Once in a blue moon a magazine essay explains immediate crises so well that it also lights up broader challenges and horizons. Jonathan Schell does it this week in The Nation by reckoning with our country's converging crises and prospects.This essay should be anthologized and, if we survive, canonized.

It sometimes catches the echoes of its own greatness a bit grandly. But this essay is great enough to be required in every serious high school, college, and grand-strategy program or agency. If the Obama Administration's Ivied wunderkinds haven't enough time, mental space, and moral disposition to absorb these arguments, we're finished. Obama should read it while drafting his State of the Union speech.

The new president's inaugural address broke ground of its own, but Schell goes further, as a democratic writer must, to explain why America can't help the world without first changing itself even more fundamentally than Obama and other elected officials have been able or willing to say.

Schell sketches the gap between, on the one hand, a "mainstream," supposedly pragmatic but delusional politics which Obama has accommodated rather troublingly in his appointments and, on the other hand, the independent, even radical nature of reality itself, which shows the current conventional political and economic wisdom for what it is:

"The operative word here is 'bubble'..... a real-world construct based on fantasies," Schell writes. "The equity exposed as worthless was always phony, but real people really lose their jobs. The weapons of mass destruction.... were fictitious, but the war and the dying are actual. ... The 'uncertainty' about global warming - cooked up by political hacks and backed by self-interested energy companies - is fake, but the Arctic ice is melting anyway."

None of these and other bubbles (nuclear-arms "safety," or a "drill, baby, drill," Hummer approach to energy consumption) was caused by any external enemy or act of God, Schell notes. We caused them ourselves, not least in Iraq and in the financial meltdown. In all of these bubbles, we have robbed our children, not just metaphorically: "The dollars we are spending [in these bubbles] are coming directly out of our children's paychecks."

Unable to face this reality, the columnist George Will showed in his column on Wednesday just how determined he and some other American conservatives are to misunderstand it. He complained that in his inaugural address Obama blames America's problems not on enemies foreign and domestic but on our own premises and practices. That's true, but not in the way Will pretends.

Noting the president's scriptural warning that Americans must "set aside childish things," Will snidely challenged him to blame dependency coddling, big-government liberalism for "the pandemic indiscipline that has produced a nation of households as over-leveraged as is the government from which the householders insistently demand more goods and services than they are willing to pay for."

Will is more than a bit stale and duplicitous here, for the "pandemic indiscipline" he complains of is the fault not originally or primarily of over-leveraged homeowners and government, as the whole conservative noise machine has been claiming, but of the corporate capitalist consumer juggernaut Will and other conservatives defended and even celebrated (see Brooks, David), even as it subjected Americans to a 40-year-long, multi-billion-dollar campaign to destroy their culture of thrift. It did this while depriving them of wages and protections and titillating and bamboozling them with easy credit and degrading entertainment.

No Burkean conservative can look in the mirror without recognizing where the primary responsibility lies. The reason Will and Brooks are done is that they can't reconcile their oft-proclaimed yearning for an ordered, even sacred liberty with their knee-jerk obeisance to every whim and riptide of corporate capitalism that is destroying and dissolving every value and institution they claim to cherish.

Can American leaders and ordinary citizens break out of these delusional bubbles and find the political courage and sovereignty to reconfigure "free markets" that no longer liberate as much as they degrade? Can we find the inner strength we'll need to re-think the national-security,"war on terror" grand strategies that are decreasing our freedom and security at home and abroad?

Obama 's Inaugural address shows that he understands these challenges and is willing to face them more honestly than Will or Brooks have done. But what will that require, not just from him, but from all of us who supported him, and from those who did not? If you want to take the measure of that challenge, test your unexamined habits and assumptions against Schell's essay.

While you're at it, read the essays and reports in the same issue: By Katrina van den Heuvel on doubts about Obama's audacity, by Benjamin Barber on the coils of consumerism, by Katha Pollitt on the travails of the publishing industry, by Robert Scheer on obstacles to government accountability, by William Greider on the global economic crisis, by Christopher Hayes on Obama's troublingly centrist team, and by Richard Falk on the Gaza War. I don't agree with all of them, but, clearly, this is The Nation's moment.