The American Empire's Point of No Return

COVID is the British gunboat blasting America's junk fleet to pieces

For about twenty years now I have been saying that America has entered its Brezhnev period. The thing is, Brezhnev was in power for eighteen years. We are well past the Brezhnev years now.

Back in 2016 I felt that the election of Trump represented something far worse than the stasis and rot I had witnessed for so long. As I said at the time, we were all headed into the fire. Some of us would get burned, some would be consumed, none would be the same. And so, almost four years later, a pandemic is raging through the country enabled by incompetence and malice. I live near the epicenter, but because I live in a "Democrat state" the lives of my family and neighbors are not worth saving. There are armed mobs descending on state capitols, as in Michigan today. In states where the infection rate is going UP they are sending people back to work.

My day to day existence has become so completely frantic that I haven't had as much time to contemplate what it all means. However, right now I see clearly that the American empire is in its death spiral. Perhaps a Diocletian is on the way to pump in some blood to reanimate the corpse, but maybe that was who Obama was. I used to think that America was headed the way of the UK. In the early 2000s I figured the over-extension of the empire in the GWOT would soon be manifest, and the US would quietly move to the second rank, consoling itself with memories of past glories.

Now it is obvious that the United States has gone for the hard crash. Our gerontocracy resembles that of the Soviet Union. The president is in his 70s, Joe Biden is even older, and Bernie Sanders, the supposed breath of fresh air, is even older than him! The opposition party is paralyzed and stuck in the past, its leadership aged and incapable of adjusting. The "left" that fancies itself to be the future is also stuck in the past, wedded to the dead ideologies of the 20th century's failed revolutions. All the while the Republican Party is waging an all-out assault on the public sphere. There is no political force capable of stopping them. Even if Biden gets elected, they will not go away. As under Obama, they will use their state governments and the power of the filibuster to prevent any forward progress.

Of course, there's a good chance Trump still gets reelected, considering the fact that Biden is MIA and hasn't addressed the Tara Reade accusations, and that so many on the left want to throw a temper tantrum and undercut him because it's the only political power their failed movement has. If he is elected I do not see any kind of program capable of meeting the challenges of the current crisis or the tactical ruthlessness needed to combat conservatives.

I had once thought there would a slow decline and muddling through, but the coronavirus has been like an out of control ship slamming into a rotting dock. The rate of collapse has been drastically accelerated. We see that this nation's failure to provide health care, its failure to treat its workers with dignity, and its failure to be able to come together in times of crisis is completely toxic.

At this point I just pray for a managed decline, not an outright collapse. It might be fun for some folks to root for the end of the American Empire, but knowing what Russia was like in the 1990s, I take no pleasure in such a possibility. I also wish more people were willing to face up to this reality. Before the first Opium War, China saw itself on the pinnacle of the world. The same goes for the Soviet Union before Chernobyl, Britain before the Suez Crisis, and Napoleon before he invaded Russia.

In the meantime I will just try to put my shoulder to the wheel and to salvage what can be salvaged. That's really the best we can hope for.

Rumors of War on Memorial Day

It's a beautiful Memorial Day here in New Jersey, exactly what you would ask for. As always, this holiday meant to commemorate the dead of American wars has been used for anything but. People online turn it into Second Veterans Day and Second Armed Forces Day where they talk about the troops or their uncle's service in Vietnam but not about the fallen. Americans don't like to think much about death, nor about the human consequences of war.

I remember the shock I felt as a child when I found out that my piano teacher's first husband died in the Battle of Okinawa. To me World War II was one of the "good wars," unlike Vietnam, whose horrors were dominating movie screens at the time. I had never really thought about how the "good" wars demand that the lives of young people whose lives have barely begun be sacrificed.

I think about this a lot, since wars like Vietnam and Iraq demanded this sacrifice, but completely unnecessarily. The last time I saw the Vietnam memorial in DC was about seven years ago, and my eyes were filled with tears of rage. Being confronted by that list of people who lost their lives for a lie was almost too much to take.

Instead of giving us pause, Memorial Day becomes yet another day to wave the flag. The subtext beneath all the local hometown parades is purely nationalistic, pretty much indistinguishable from the Fourth of July. We are a nation conditioned to war.

I was born in 1975, a few months after the fall of Saigon. The United States did not wage a full-scale war until the Gulf War in 1991, when I was fifteen. Opposition to new wars was pretty broad during my childhood. When Congress forbade Reagan from intervening in Nicaragua, that was a popular position. My students were born after 9/11, and so the United States has been at war for their entire lives, with no end in sight and very little concerted opposition to future wars.

This day, which should be for national reflection on the lives our nation has sacrificed for good causes and bad, is the ultimate symbol of our war mongering ways. We wave the flag, grill burgers, and watch the jet flyovers with no thought to the black soldier massacred at Fort Pillow, the doughboy blown apart by a trench mortar, or the sailor drowned in the waters of Pearl Harbor.

And so rumors of war fly again. Our nation rattles the saber with Iran and starts talking about the Monroe Doctrine in Venezuela. It may be there or someone else, but I would bet anything that soon enough there will be more American names added to the "roll of honor" on ground where their blood has yet to be spilled. The way we celebrate Memorial Day is all the proof I need.

Out Into The Great Wide Open

My family and I are soon taking off on a road trip vacation, part of the reason I have not been writing much. (Lots of prep work to do.) Our ultimate destination in my hometown in rural Nebraska, for a much needed visit with my parents and sisters.

We are also planning on seeing a lot of stuff and old friends between here and there. We first did this two years ago, and it was quite a memorable trip. This time, however, I am approaching things with a bit of trepidation. A lot has happened in the world over the past two years, and much of it makes me feel as if the world I grew up in back in Nebraska and the one where I live and work now in New Jersey and New York City could not be further apart. 

I am in a group I like to call "bubble jumpers." I grew up in a bubble that was overwhelmingly white, Christian, and conservative. I have move to a new one that is more diverse, cosmopolitan and liberal. Neither seems capable of speaking to the other, and both view each other with complete ignorance. I am sometimes shocked at just how little supposedly educated people in both bubbles know about the other parts of the country.

I've been lucky to live in many parts of this country, from big cities like Chicago to midsize ones like Newark, Omaha, and Grand Rapids, from college towns like Champaign to small towns in Nebraska and Texas. During my life I've traveled to 45 of this country's 50 states. I've had Runzas in Nebraska, roadside tamales in Texas, "Italian" hot dogs in New Jersey and fish tacos in San Diego. That experience has given me the knowledge that this is a country of many regions, not a simple "blue state-red state" divide. It is a geographic diversity that I am excited to experience again on my trip.

However, I've been thinking a lot about the fact that many of the regions I will be traveling to -including the one where I lived half my life- voted overwhelmingly for the current occupant of the White House. It's made my relationship with those places, especially my hometown, much more fraught.

But this morning I got a reminder of how much this "red-blue" talk blinds us to the ubiquity of the political poisons in America. This morning, after dropping my daughters off at school, I went to the Italian bakery/deli to get some stuff for our trip. As I came in, I heard a woman finishing a rant (which I couldn't quite make out) angrily mentioning that there is no "White Lives Matter" movement or "White History Month." The hate and bullshit that gave rise to the Trump presidency is not a regional matter, it is deeply woven into White American culture in all the nooks and crannies of this nation, whether they be the on the coasts or in the middle. As I make my trip, I will be reporting back on this blog, hopefully with some worthwhile insights.