Warning: What follows may confuse you. It certainly confuses me. Consider:
* Unemployment is dropping; so, too, the federal deficit.
* Exports are soaring.
* The fearsome Japanese economic assault has been turned back (for now); and the Japanese are fumbling around, looking for a future.
* The "European challenge" that MIT's Lester Thurow predicted? Ho, ho, ho. Grossly overpaid German autoworkers are losing their jobs to South Carolinians and Alabamians. The European computer/software industry is a joke.
* Thanks to starting their diets earlier than others, big U.S. companies are staging a remarkable comeback.
* The respected World Economic Forum has declared the United States No. 1 in global competitiveness, displacing Japan.
* America's entrepreneurial and job-creation prowess remains the envy of the planet (and most of the new jobs are good ones).
* Services productivity, finally reflecting a mammoth investment in information technology, is stirring.
* Time magazine's centrist board of economists says U.S. economic prospects are as bright as at any time since 1945.
* Full-time U.S. workers now log more hours than the Japanese. (Remember when we fretted that "they" worked so much more than we did?)
* Crime is down, according to respected surveys.
* The divorce rate has been heading south for 20 years, and recent polls show 80 percent of us are faithful to our spouses, 88 percent "never doubt the existence of God" and 78 percent pray regularly.
* The U.S. high school dropout rate is one-third of what it was in 1974; the percentage of high school graduates has doubled, and the percentage of college graduates has tripled since 1960.
* We won the Cold War.
* Women are making enormous strides in the workplace, and for those like me raised amid Jew-baiting, Catholic-hating, rampant segregation and the House Un-American Activities Committee, the change in social tenor stuns.
* The workplace is far safer and far cleaner than 25 years ago (and our businesses have hardly collapsed in the face of mandated OSHA and EPA regulations).
Yet amid this cheery news, we are furious. Some states are putting jailbirds back into black-and-white stripes to demean them. Californians seem determined to turn doctors, nurses and teachers into immigration cops via the mean-spirited, xenophobic Proposition 187.
Opinion-maker Kevin Phillips, hardly an alarmist, even says we are "prerevolutionary." In a recent op-ed piece, he equated today's rumblings to the days of Lexington and Concord.
I don't get it. Columnist George Will says in part it's the brutish nature of sound-bite TV campaigning. (Is any candidate for office saying anything positive?) Phillips blames 91,000 grabby lobbyists in Washington. Then there's the growing distance between the haves and have-nots -- and the genuinely new perception that the gulf can't be bridged.
My own, quarter-baked take:
* 1. Will is right.
The stench of political TV ads and most talk radio, among other things, has tarnished the image of almost everyone in authority. ("Honest Ollie" North's "not my commander in chief" remark is typical of the scurrilous talk du jour.)
* 2. The light at the end of the tunnel is flickering.
Rankings of U.S. competitiveness not withstanding, new global competition -- India, Mexico, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, China, etc. -- and the accelerating technological revolution have got all of us on edge. It is hard to imagine a job at one company for life ever again; and to stay ahead in the increasingly Darwinist economic race, we all will have to learn new tricks (retrain and retrain and retrain) from age 18 to 70.
* 3. The Age of White Guys may be past.
The center of the world economy, despite a slightly tatty and aging Japan, is Asia. And that feels very odd indeed to the white, Eurocentric U.S. establishment (and many outside the establishment).
"We are becoming a nation of soreheads," philosopher-humorist Garrison Keillor wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed piece. Indeed we are. And it's not doing us any good. Instead of turning our backs on immigrants and free trade, demeaning every public servant in sight and spewing bile far and wide, we need to take a measured look at our world. Does Washington (Sacramento, Albany, etc.) need fixing? You bet. Are we on a respirator, ready for Last Rites? Is it Lexington and Concord redux? Hardly.
Tom Peters is a syndicated columnist. Write to him at Tribune Media Services Inc., Suite 1500, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, Ill. 60611; (800) 245-6536