David Brooks has a pretty great column in the Times today, in which he compares the nation’s somber celebration of V-J Day in 1945 to the spectacular displays of personal aggrandizement accompanying virtually any achievement in 2009. Props to The Cure for the heads-up; I do not normally read David Brooks, as I find his foppish postures unbefitting the otherwise prestigious Brooks name. Brooks asserts that humility was the defining quality of America’s response to its victory in World War II, and any celebration of the defeat of fascism was dampened by a sense of the mind-boggling human suffering that achievement necessitated. He quotes the war correspondent Ernie Pyle: “We won this war because our men are brave and because of many things — because of Russia, England and China and the passage of time and the gift of nature’s material. We did not win it because destiny created us better than all other peoples. I hope that in victory we are more grateful than we are proud.”

That’s a far cry from Mission Accomplished and the nation that declared war in the Middle East on a mandate from god. Ask Tom Brokaw or any prep school history tutor and he’ll tell you that the United States was probably at its peak when it won World War II, and yet—at least according to Brooks’s perspective—our national touchdown celebration was more humble than most, um,  local touchdown celebrations. Such assessments are risky, but I think we can safely say that we’ve become a more self-aggrandizing people than we were in 1945. The question is, what changed?

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Osama bin Laden—or someone purporting to be him—released a taped “address to the American public” yesterday, in which he blamed US support of Israel for ongoing terrorism and called President Obama “powerless” to stop the war in Afghanistan. Bin Laden typically releases a statement around September 11th every year, kind of like the way CBS always plays How the Grinch Stole Christmas the third week of December. In previous years, he’s had George W. Bush and cronies to rail against, but the measured rhetoric of the Obama administration has left bin Laden without a Batman to his Joker. With his talk of international cooperation and emphasis on specific problems rather than broad ideological conflicts, the current President is more Commissioner Gordon than Dark Knight. No kid ever bought Commissioner Gordon comics, and Osama bin Laden is now in the unenviable position of having to convince high school dropouts to blow themselves up in order to strike back at a President whose stated goal is to get us out of two wars in the Middle East. Ironically, the man who helped define the Bush administration seems to be flailing to define himself.

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Provided you’re not operating on the same two-day news lag that I am, you’ve probably already heard about Joe Wilson’s outburst during the President’s address to Congress on health care reform. Wilson shouted out “you lie!” in response to Obama’s assertion that his proposed reforms would not provide health care to illegal immigrants, initiating a brief instance of what Pete Campbell‘s mother would call “arguing over facts.” “It isn’t true,” the President said before moving on. Let’s take a second and settle this now: H.R. 3200, along with all the other reform proposals currently under discussion, specifically forbids the use of federal funds to provide coverage to illegal immigrants. Now that that’s out of the way—and really, couldn’t Representative Wilson have done a quick Google search on his way to shout stuff out from the floor of Congress?—let’s take a second to look at the historical context of Joe Wilson’s little ejaculation.*

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Greetings from Room 128 of the Microtel in South Bend, Indiana, where the coffee is free, the children are obese, and my next door neighbor loves TV. This is the real America, unfettered by government, unsupervised by bosses, and unable to eat M&Ms without dropping them in the hallway. I’m just saying—we all live in this Microtel, and we all get to choose what sort of environment it is.

As usual, my suggestions have been overruled by the forces of democracy. Perhaps, though, another nerd will fare better with America’s heartland. While the rest of us while away our time in the Microtel, ordering micro-prostitutes and then being too scared to answer the door when they arrive, Barack Obama will be on Capitol Hill trying to convince Chuck Grassley to pay for treatment of our micro-gonorrhea. This guy and I are on, like, the same star path or something.

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