Enjoy our empire in decline…it’s generally the fun part.
Assuming we ever actually had the moral high ground, it’s now gone. And I say, “good riddance.” It’s a position that blinds you to reality, confuses honest diplomacy, and allows smugness to reign supreme. Nobody likes deluded arrogance, and that’s basically been our default position.
I’m mainly talking about America’s international relations, but that encompasses a lot of areas of life. This tall ledge on which we’ve perched, spitting on the foreign peasants, hasn’t really served us very well. For at least the last eighty years or so, we’ve kind of assumed that the rest of the world sees us like we see ourselves…as undeniably awesome. A people to emulate, a system to admire, a place to move when you’ve tried everywhere else, and failed.
For a minute there, some of them actually did.
Not anymore.
Yes, America did, indeed, turn the tide of two 20th century world wars. But we’ve been living off that ever since, conveniently forgetting the bad parts of that (nuking Japan comes to mind), and riding high on the glory of our ancestors. That nation, that sleeping dragon, is not who we are anymore. We’re neither emotionally nor physically equipped to do that again, should the need arise.
Thinking people with different ideologies aren’t just wrong but evil, spying on our own citizens, creating an above-board extra-legal judicial system with no rules but plenty of torture, believing anything that comes out of the mouths of war mongering politicians of either party. Let’s just say The Greatest Generation wouldn’t have stood for that. They wouldn’t even recognize it as the same country they fought to save…and they’d be right. It’s not freedom. I’m still not entirely sure what it IS, but it definitely ain’t freedom.
Political parties trying to game the system is a real thing. I know you think it’s just the other party that does this, but you’re wrong. They both do. What’s crazy is how we’re letting them destroy democracy in the name of saving democracy. I’m not even sure if we notice the irony.
And have you tried to listen to modern college students? The overwhelming majority of them are angry, vapid, deluded, screen-jockey stupid blobs of malformed, uninformed but highly opinionated goo. They have neither the correctly-aimed righteous Utopian anger of the Flower Children, nor the solid, strength and old-time values which once defined rural America. Hell, they’re so drowned in emoji-based communication that they barely even do the dirty fun stuff we did at their age.
But if we’re going to be a proper empire in decline, we should, at the very least, get better at debauchery. That’s what’s great about declining empires. Bacchanalias, masquerade balls that slowly devolve into orgies, cross-dressing/gender-bending/role-swapping sex play. The parallels to late Rome are pretty staggering.
Instead of angry cross-dressers yelling at their baristas for hurriedly calling them the gender they appear to be but don’t think of themselves as in order to gather equally faux-outraged pretend internet “friends,” let’s take a page from ancient Rome. Cross-dress if you want. Hell, tell the world that you change genders every fifteen seconds, if you want. But for God’s sake, do it for the sake of a wondrous variety of sex play, not to make some mild ideological point that no one really cares about. Let’s Decline in the right way, damn it.
Just so this article isn’t entirely depressing, I do think there’s hope. Our system is malleable, and if we’d stop letting corporations and the 1% divide us so deeply over social issues, we really could focus our energy on more important issues, we really could band together and non-violently reclaim what was once great about this country. I refuse to believe that we’ve gone too far down the Rabbit Hole to be able to rescue ourselves. Reclaim freedom, stop torturing people and have a lot more sex. All of that, even the sex, will help us claw our way back toward a place where that former moral high ground will help us internationally. If not, at least we’ll get laid a little more.