Pylimitics

This is a different sort of essay. Instead of just writing and posting and that’s it, I’m adding to it daily as I find more and more evidence that the United States I grew up in is done, gone, and replaced by a thuggish, fractured, immoral and criminal rogue society.

For most of my life, one of the givens of the world order was that the US was a place where there were laws, and if anyone broke them, there were institutions and systems in place to find them, apply due process, and if guilty, they’d be punished. It felt like the US, for all its faults, tried to be an exemplar of morality for the rest of the world. As Robert Reich points out, “the moral purpose of civilized society is to prevent the stronger from attacking and exploiting the weaker.” There were nations that were quite the opposite, and we called many of them “rogue states.”

People on the conservative side of the political spectrum were, I think, quite proud of these aspects of the US. Or at least claimed to be.

Over the past, I dunno, couple of decades at least, it looks like one of two things has been revealed. Either those conservatives were insincere liars the whole time, or their stance was coopted and overrun (successfully) by people who really are insincere liars. I don’t know which is the case. Maybe both are true.

In any event, by just about any measure one can think of, the term “rogue state” now applies to the US more than any other nation on the world stage. And as Adam Serwer points out in The Atlantic, the idea of morality on the US national stage is pretty much gone as well. If you’re rich and prominent, in the US you can get away with pretty much anything. Look at the con artist and its minions now running the place.

Quinn Norton describes the result of the decline and fall of US society as moral injury: “In the process of dismantling the American system, everyone is affected by the failure of moral life in society.” Norton points out that the affected, which is nearly all of us, feel “rage, sadness,” and that comes with “a sense that nothing we do can stop this.“

Moral injury is well-known in psychology. There is an International Centre for Moral Injury in the UK. They mean they study it; not that they traffic in it. That other kind of center is presently right here in the US. At the Centre, moral injury “involves a profound sense of broken trust in ourselves, our leaders, governments and institutions to act in just and morally ‘good’ ways” and the experience of “sustained and enduring negative moral emotions – guilt, shame, contempt and anger – that results from the betrayal, violation or suppression of deeply held or shared moral values.”

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There’s another aspect of this, detailed by Hanna Horvath in Nobody Trusts Anybody Anymore. “There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from living in a society where you can’t take anything at face value,” they write. Read her piece; it points out that besides the moral depravity of the US and its brand of capitalism and politics, there’s an everyday economic cost to everyone. “When the system rewards dishonesty, dishonesty is what you get.”

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Yet another facet is illustrated by the Epstein Affair. Sarah Kendzior, who has been reporting on this for a long time, suggests that the release of (not all of) the Epstein files “…has forced politicians and pundits to finally address the massive criminal conspiracy that was in the public domain for two decades.” A key here is that Kendzior is replying to a submitter’s question about whether there will be any accountability. She begins “Yes, some — but not necessarily in the US.” Because the US is now an immoral swamp. Those politicians and pundits had victim reports right in their faces for years. But, points out Kendzior, “There is something very wrong with the way Americans trust criminal elites to be more reliable sources than the people they hurt.”

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The US is no longer the kind of nation everybody aspires to emigrate to, and no longer the kind of nation other countries aspire to emulate. It’s the kind of nation decent people leave. That’s not feasible for me, but if I were younger and less enmeshed in my life here, I would certainly be considering it.

The US is now led by a “transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government.” (Sarah Kendzior)

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Is there any alternative to leaving by exiting through the border? It could be. The US is a huge geographical area, mostly empty. I’ve read about people who “leave” by pulling up stakes, going off-grid, and living in tiny houses, vehicles, vessels, remote cabins, and the like. Some of that is driven by the apocalyptic economic plight of more and more citizens and residents here. But I think some of it might be driven by the same things I’m recognizing.

I’ve never been a camping aficionado, although I have slept in tents, trailside cabins, and even RVs. I understand the draw some people feel to wake up to a different landscape on different days — but that doesn’t draw me. What I muse about is whether there can be a kind of exit that remains within a social organization that still retains the essential character of a healthy civilization. Not everything in the US is rotting, after all. The town and state where I am are, for the most part, still intact, civil, and livable. Perhaps there’s a kind of exit in remaining in place.

There is an ongoing struggle against the transnational crime syndicate masquerading as our government. That will take some time to win or lose. But there is another struggle that’s going to go on for a longer time, I think. It’s internal to each of us as we try to cope with what has been done to, and by, us: The sufferers of moral injury don’t just experience emotional pain, they endure physical symptoms — headaches, stomach complaints, barely sleeping, or barely able to stay awake.*

I began with “the United States I grew up in is done, gone, and replaced by a thuggish, fractured, immoral and criminal rogue society.” Even when (and if) the monsters are overcome, everything is going to be different. Including ourselves. Maybe there can someday be a new United States that aspires to be a moral society. But I think it will be completely different.

Last year I wrote a fictional series of “symiliptic reports” that were dispatches from a future sixth republic. It’s an optimistic story, based on the idea that we are now in the fourth version of the US, and we (or some of us) are going to get through this, try again (the fifth republic), fail, and try yet again, successfully (the sixth republic). I’m less optimistic now than I was last year, but I haven’t given up. I aspire not to, ever. I remember Dan Rather ending his nightly newscast in a way I didn’t understand at the time. I get it now, though, and bid you the same. Courage.