They were bad years, horrible years, without-hope years, years that left us on our knees, scared shitless and longing for home.

A decade of smooth decline, dotted with spontaneous little destructions.

And now, as this decade mercifully draws to a close, we look upon ourselves and assess the damage.

Or at least Time Magazine does.

The Time cover story on the ’00s (which they deemed the “Decade from Hell”), attempts to make sense of these tumultuous years. It mostly does the whole learn-from-the-mistakes-of-our-past thing. It rehashes long-forgotten fuck ups (Elian Gonzalez gets a shout out), and revisits already-mourned-over tragedies (the USS Cole?). Bullet points get involved.

It even has a happy ending. Because despite the litany of institutional, financial, economic, cultural, psychological, pseudo-psychological and possibly genetic problems facing this country, there’s “no question that we will rebound” according to the Time article. Unless, that is, you “believe that this country is in the throes of a deep and permanent decline,” which makes you a traitor and a quitter and probably a goddamn commie.

This happy ending comes out of an almost Palinian belief in American exceptionalism. It’s the intellectualized version of the same dumbassed, redneck patriotism we saw at every Palin rally in last year’s election. It’s a blind subscription to the notion that America is especially strong and righteous and fast and smart and pretty and altogether specialer than all the other little girls in the whole wide world. The notion that somehow our institutions are the most stable on Earth, our morals the most virtuous, our way of life the best there is or has ever been, and that’s all there is to it.

Well I hate to say it, Time Magazine, but all that is bullshit. There’s nothing about America that makes us invincible. No law demands that America be as successful as it had been for the second half of the 20th century. It’s not written into our DNA that we can’t fail or slip into mediocrity just like any other country. The idea that America will be perpetually stable, that something about the nation itself makes it superior to all others, is completely at odds with anyone’s definition of objective reality.

Going forward, we need to rethink what constitutes a “bad decade.” Because if the so-called decade from hell is any indication, this century is going to be one goddamned disaster after the next.

This may sound a little too doom and gloom, a little too hopeless as the Big O would complain, but the fact is the very things that caused the shitstorm of the past 10 years are endemic to American society.

The Time article points to the four things that accounted for decade’s tragic fate: neglect, greed, self-interest and deferral of responsibility.

No shit!

What’s more American than those things? We live in a country where fat people sue McDonalds for making them fat. Where those greasy fucks at Goldman Sachs are pulling in billions of our dollars while one out of every eight of us is on food stamps. Where self-interest is considered a virtue. Where intercity schools crumble and prisons overcrowd while we sit idly by.

These inherently American traits aren’t just going to go away because circumstances have changed. We aren’t just going to stop being greedy and individualistic because our country’s falling apart. No, this is America, land of the free, home of the red, white and blue — and them colors don’t run.

But then again maybe all this hopelessness is a result of coming of age in the decade from hell. Ours is one of the first generations of Americans to be a product of these trying times. For people of our generation the prosperous America only exists in fading memories, in tiny fragments bearing no context or time stamp. Y2K, the Bush/Gore Election, 9/11, Abu Ghraib, Katrina, the Great Recession, Madoff — these constitute the entirety of our lived history. They have shaped us. They have dictated how we think about the country we live in, and what we think about when someone utters the letters U.S.A. And whether or not we want to believe it, the ’00s shape our visions for the future. They imprinted us with a certain hopelessness, an anxious feeling that things aren’t going to be all right.

And maybe that was what made Obama so appealing to our generation. He acknowledged the litany of problems the ’00s wrought, yet he still carried the message of hope we so desperately wanted to believe in. It was a message of defiance in the face of hopeless circumstances. Here was this figure massive enough to take on these seemingly insurmountable problems. He remedied our anxieties. We poured our hopes into him. And the fact that he has been so inept, that he has surrounded himself with the same old goons that fucked this country up in the first place, that all that hope he promised seems to have disintegrated, is perhaps this decade’s greatest tragedy.

Tony Manfred is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He may be reached at tmanfred@cornellsun.com. The Absurdity Exhibition appears alternate Tuesdays this semester.