Starvin Larry

He’s every poker player’s dream: boisterous, talkative, inattentive, ingratiating, a drinker, thinks he’s smart, sure he’s the best player at the table, and best of all, loaded with cash. By the end of the night he’s tapped out, like the week before and the week before that, but the safest bet of the evening is that he’ll show up the following week. At global poker, the US has been the chump for almost a century and that’s not going to change; it’s as close as you can get to a sure thing.

Theodore Roosevelt, his visage now inexplicably carved on Mt. Rushmore, envied the British empire and wanted one for the US. It wasn’t enough that the Industrial Revolution had made the US the world’s richest country. There was no glory in business and prosperity; what mattered was war, conquest, and battlefield heroics. With the charge up San Juan Hill…