Spengler: Americans Can't Do Tragedy

You can’t put one over on Spengler. He’s right there in the front rank complaining that it
just isn’t on to save Charlotte Simmons
from a necessary martyrdom. But, he’s sanguine about it.
Americans have an ideal of middlebrow competence—represented by heroes like Chuck
Yeager and George W, Bush—that shields from them the real awfulness of life.
But not Spengler. He has drunk deep from the German experience, and has seen the face of the Dionysian,
the truth of a universe filled to the brim with wanton death and destruction.