
Election 2020: The End of 'American Exceptionalism'
In These Times - September 30, 2020
"Despite all of our nuclear weapons, America’s real power has always been cultural. We took over the world with Doritos and McDonald’s and Hollywood blockbusters, everything engineered to provide a quick and addictive burst of pleasure with the least possible effort. Perhaps the barking, dog-faced idiocy of our entertainer president is the inevitable culmination of that..."
Individuals may experience injustice, but nations get what they deserve. America has gobbled up the earth, sucked its blood, and swallowed all of its carcinogens and poison in the process. Our fate is not glory, but brain damage. We may end our history as fools, the scary mob bosses who aged into pathetic infirmity, parked in a corner in front of a droning TV set as the rest of the world carries on without us.
The Trump years have actually made me less cynical. Cynicism is a knife used to prune away the flowery concealments that obscure the truth. With Trump, this is unnecessary. There is no skill or nuance required to decipher his meaning. This is one reason he leaves so many of his opponents sputtering. We came for fine dining, and were given instead 100 Snickers bars shoved directly into our mouths as a robot manipulates our jaws up and down. Trump asks nothing of anyone, except to sit back and watch and die. Maybe that is what America wanted all along.
Despite all of our nuclear weapons, America’s real power has always been cultural. We took over the world with Doritos and McDonald’s and Hollywood blockbusters, everything engineered to provide a quick and addictive burst of pleasure with the least possible effort. Perhaps the barking, dog-faced idiocy of our entertainer president is the inevitable culmination of that. Joe Biden seems like a nice enough man when juxtaposed against that — and is the one and only thing on the menu besides total nihilism — but he also embodies the devastating weakness that all of the normal politicians are now faced with. Trump, a jackal blessed with a total lack of self-reflection but able to smell blood, gestures out at everything that is broken and says: “You helped to break this!” Which is quite true. And Biden and the other traditional types can only stammer back: “Well, I don’t want to break it any more.”
A tepid choice when compared with the thrill of watching the world burn! Did you ever stop and consider that perhaps Americans are ready to lay back and cackle as it all collapses? The best and final reality show in American history is on the ballot. The only question is whether a majority of us have had enough of the rise of our empire, and are eager for the fall. ...
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