To be sure, the United States has profound problems, not least our faltering educational and physical infrastructure.
This is a tragedy among human history, the result of large numbers of human errors.
The kind of problems we're facing now, no government can fix.
The financial crisis revealed important weaknesses in many areas of our financial system.
Poor governance affects us all - entrepreneurs, homemakers, farmers, labourers, whatever identities we might have.
Our education system teaches the young what to think, not how to think. And if you ever wonder why so many things don't work properly any more, or why you can't get any sense out of so many organisations, this is one of the main reasons.
I think what Donald [Trump] is saying is that it's unacceptable to him that members of the African-American community - and I'm sure he will say this about other communities as well - who live in violence, who are subject of that, or who do not have the educational opportunities that every child in this country should have so they can reach their fullest potential, that that's unacceptable.
State governments seek local remedies for the globally fabricated deprivations and miseries in vain - just as the individuals-by-the-decree-of-fate (read: by the impact of deregulation) seek in vain the individual solutions to the socially fabricated life problems.
No matter what federal program one selects - Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the drug war, the income tax and the IRS, education, foreign interventions and wars - they are all a giant mess.
We do have our challenges. Some things don't always work right in Washington, and the anger you see from the electorate, I think, is a reflection of what's not working right.
From a victim's point of view, our justice system is hardly fit for purpose. No doubt individual failings by police and prosecutors provide part of the explanation.
The federal government has invested billions in Metro, yet the system is not safe and is not reliable.
Our entire civilization is built on a foundation of unfixable bullshit.
We have witnessed Chernobyl, Bhopal, Challenger, Seveso, Amoco Cadiz, Three Mile Island and have still not wakened from our fantasy that large organizations can carry out complex technologies on a huge scale with total perfection.
Honest error in the face of complex and possibly intractable problems is a far more important source of bad results than are bad motives.
Fires and floods, we're hardwired to accept them or at least file them under Bad Things Happening. But there's something so abstract and so modern about a bank making a technical mistake about how it funded its obligations to depositors, and suddenly you're out of work.
The most violent and troubling stories become part of our national consciousness about foster care.
Most of the great problems we face are caused by politicians creating solutions to problems they created in the first place.
The problems in our educational system are indissociable from broader malignant trends in our society, and they can't be solved by lots of testing and by punitive actions against schools that are not performing well.
