- Joined
- Jul 12, 2020
Look around you (on KF, I mean, click on any random thread).
These people - I hesitate to use the word - are Mamelukes. I mean they are a new class of slave, entrusted with administrative duties. They spend all they have in the present, and save nothing, and take trips to Disneyland, are childfree, and so on - more has been written about them elsewhere, and more eloquently. There is little I can add to the taxonomic classification of the species. You know who they are. And - hear me out! - that is America.
You might love your family, town, or state. You might even be proud of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the words and deeds of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln, the heroes of Gettysburg, Belleau Wood, D-Day and Okinawa. And that is your heritage. Guard it dearly! But that is not America.
America is a horde of uprooted, internet-addicted individuals, without family or community, migrating from one exurban plywood five-over-one apartment complex to the next, in their midrange sedans full of Ikea and Wayfair furniture. And it is people who indeed do not identify with any one place, but with America; and by America they mean an immanent, ethereal version of New York and Los Angeles, spreading across the entire country in a diffusion of golden strands and connecting them to the metropoli, whether they are in Pomona or Redmond or Colorado Springs or Austin or Milwaukee or Minneapolis or Charlottesville or Glens Falls. It is people with Facebook and Twitter and GMail and Netflix and Disney+ and Paramount+ and Hulu and GrubHub and DoorDash and UberEats accounts. I once read someone describe his time on Twitter "as if your brain had been flattened and spread out atop everyone else's brain", and he meant it positively (please consider that for a while). It is mostly people who can't cook for themselves.
America the federal government. It is the IRS, DEA, ATF, FBI, and CIA; it is Disney, Netflix, Google, Microsoft, Sysco, Monsanto, Wal-Mart, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs. It is New York contract law and Delaware corporate law. It is the Pride Flag, but not last year's Pride Flag. It is the MQ-9 Predator B and USAid and the WTO and the DMCA and the Open Society Foundation, and, in the final analysis, probably the UN.
In that sense, America is not even limited to America. There are Americans all around the world. There are Americans in Brazil, England, Germany, Australia, and Sweden, people whose hearts heave and roll with every event which takes place in America, and make no bones of telling you about it. God knows the majority of Canadians are actually Americans. And they are no more or less American than the people living in the five-over-one apartment complexes in North Virginia, neither in allegiance, nor in virtue, nor in the money they pay into America's coffers. And they know just as little about what is happening where they physically are, about anything outside that golden gossamer network, that which wraps itself around the world, that republic of letters, which I now call America. America is an idea. It is an idea and a bunch of server rooms and cables and a handful of imposing federal buildings. Everything else is unincorporated territory.
America runs on those people and those objects, and not Dunkin', because the coffee there sucks. It only needs us to buy its wares and pay the tax-man to go away once a year. It otherwise wants nothing to do with us, backwards rustics that we are, for administration and thought leadership and the spoils are the province of its dear, pudgy Mamelukes.
So then, what are we?
And I talk about WE as in US, you the reader and I the autism-stricken Mass Debater, unless you don't live in North America, then buzz off. Because, otherwise, you and I, we inhabitants of this continent, we really are the same, in the same way that all Americans are the same. We have been made the same, as they made themselves the same. Two hundred years ago, there was Rupert's Land and Texas and New England. Now there is Wal-Mart and Coca-Cola and the Interstate, and North America, and we who are North American, who share a common lot and common problems. But I think that's an ugly name. What can we call ourselves?
I could be facetious and call us "US". I could call us "continentals", for when I grasp for some feeling about what binds us, my mind goes to the continent of North America and the vast wild spaces in-between, our common heritage, so far removed from the gray cities. I could reach back into the Era of Good Feelings and pull out the words "Columbian" or "Usonian", and maybe we would all feel a little better about ourselves. Then, we wouldn't be lost subjects of this new empire, but heirs to that first Revolution, whose noble country was, alas, partitioned up and taken away by Wilson and FDR and Johnson. I am even tempted to say that we are Americans, too, but that our "America" is not that "America", two words for two referents.
But the truth is: I don't know. Maybe it doesn't matter. We look up at the same jets flying overhead from LA to Dubai, you and I, and that does not change, whether we have a word for ourselves or not. But to call ourselves Americans or Canadians would be to tie ourselves to that benighted network of drone workers, to put the goodwill of our characters behind the name - in the eyes of each other and our neighbours and of foreigners - and to let it survive another week or decade. Even if it deprives me of a word to call myself, I am not willing to do it. But you still might be. I don't blame you. Maybe to you, America is still a shining city on a hill. And indeed, that city on that hill is yours, and I humbly hope to call it my own. But the city is not America. Keep the shine and ditch the word, and let the predator drones have it.
These people - I hesitate to use the word - are Mamelukes. I mean they are a new class of slave, entrusted with administrative duties. They spend all they have in the present, and save nothing, and take trips to Disneyland, are childfree, and so on - more has been written about them elsewhere, and more eloquently. There is little I can add to the taxonomic classification of the species. You know who they are. And - hear me out! - that is America.
You might love your family, town, or state. You might even be proud of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the words and deeds of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln, the heroes of Gettysburg, Belleau Wood, D-Day and Okinawa. And that is your heritage. Guard it dearly! But that is not America.
America is a horde of uprooted, internet-addicted individuals, without family or community, migrating from one exurban plywood five-over-one apartment complex to the next, in their midrange sedans full of Ikea and Wayfair furniture. And it is people who indeed do not identify with any one place, but with America; and by America they mean an immanent, ethereal version of New York and Los Angeles, spreading across the entire country in a diffusion of golden strands and connecting them to the metropoli, whether they are in Pomona or Redmond or Colorado Springs or Austin or Milwaukee or Minneapolis or Charlottesville or Glens Falls. It is people with Facebook and Twitter and GMail and Netflix and Disney+ and Paramount+ and Hulu and GrubHub and DoorDash and UberEats accounts. I once read someone describe his time on Twitter "as if your brain had been flattened and spread out atop everyone else's brain", and he meant it positively (please consider that for a while). It is mostly people who can't cook for themselves.
America the federal government. It is the IRS, DEA, ATF, FBI, and CIA; it is Disney, Netflix, Google, Microsoft, Sysco, Monsanto, Wal-Mart, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs. It is New York contract law and Delaware corporate law. It is the Pride Flag, but not last year's Pride Flag. It is the MQ-9 Predator B and USAid and the WTO and the DMCA and the Open Society Foundation, and, in the final analysis, probably the UN.
In that sense, America is not even limited to America. There are Americans all around the world. There are Americans in Brazil, England, Germany, Australia, and Sweden, people whose hearts heave and roll with every event which takes place in America, and make no bones of telling you about it. God knows the majority of Canadians are actually Americans. And they are no more or less American than the people living in the five-over-one apartment complexes in North Virginia, neither in allegiance, nor in virtue, nor in the money they pay into America's coffers. And they know just as little about what is happening where they physically are, about anything outside that golden gossamer network, that which wraps itself around the world, that republic of letters, which I now call America. America is an idea. It is an idea and a bunch of server rooms and cables and a handful of imposing federal buildings. Everything else is unincorporated territory.
America runs on those people and those objects, and not Dunkin', because the coffee there sucks. It only needs us to buy its wares and pay the tax-man to go away once a year. It otherwise wants nothing to do with us, backwards rustics that we are, for administration and thought leadership and the spoils are the province of its dear, pudgy Mamelukes.
So then, what are we?
And I talk about WE as in US, you the reader and I the autism-stricken Mass Debater, unless you don't live in North America, then buzz off. Because, otherwise, you and I, we inhabitants of this continent, we really are the same, in the same way that all Americans are the same. We have been made the same, as they made themselves the same. Two hundred years ago, there was Rupert's Land and Texas and New England. Now there is Wal-Mart and Coca-Cola and the Interstate, and North America, and we who are North American, who share a common lot and common problems. But I think that's an ugly name. What can we call ourselves?
I could be facetious and call us "US". I could call us "continentals", for when I grasp for some feeling about what binds us, my mind goes to the continent of North America and the vast wild spaces in-between, our common heritage, so far removed from the gray cities. I could reach back into the Era of Good Feelings and pull out the words "Columbian" or "Usonian", and maybe we would all feel a little better about ourselves. Then, we wouldn't be lost subjects of this new empire, but heirs to that first Revolution, whose noble country was, alas, partitioned up and taken away by Wilson and FDR and Johnson. I am even tempted to say that we are Americans, too, but that our "America" is not that "America", two words for two referents.
But the truth is: I don't know. Maybe it doesn't matter. We look up at the same jets flying overhead from LA to Dubai, you and I, and that does not change, whether we have a word for ourselves or not. But to call ourselves Americans or Canadians would be to tie ourselves to that benighted network of drone workers, to put the goodwill of our characters behind the name - in the eyes of each other and our neighbours and of foreigners - and to let it survive another week or decade. Even if it deprives me of a word to call myself, I am not willing to do it. But you still might be. I don't blame you. Maybe to you, America is still a shining city on a hill. And indeed, that city on that hill is yours, and I humbly hope to call it my own. But the city is not America. Keep the shine and ditch the word, and let the predator drones have it.
