KC SHOEN
History has arrived at the station of being where long-hallowed veneers now evaporate for the U.S. The generations of denial, greed, corporate corruption, inequality, civic apathy, racial violence and consumerism have reached an 'event horizon': the long endgame. It is now the space where the polemic of pandemic, poverty, fascist brutality and protest now intersect. and need to deliver change, not just critical for improved civic engagement and civil cohabitation, but to the survival of the United States itself, now exposed as being absolutely nothing more than the failed republic that it is.
It cannot be excoriated enough, and with any excessive abundance; the needful elimination of the illusory construct the U.S. ever
being egalitarian, humane , tolerant, equal or free; all in itself a
worshipful lie of its Christian founding. To simply succumb to such pompous piety,
would be declaring eugenics not the heart of confluence to a
jailed war veteran who attempted to force the capitulation of Austria
via authoritarian overthrow as response to his country's failure post
-WWI...
Reverence
in the phantom leviathan of racially-based Anglo exceptionalism fueled
three-and-half centuries of colonialism worth of willful ignorance and
denial among the bourgeois elites , enabling the cultural and
religious justification of slavery which did not cease until 1865
(alongside the slaughter and displacement of indigenous peoples
throughout this period). From that seizure of practice, continued
forward 150 years of 'Jim Crow' legislation, segregation, racial riots,
lynching, perpetual foreign wars, obstruction of human rights both in
foreign lands, and domestic territories against the impoverished and people of color.
American culture in the past as in the present tense, remains defined by tyrannical religious zealotry, technological advancements in warfare and gun violence, materialism , witless pop culture iconoclasm and celebrity worship. The difference now is that the US in the throes of self annihilation. CoVID 19 has fleshed out and drawn bare the American Dumb, in all its arrogant gravitas, anti-intellectual splendor. The realm of the American affluent liberal acolytes of academia does not escape this blistering critique , as their bashing of the working class and subtle idolatry in acquiescence to the corrupt corporate masters they 'worship' to for their own interests, while making pseudo-progressive overtures in action and deed, is equally as 'stupid' as their uneducated counterparts they assume prowess over.
If you are among of the unfortunate 350 million gasping for air in the United Cesspool of America who are not card-carrying members of the gilded and criminal elite 1%, you are being bitch-slapped on the daily with rampant disease, unemployment, riots, threats of local and federally sponsored police kidnappings and terrorism, militia violence, inaccessibility to emergency medical services, eviction, homelessness, and the dangerous exposure to idiot motherfuckers who refuse to wear masks, who think the pandemic is a hoax, alongside the other maskless vermin, the QAnon worshiping trailer-park all-star inbreeds who are certain that pizzerias, pederasts, registered 'Democrats' and Hollywood 'liberals' are conspiring together to bring America to an end by child sex trafficking on a demonic spectrum , then selling its national entrails to China.
Couple this with the reality that your incumbent President is cementing his permanent station within the Oval Office as your Supreme Leader via suspending the 2020 election ( and enacting Martial law in the ensuing mass public unrest), so that aside the pre-ascribed manifested petulance (which itself makes your continuing survival questionable), you may have to go into hiding if you are not in 'alignment' with Big Brother Trump and Company. The scepter of permanent incarceration around other CoVID convicts nation-wide will be a death sentence in itself if you are not careful and compliant...
Empires always reach such active levels of hubris upon their inevitable extinction, but America's moribund death-knell is quite something to behold, indeed. Accelerated by a vicious virus that was met by the very aforementioned stupidity, exposed it to be the den of inequity it has always been throughout its densely slave-infested, derisive, violent, barbarian history. And while I appreciate Wade Davis' romantic sentiments in regards to America's unraveling , it is still done through the annoying lens that most Americans themselves allow their vision to be clouded by: exceptionalism.
The cultural beatification of American exceptionalism is the very reason why the U.S. is now on its way to the failed-state graveyard. The conditioning and propagandizing of the past two and a half centuries of its existence ensured its demise would be assigned rapidly into the vacuum bag of history. In its beginning, the founding fathers and their euro-white colonist brethren sanctified the evils of the imprisonment of Africans kidnapped and sold into chattel slavery, the murder of indigenous peoples and criminal acquisition of their lands, the further destruction of local culture through puritanical religious doctrines establishing missions and colonies to forcibly convert and kill indigenous people as warranted. This fanaticism of exceptionalism became as sacrosanct when Monroe dropped his doctrine in 1823, directing American foreign policy as right to invade the sovereignty of other nations as warranted to preserve its sphere of influence without European usurpation. Andrew Jackson would cement the exceptionalism of the European descendants and their power to 'redraw' the map domestically whenever suited for Anglo expansion during his vicious, pre-civil war tenure .
Throughout the latter 19th and prevailing 20th century a society was borne from this through generations that would collectively believe itself to be indispensable to the world at large: the most free, the largest of all capacity for opportunity unmatched in the planet, the most democratic of all governments, the most productive. The myth of exceptionalism seemed solidified in full view of the world after America's victorious involvement in WW II. At 6% of the world population, the US ran the table with providing nearly 90% of the worlds goods.
Americas
outreach, confluence, economy and culture became at once stratospheric,
monolithic and legendary. Nearly twenty years of world dominance in
these arenas were astounding indeed. It was also the period of
ultra-conformity imposed upon the boomer generation who would come of
age during this time (1945-1962), as their parents wanted the absolute
best for this generation after they had suffered the Great Depression
and fought fiecely during the proceeding war. They wanted their kinder
not to stand out or be different, honor all authority as
absolute, stay away from 'free-thinkers' and 'creatives', get an
approved, socially acceptable career, get married, swim with the rest of
programmed minnows and be a brick in the Great Wall of American
Exceptionalism.
This same generation would be the ones to lead the US straight off a cliff, for their own enrichment. Consider this:
The Civil Rights Act of 1964, The Voting Rights Act of 1965, and all the well-intended social safety nets that were created during the 60's and 70's did not change the realities for Blacks in America. Lack of upward social mobility, affordable medical access, fair housing, financial equality, coupled with voter suppression, excessive incarceration, police brutality aka "death by cop" are all as active in the present tense as in time 30, 40 50, 100 even 150 years previous.
Regardless of this obvious anomaly, white boomers like to gloss themselves as the music and protest generation, yet, at the first instance they could glom any patronage of status, position and money within the upper classes through their white entitlement they ran for it, and did not give a shit who they left behind, or stepped on in the process to get there. Once Tricky Dick resigned from the Oval office, and Vietnam was over, their obligation to 'social consciousness' was swiftly concluded. The younger boomers later became known as the 'Me Generation' of the 70's and early 80's : the self-enamored, self-entitled, and mean-spirited sect that sparked the rise of serial killings, child abductions, rapes and homicides, later on being the fore-bearers of modern American Gun Entitlement: mass public shootings.
With exception of Reagan and Obama, it has been primary boomer administrations like the Clintons , G.W. Bush and Donald John Trump that continued to sell this sense of American exceptionalism always for personal gain. Boomer corporate trouser stains such as Lloyd Blankfein (Goldman Sachs), Jamie Dimon (JP Morgan Chase), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Larry Kudlow (current Director of National Economic Council) Larry Summers (Former Director of the EC as well as the U.S. Treasury under Clinton), and David Robert Malpass (President of The World Bank) have all successfully, and in part, over the course of 50 years en total, collectively created, and personally benefited from, the continued creation of American inequality.
Source:Economic Policy Institute, current as of 24 August 2020
The
Boomers became the very epitome of what they sought to set themselves
apart from: greedy, selfish conformists, and permanent members of the
establishment who have enabled and perpetuated unjustified foreign
wars in support of breaking the sovereignty of independent nations for
economic and political gain. Maintaining segregation and inequality
between whites and non-whites, the affluent class and the impoverished
working class through instruments of law and individualism..
Less
the heroic pastime warriors for justices old a la Malcolm X, Huey P.
Newton, or Abbie Hoffman, but more the obsession for power, prestige,
control and corporate glory akin to Richard Milhous Nixon and the Powell Memo
The true 'face' of American Exceptionalism.
To relegate the entire onus of Americas death-by-tropes entirely on this whinging mob of megalomaniac milquetoast malcontents, (however may be it personally satisfying), would not be accurate, and doesn't answer for the deficiencies of the descendant groups from Gen X to Z.
Americans
became complacent, lazy and willfully ignorant within the last 40 years
in particular, and did not proffer uprising nor meaningful resistance
when Reagan delayed release of the American hostages in Iran to coincide
with his inauguration, stripped the negotiating power of Unions,
deregulated Wall Street, or when Clinton dropped his 'three strikes'
aberration decimating black communities, anti- Rooseveltian New Deal
policies sharply curtailing the public safety net, lesser regulations
regarding black-box derivatives stocks that would crater the economy in
two major crashes in 2000 and 2007-8 fomenting further inequality
between social classes, etc.
Americans
constantly vote against their own interests, inheriting more
degenerative, selfish , criminal, even violent leaders in both local and
national levels in every election cycle since 1968. This is the aspect
of exceptionalism that creates the space of apathy, of 'everything will
be fine , we are America' has constantly interceded into reasonable
and honest discourse, disrupting critical thinking necessary to
adjudicate that things are fucked up and why.
The hallucinogenic and hyperbolic fervor over conspiracy theories, anti-intellectualism, anti-science and non-factual hubris has been a feature of American ideology and culture for the entirety of its existence, for certain. Exceptionalism allows the inexplicable to be reasoned away, the illogical to abscond and dissolve genuine fact for belief as truth, dominates discourse with rancor, repetition and threat, rather than verifiable bonafides. It is the vaunted superstition of old, reconstituted as 'fact' to subordinate a peculiar belief or construct, giving and inciting drama over phantoms and shadows, so as obstruct the obligation to face the adversity of our existence directly.
It has maturated from existential threat to full bore 'alive' in the present: CoVID 19 will be the pandemic that catapulted the US into fascism under Trump, as there will be no election with which to remove him. No matter the frequency of our history screaming into our present, the lights our going out in America. From anti-vaxxers, anti-mask Trump supporters to dunderhead, inept Neo-liberal politicians to the biased-fed masses who place their allegiance to MSNBC, Fox News, CNN and Washington Post-like echo chambers, many Americans will meet their death by exceptionalism in the end , both as a society and as a nation.
There is no loud rumble of sustained multi-million person resistance on the horizon to undo the damage of corporate malfeasance which has fed racial and economic inequality, as would be necessary to exact necessary revolution. Americans as a collective continue to leave this to "others" when there are no "others " to take up the fight. Americans are too comfortably divided to unify over such an obvious encroachment and destroyer of human existence such as inequality: that would require the acknowledgement that America is , and has been for about 5 decades, a shithole country, that America has fostered and has been primed for fascistic take-over.
Required acknowledgement, too, is the fact that the incompetent handling of the pandemic was simply that: incompetent. America has the highest percentage of dead and infected that any. other. nation. period. It has held this distinction since April 2020.
It would require acknowledgement of the dark, disgusting history which built and sustained it, with Trump being understood as its end-product, not its source. It requires that the centuries-worth of evolving latitudes of propaganda , euphemistic doublespeak, entrenched conditioning, religious zealotry and lying sobriquets of American Exceptionalism be dropped entirely from the synapses and lexicon of a nation, to unify as a society, and allow capacity to survive and regroup to foment and awaken.
It will not happen. There seems to be not enough death, violence, state sponsored terror or socioeconomic ruin to bring this dilapidated bastard Republic together to enlighten itself.
Best prepare your casket and eulogy, then. Your exceptionalism is terminal.
