the newspaper with interest and retained his curiosity about the world.

But then he started telling his mother she was an imposter, not his real mom. The same went for his father, who was no longer his real dad. It didn't stop there. The house he lived in was like his parents--just a good imitation of the real one. Not only that, David was not really David. He sometimes became the other David. He was his own imposter.