Was the United States ever truly here? It vanished so quickly. The constitution, free speech, habeas corpus, posse comitatus, due process, the fourth amendment safeguarding our privacy and the sanctity of our homes, gone. Gone in a flash. Like it never existed.
Or do I delude myself? Are there things I’m not seeing
because of my personal bias? Is life in the U.S. as catastrophic as it seems,
or am I exaggerating events out of an innate tendency to catastrophize? No. I
am not. These are realities. Facts. Concrete evidence. Videos. Savageries impossible
to hide, however much deceit and propaganda get thrown at it. You can argue about
policies that further enrich the rich and impoverish a population already struggling
to survive under the harsh austerities of neo-liberal economics, but you cannot
exaggerate or obfuscate a murder. And there have been at least two. Committed
with the merciless slick of Minnesota ice.
It is so easy to delude oneself. I do it consciously.
I do it unconsciously. I do it in my sleep and I do it standing arms akimbo in
daylight, with a cape flowing behind me. One of the more unexpected benefits of
feeling powerless, is counteracting it by developing superpowers. One of my
superpowers is inconsistency. Another is contradiction. Oh my god do I love
contradiction. I love anything that spurs a quiet moment of domestic monotony
into a hippodrome of competing theories and flaming enigmas. I enjoy quantum incongruities
like Schrodinger’s cat. And a tight-fitting blue suit, red boots, and a long
red cape. I do lift dumbbells. So I’m on my way. Give me time. Tell me
something and I’ll contradict it. I’ll twist it into a muscle. I’ll make it
physical. I’ll build it into something counterclockwise and strange and animate
it with electric motors and old rubber belts and industrial scrap à la Jean
Tinguely’s noisy, self-destructive sculptures.
I believe illusions are necessary because the human
condition is stark and unforgiving, but when illusions start dominating the
agora and replacing reality with the kind of simulacra described by French
philosopher Jean Baudrillard, life starts resembling the hellishly fake worlds
of The Truman Show and The Matrix. It’s fun to watch sci fi
movies like Alien and Fahrenheit 451 and tv series like Black
Mirror that allegorize dystopic and technological threats with highly
destructive agendas. It’s always a relief to leave a nightmare behind with the
popcorn and credits rolling on the screen and step back out into the world
where life continues as normal. But now we’ve reached a point where the events
outside the theaters and streaming services on our flat screen tvs are even
more threatening and dark, and most certainly no longer normal. The alien
eating the crew of the USCSS Nostromo is a slimy analogue to the unchecked
greed devouring what is left of the former United States. And I often feel
surrounded by the same eerily bland temperaments of the vegetabalized population
in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the sidewalk zombies riveted to lithium
hungry smartphones.
Who are these people I see out walking or whizzing by
on monowheels or escooters who so ignore your physical presence you begin to
wonder if you’re not a ghost? The pods have opened.
Hannah Arendt argued that totalitarianism thrives
on a dumbed-down or atomized population, specifically through the erosion of
critical thinking, loneliness born from an imposed isolation similar to the one
mandated by the Covid pandemic, and the replacement of truth with consistent,
fabricated narratives. She noted that such regimes replace expertise with loyal
sycophants and groveling mediocrities and find it much easier to exploit a
society that has lost the ability to distinguish fact from fiction than a
society with an appetite for inquiry and intellects nimble enough to appreciate
the inherent complexities of human behavior and its many contradictions.
Dictators dislike contradiction. That’s because
they’re constantly teetering, having come unmoored from the moral universe and
having no understanding of the fickleness of existence. Stop respecting
existence and you risk existence losing respect for you. You live in fear.
Constant insecurity. Because you lead a life of lies. I know how exhilarating
that must be, to acquire that ability to lie, distort, create fictions that
suit your image, that flatter your beautiful hair, and your winning smile as
the paramilitary force you’ve devised bashes in doors and kidnaps people. The
power is intoxicating. But it must be constantly fed, like any drug. And that
requires lying. The truth won’t do. The truth is bitter and pregnant with
nuance. The truth is aligned with liberty and justice, those two old worn-out
words, weak with Orwellian legerdemain and semantic leaching. But they do mean
things. They mean having the freedom to air your opinions without fear of
arrest or banishment. And not having to conceal or compromise your beliefs to
keep a job or a friendship alive.
The late Michael Parenti once said you don't know
you're wearing a leash if you sit by the peg all day. The
further from the peg you go, the tighter the leash around your neck. When
people move too far from the peg they get called conspiracy theorists, cynics,
curmudgeons, and just plain nuts. I’ve been feeling that leash tighten these
last few years. Beginning with Covid. And showing proof of vaccination to a
maître d’ so that I might have entry into a restaurant. Growing suspicions.
Growing mistrust. Which has cost me some friends. And who knows what else.
I was born in Minneapolis. I lived there until I was
twelve. The last house our family occupied in Minneapolis was on the banks of
the Mississippi. In the summer I’d go down and gaze at the carp lounging in the
sand close to shore. Or that turtle that used to get up on a rock in a shallow
part of the river and stay there all day, looking north. Why north? I remember
coming home from school one April afternoon and hearing the loud crash and
thunder of the ice breaking up. That’s what you fear all winter long. The
treacherous, unforgiving ice. Like that time I was ten and skating on a lake at
night and two guys got in a big fight and were lying on the ice blood
splattered everywhere, surrounded by a crowd of onlookers, who were trying to
stop it. The prevalence of blood was no doubt due to the blades of their ice
skates. It was horrifying. I was unused to seeing violence outside of
television dramas and news shows and my feelings about it were intense. Ice can
also be beautiful. But I prefer it in a glass of iced tea. Not in people’s
eyes.
Some things still feel normal. We still have
electricity and running water. The mail gets delivered. The streets are full of
cars. The traffic lights are still functioning. People are still trading in the
stock exchange. I can watch Lucinda Williams or Glenn Greenwald on YouTube.
This afternoon I took a shower. And ate a meat loaf sandwich and watched Landman
on Paramount Plus. But I can’t help feel something is missing. And
something in its place has been added. I can’t quite define it yet. But it’s
not a ticking bomb anymore. It’s been detonated. And its explosion has left a
crater the size of the liberty bell right where my heart used to be.
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