In the 2008 election year, the American financial meltdown has hit home to Americans like a ton of bricks. With President Bush calling for a world summit to address the crisis, America admits that the world has grown global while it was busy fighting the world and the obesity that stems from bored overeating due to lack of engagement with the outside world.

America’s aloofness from the world is the result of many factors, including narcissism, frustration, complacence, fear or a general sense of being overwhelmed. Powerlessness is the broadest umbrella term for the emotional mix. Fight or flight is the response, either giving in to depression and staying in bed or getting riled up and attacking.

Nothing can be more depressing to America than eight years under a Republican administration waging war on the world in a misplaced hunt for faceless enemies while the world reorganized and reoriented to a global reality.

The European Union established itself, as did the African Union, the League of Arab States, the South East Asian Countries and the Pan American Union, among dozens of such regional groupings. Meanwhile, America stood in lone defiance of that globalizing reality while dressed in the Emperor’s outfit of a fantasy about “allies” dropping steadily by the wayside.

America’s nakedness in the 2008 election year has been exposed by an upstart half-Black presidential candidate who has called for “fairness” in a nation obviously run amock. Corporate heads rake in millions of dollars in golden parachutes on having failed at their jobs while millions of middle-class Americans are called upon to bail them out and let them keep looting on the talk and consultancy circuits.

One of those middle class Americans was “Joe the Plumber,” who was not really a plumber and who didn’t pay taxes but who gained his fifteen minutes of fame, and the same for other plumbers across the country, by challenging the Democratic candidate and then being erroneously cited by the Republican candidate in a failed attack against the Democrat that backfired. The details of “Joe” and his role in the campaign have long passed from view but his impact lives on in his un-coached openness to the media that zoomed in on him.

“Joe the plumber” was angry about the need for America to change its go-it-alone American way. That perception was filtered through limited understanding about the Democratic candidate’s tax plan. Subsequent media analysis proved the view to be unfounded.

The logic of the dynamics involved and the truth of the reality was lost on the angry portion of the middle class supporting the Republican slate by equating a more equitable domestic social fairness for America in a global world with the red-flag terms of “raising taxes on the little guy” and “socialism.”

As the election nears, the anger of those Americans is fanned by an escalating nasty meanness and disregard for discourse based on follow-through about stated facts. That emotional appeal to baseless gut feelings is aimed at shooting down the steadfast assertion of reality. America has to join the global mainstream to save its economy.

America as a whole, however, throughout the 2008 election campaign, has proclaimed ever more vocally that it is done with the fearful world as it has always been. America is ready to engage at a meaningful level with the world for its own prosperity and for that of its 200 other national equals as citizens of one world in which technology paves the way for human savvy to triumph over challenges and limitations to innovation.

The conservative element clinging to old-world ways of life is not admitting defeat and not lying down in bed with depression. Tooth and nail, it fights against change, drawing on the outmoded devices of nastiness and the instilling of fear against proponents of change to preserve a nonexistent ideal of rugged, frontier toughness when the world calls for America to exert its kinder, gentler and nicer side to lead the world.

In the 2008 election year amid a global financial crisis caused by American greed, America and the world don’t need moose killers and oil drillers. Americans as a whole are not taken in by cheerleaders for taciturn old men angry about young upstarts taking over. America as a whole is not opting for mean or nasty or bitterness about the rapidity of global progress. America is opting for nice and the prosperity that comes with it.

A true crisis for the American family brought the country to a breaking point with the past. The thrust of the 2008 election campaign shows America as ready to tame narcissism, ignorance, fear and anti-intellectual emulation of the down-home ignorant nice guy as the American ideal. It shows America ready for a smart man to lead it among the world’s other smart leaders in a wise and fair use of resources to prosper by building a better world instead of clinging to outmoded delusions.