I'm reading What's the Matter with California by Jack Cashill who went around that state asking people What's the Matter. By far the best answer came from Larry Harvey who founded the Burning Man festival.
His answer to the question What's the Matter - "a petulant sense of entitlement."
"As he sees it, the nation's obvious abundance has spawned a lifeless materialism. Unrelieved, this materialism has infected us with a "moral coarsening and a growing cynicism" and a "supine passivity" that Harvey finds decidedly "unhandsome."
A few other things I especially liked were some new anacronyms
SWAG as in Sophisticated Wild-Assed Guess
ABETTO, short for A Blind Eye to the Obvious
ABATU or A Blind Acceptance of The Unproven
