America is suffering under a lack of leadership.

To be fair, the world is suffering from a lack of leadership, but most cameras and most eyes and most guns and most interest is trained on the contiguous 48 (apologies to Sarah Palin and Barack Obama's childhood homes), and I have a very wide swath of experience therein, so that's where we're gonna focus today.

Leadership is the sort of thing that Patrice Lumumba brought to the Congo, that Toussaint L'Ouverture brought to Haiti, or (even notwithstanding his imperialist bloodlust and apparent insanity) Teddy Roosevelt brought to the US presidency. Going back to conquerors like Genghis Khan, entrepreneurs like Madame CJ Walker or great thinkers like Dr. Mark Dean (one of my missions this year is to name drop this guy as much as I can, in that I technically could not have made most of the money in my career without three of the thirty patents he holds existing, forming the foundation for all "personal computers" that we use today), leadership changes things. Leadership steps up.

Unfortunately -- and I can personally attest to some of this -- leadership has been bred out of the greatest parts of western culture for (at the very least) sixty years. With the advent and popularity of television (combined with the staggering yoke of sexism, holding down some of the most talented minds from jump street). After a soul-crushing day of workplace monotony and dehumanization, the comforting opiate of cathode rays (or reflected plasma or LCD screens these days) is a welcome reward and a childcare necessity for many. Made all too comfortable by the "convenience" of iPhones and Wal-Mart, the rewards of leadership -- historical posterity, change, a better world for the future to inherit -- are viewed as not worth the challenges of hard work, rampant opposition, political gladhandling in organizations and (in some cases) threat of personal harm. This is true even when it leads to being in debt up to your eyeballs, imprisoned by mortgages and soccer practice schedules. The very concept of service has been middle classed to death with Huxtable aspirations and Good Times realities