Politics & Power Quote by Robert Stone

America, in Stone's telling, isn't collapsing in a cinematic explosion; it's wobbling like a table that looked solid until someone leaned on it. The brilliance of this line is its refusal to romanticize the prewar order while still insisting that something structural changed. "Shakier" is domestic, almost homely language for a national diagnosis, and that choice matters: it frames political crisis as lived instability, the kind you feel in your gut long before you can argue it on a panel.

The "war" hovering behind the sentence is Vietnam, but Stone isn't only talking about battlefield outcomes. He's talking about credibility, faith in institutions, and the sudden visibility of violence and corruption that had always been there, just better laundered. When he says "everybody must be aware", he's not claiming consensus so much as calling out denial. If you aren't aware, it's because you're invested in not noticing.

His intent with Dog Soldiers (a novel steeped in drug smuggling, moral drift, and post-idealistic hangover) is diagnostic rather than documentary: to track "the process" of the blow. That word does heavy work. A blow implies impact and injury, but also surprise and humiliation. Stone is examining how a country metabolizes trauma - how war seeps back home as cynicism, appetites, paranoia, and a market for escape. The subtext is bleakly American: we don't just survive shocks; we monetize them, narrate them, and call the resulting vertigo "normal."