As the country degenerates into the kind of failed empire that fascism always requires, it’s hard not to think about the last empirical crash-and-burn, Nazi Germany, and the similarities between then and now. Bill Murray, in Stripes, best described the origin of America immigrants: “We’re Americans. Do you know what that means? It means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse.” When you read the comments from the MAGAots on any subject—social, intellectual, scientific, or political—you see all of the evidence that anyone should need to know that we have not improved on that original, defective genetic material over the past 250 years. In fact, in rural America we’ve doubled-down on stupid and tuned it into a fine mist of constant trickle-down piss.
North American European immigrants have a long, vicious history of turning wine into asparagus-scented urine (the worst kind of piss). The Scotch-Irish immigrants who populated the southeastern states in the late sixteenth through the seventeenth centuries were . . . not the cream of the Anglo-Saxon crop, to say the least. They were clannish, violent, racist, and resisted any form of education as if learning something new was akin to contracting polio or the clap. As Colin Woodard wrote in his book, American Nations, “The founding fathers of the Deep South arrived by sea, their ships dropping anchor off what is now Charleston in 1670 and 1671. Unlike their counterparts in Tidewater, Yankeedom, New Netherland, and New France, they had not come directly from Europe. Rather, they were the sons and grandsons of the founders of an older English colony: Barbados, the richest and most horrifying society in the English-speaking world . . . The society they founded in Charleston did not seek to replicate rural English manor life or to create a religious utopia in the American wilderness. Instead, it was a near–carbon copy of the West Indian slave state these Barbadians had left behind, a place notorious even then for its inhumanity.”
Contrary to the “un-woke” myths and fairytales regressive Americans tell about themselves, this origin story absolutely fits Murray’s description of “wretched refuse.” When Southerners are ranting about preserving their precious heritage with statues of slavers and traitors and their blatantly racist and seditious Confederate flags, this is the heritage they are preserving. Those “founders” were terrible people and the legacy they left the country with is one of many things keeping this country from ever being great; or even good or, at best, not awful.
The Republican Party, and the billionaires who dominate that political disaster, prey on the low-information deplorables by telling them fairy tales about “the woke virus” and how special being illiterate, uneducated, and gullible makes them. While that tactic is good for short-term wealth gobbling, as the vulture capitalists and 0.1% “parasite class” rapes and pillages the nation’s treasure and resources, it will prevent the United States from being competitive on the world’s economic stage. Looking at the band of rich white kids populating the current Republican Party’s Executive branch, does anyone imagine that these nitwits would have the slightest idea how to fight off a concentrated cyber-attack on the country’s infrastructure? If Russia’s bots and hackers linked up with China’s similar “talent,” what are the chances that Musk’s DOGE nitwits would provide even a microsecond of defense from actual skilled programmers? Those goobers can’t even tell COBOL from C+ code. Machine language coding would look as indecipherable to them as it would to Trump’s voters. You might as well send an army of toddlers against a well-armed Seal Team 6 as hope that today’s Republican Party is an answer to any modern problem.
If you were a Bond-style super-villain, you couldn’t do more damage than to stuff the White House, the Capitol Building, and the Supreme Court Building with exactly the people Republican voters have cursed the nation with for the past 40 years. Trump and his moron-minions have exposed the festering underbelly of at least half of the citizens of this country to the rest of the world and our international reputation hasn’t been this low since the early 1970s (Vietnam War) and the early 2000s (Afghanistan and Iraq Invasions). This is exactly what I mean by “making America gross again.”
After one of my earlier essays, a friend from New Zealand wrote, “Let me say firstly that US politicians in particular (not excusing the rest of the world either) have done very little to genuinely advance mankind's wellbeing for many decades, other than to advance the wellbeing of their cronies.” For an embarrassing moment, I wanted to argue that point. But at least from Vietnam in the 60s and 70s to invading Iraq, three times, and the absolute mess we made out of Afghanistan, it’s been pretty obvious (even from inside of this country) that we are not making the world a better place. During Bush II’s oil-theft “holy crusades” in Iraq and Afghanistan, it particularly irritated me to listen to those international criminals babble about “bringing democracy” as part of their nation-building bullshit. The same people who violently stopped the 2000 Florida recount and ignored the majority vote of the citizens of this country are going to bring “democracy” to another country? Not possible. The only consistent contribution Republicans have made to the world in almost 100 years has been in “making America gross(er) again.” I’d like to hope we’ve hit bottom with this last election, but one thing I have learned in my 77 years is that you should never imagine the bar is finally set low enough, it can always go lower.
