"(The United States’) industries are gutted and vanished. Her finances are ruined beyond imagining. Her old cities, but for a few, are dirty, dangerous, unlivable. Millions of feral, armed savages, perfectly de-civilized, run wild in her streets. Her famous social fabric is shredded, her famous voluntary institutions defunct, her population bored, lonely, atomized. Her small towns have rotted, turned into strip-malls, or both. (Her birds, however, are remarkably well-protected.)"