Death of a Nation

When I was growing up, I remember hearing people refer to the expression “May you live in interesting times” as a Chinese blessing. I later learned that it was neither Chinese nor a blessing. I could double-check this, but most of the websites that a few years ago could have explained its origin have become AI chatbots that coach children to commit suicide, online masculinity colleges and online casinos. I am ready to be bored.

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump announced America’s “liberation” from ruinous tariffs. That he was “retaliating” against nothing was obscured by numerous legacy outlets uncritically repeating the president’s phrasing. Instead of being retaliatory, the Trump tariffs rely on screwheaded math that factors in trade deficits. Imagine owning a Subway franchise and working up a $1,000 medical bill, then ringing up your doctor for 200 $5 foot-longs the next time he comes in because “that’s how much he’d stolen from you by not eating there.” I’m not even sure that works, but in my defense, neither will the tariffs, and, in any event, I’m not sure I’m being stupid enough. The commerce secretary defended the Trump tariffs by saying of Europe, “They hate our beef because our beef is beautiful and theirs is weak.” The only surprise here is that the commerce secretary isn’t convicted pedophile Jared Fogle, but maybe Trump’s saving that surprise for the third term.  

A repurposed meme began circulating yesterday to the effect that we are about to enter a Republican-caused once-in-a-century depression, after a once-in-a-century pandemic led to a Republican-stewarded recession and a million American deaths — and all this after the Republican-caused once-in-a-century recession during the late-2000s financial crisis. The author probably quit there because he or she was too young for the savings-and-loan crisis or the Reagan recession. We could’ve kept going. The Great Depression had Republican-controlled congresses and Republican presidents to thank. A bellicose lout of a president with an affinity for genocide (stop me if you heard this one) murdered the Second Bank of the United States and plunged America into cyclical panics for nearly a century. You can’t blame Tulip Mania on The Diggers, but if you mention the former long enough online, eventually a South African Nazi plutocrat and the former evolutionary biologists who get retweeted by them for a living will.

This might be the most calamitous economic event of my lifetime even if it were happening in a vacuum, but it’s not. March brought us the third-largest layoffs in American history, 80% of which were caused by the Trump administration and Elon Musk, an unelected drug-addled Nazi geek who converts taxpayers dollars into vehicles that explode. The president seems to want to annex Greenland, which is going to pay for itself as well as invading Iraq did. American public health infrastructure has been destroyed; any regulation designed to inhibit poisoning the earth, air and water is being lifted, and everyone’s on the pre-Obamacare “let’s hope we don’t get sick” insurance plan now. We’re black-bagging legal residents on the street, spending six times the commercial airfare to exile gay hairdressers to Salvadoran torture prison and passing the cost of litigating ethnic cleansing on to you.

Death and immiseration might be leavened by having some ostensible purpose attached to it, but I doubt it, and either way, one isn’t coming. We’ll be told that we’re all winning now — we’re winning so much — but that’s just about the most participation-trophy shit imaginable. You can pin a #1 ribbon on a corpse, but it’s still tied for first place with all the rest in Not Breathing. The best explanation we’re likely to get is that we’re not woke anymore, so mark this down as America spitefully entering its coma. On the one hand, it’s the dumbest depression in world history; on the other, companies that weren’t going to hire women and minorities no longer feel a largely inconsequential social obligation to pretend to try to hire women and minorities. In any case, the open positions in question have been eliminated.

My various social media timelines and text chains are filling with people of my parents’ generation on fixed incomes suddenly worried that their limited means for affording life’s staples are in jeopardy. My peers are texting me as if I’m an oracle because I read more depressing sections of more newspapers than they do, and are wondering if they will need to move home to try to fill in the cracks that have opened beneath their parents’ feet, their own or both. All I can tell them is to expect less. 

The arc of my life and that of my peers’ has thus far been one predictable calamity after another, twisted and exploited and willed into existence by the same malefactors and succeeded only by diminishment: “The Shock Doctrine” as biography. Every decade, the world we were born into is criminally unbuilt, brick by brick. The perpetrators are made whole; the victims are punished, and what replaces what we knew is more nothing, more gambling or more cops. Essential services vanish, pensions become 401Ks, and the complaint desk is a gun barrel with “qualified immunity” engraved on it. Each time, an “opposition” party fraternally pardons the psychopathic architects of the permission structure for each economic disaster before compromising halfway with the catastrophic cult mindset of it in pursuit of electability, cementing the elements of today’s cataclysm in the foundation of tomorrow’s.

We recover a little less each time. What was last decade’s Adobe Photoshop will be the next decade’s single-family home — something you can no longer own but may rent at terms renegotiated unilaterally. Contacting the Social Security Administration will become as much of a futile joke as speaking to a person at Facebook tech support. Your subscription fee to the United States goes toward those plundering the commons for private profit and the people who will disappear you for objecting in public. 

An America still far shy of its potential — an A-minus America, if we’re generous — is replaced by the B-minus version. Then, that smaller, less just, less imaginative retrenchment fails in some new circumstance and is replaced by its own degraded version, again and again, until we arrive here, at a failure of a nation. Call it enshittified America if you want. It is here that Trump realizes the only goal that his racist, brain-damaged mind has clung to over these many decades: Why, after all, would anyone from a shithole country bother to move here when America feels just like home?