America has a bad attitude.

I can sense the basic mood of the country, and I’ll tell you what, these days it’s not good. In fact, I can’t remember a time when the national mind-set was more … well, let’s list a few of the adjectives — morose, angry, bitter, sulky, rude, acrimonious, contemptuous, indignant, lackadaisical, selfish, and conspicuously (excuse the adverb) unempathic.

We think of the’20s as being wild, the ’30s desperate, the ’40s focused, the ’50s bland, the ’60s fractional, the ’70s self-indulgent, the ’80s narcissistic, the ’90s greedy — now we’ve devolved into a bunch of misanthropic cynics.

For example, I never thought I’d see the day when we would accept the fact that our minions torture other human beings in our name. Although it may have been a convenient form of self-deception, Americans once thought of themselves as the world’s best hope. We were the champions of human rights, a beacon to all mankind. We took well-deserved pride in holding ourselves to higher precepts than the brutal ideologies that guided other nations.

And it’s not only accusations of torture that trouble me. Peruse yesterday’s news and op-ed headlines — “So what if Big Oil rakes in big profits?”; “Cops took rape case lightly”; “U.S low grade on newborns”; “Army bans ‘water- boarding’”; “U.S. soldiers, 33 others killed”; “Minimum wage vote falls short”; “Halliburton, hundreds of millions, incompetence, concealment, disaster for Iraq and America”; “Shiite and Kurdish Militias Running Iraq.” And what’s even more distressing — “Rolling Stone undergoes surgery”; “Barrino to play herself in TV movie”; “Axl: new Guns and Roses album due in fall.”

You get the picture — health care, immigration, fuel prices, racism, the soaring deficit, more than 2,400 of our military dead in Iraq.

There was a time when Americans would have reared up on their hind legs and howled like banshees if they’d been lied into a box-canyon war — a war that’s already lasted longer than our participation in World War II. And if the news is too terrible, we simply focus our attention on the nonsensical — the Rolling Stones, Guns and Roses, “American Idol.”

Worse yet, when someone disagrees with prevailing attitudes, he’s characterized as giving aid and comfort to the enemy. In other words, shut the hell up! We don’t want to hear it!

What we need, of course, is an authentic, inspiring, right-minded leader — no, it’s not Dr. Phil — who can re-instill our sense of pride and self-worth, someone who can reorder our priorities and direct our focus on solving our many problems — someone who can restore the perception that America is the most humane of nations. Someone with the candor of Truman, the charisma of Kennedy, the idealism of Carter, and, yeah, the pragmatism of Reagan.

But I suspect that politics is too corrupt to attract such a person. Lordy, what fool would subject himself to the wrath of the Swift-Boat-Veterans-for-Truth-Fox-News-Hate-Radio hatchet men?

George W. Bush is the source of many of our immediate problems — his approval rating reflects this — and he’s offered few solutions to the long-term dilemmas we’ll soon face. But he’s only the latest in a long line of leaders — presidential, judicial, and legislative, Republican and Democrat — who have allowed self-interest to compromise the general welfare.

All right, enough of this ranting. Perhaps I’m the one with the bad attitude. But I know that as a people we can do better. I’m reminded of the WPA, Social Security, the Marshall Plan, the Peace Corps, the Civil Rights Movement, Medicare, the Apollo Program, the War on Poverty, and a hundred other achievements that we can cite with pride.

With leadership and determination, we can pay down the national debt, provide better education for all our citizens, formulate an equitable solution to the immigration problem, eliminate our dependence on foreign oil, provide quality healthcare, restore the environment, improve living standards for the poor, save Social Security, etc.

If focusing on these problems results in our being misunderstood by the rest of the world, that’s fine, as long as we firmly believe we’re in the right. It’s been a long time since we’ve felt that way.

Perhaps all this is idealistic claptrap, but, you know, a healthy dose of naiveté might be refreshing. Even the most cynical among us knows what’s right and wrong, what’s good and bad. It’s time we went back to believing in ourselves.