Politics & Power Quote by Florence King

King’s line lands like a cigarette flicked into a puddle: casual, nasty, and oddly illuminating. “Time has lost all meaning” isn’t just hyperbole about distraction or modern speed; it’s an accusation that Americans have traded continuity for impulse. When time stops functioning as memory, consequence, tradition, or even patience, culture becomes permanently present-tense: the next hit of outrage, the next reinvention, the next purchase.

The phrase “nightmare alley” does double duty. It’s a seedy, funhouse corridor where you’re lured forward by spectacle, but also a nod to the noir tradition of grift and self-deception. King suggests the American psyche isn’t simply confused; it’s being worked. The “Western world” tag is strategic, too: she’s framing the U.S. as the civilization that was supposed to inherit Enlightenment ideals - rationality, progress, moral seriousness - and then turned them into a gaudy theme park of appetites.

Calling it “the American mind” is the sharpest twist. She isn’t indicting a policy, a party, or a particular era so much as a mental style: restless, credulous, allergic to limits. The subtext is that a culture can’t be “exceptional” if it can’t remember yesterday or imagine tomorrow. King, writing in a late-20th-century America saturated by TV, advertising, and self-help optimism, uses cynicism as a diagnostic tool. The wit isn’t decorative; it’s the scalpel.