https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/11/29/why-i-no-longer-wish-to-write-about-american-politics/
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There comes a time to quit something one has long been pursuing and even something one is good at. I feel like it’s time to quit political writing, at least of a particular kind that deals with the daily ups and downs in America, because it’s filling up headspace that takes away from crucial other tasks. I more or less quit writing literary criticism in 2017—along with writing poetry at the same time—after penning hundreds of thousands of words of literary criticism since the start of my career. It helped to abide by the new discipline because I announced my decision at a South Asian literary festival in Austin to a big audience and then stuck to it, except for the rare occasion when a friend or someone I respected asked me to write a review essay. And it was the right decision, my only regret being that I ever engaged in the pursuit, wasting precious years when I should have been dedicated entirely to my own fiction writing. Ultimately, I quit literary criticism because I didn’t feel that there was any real audience for the kind of criticism I was writing. I saw no value for it in the culture, and why pursue something valueless?
I feel the same way about writing about American politics now, that there is no audience for it. I can write for my own satisfaction, but if in my head I have the image of an iconoclast of the past such as Alexander Cockburn or Gore Vidal as my ideal audience, such readers have more or less ceased to exist. The feeling of speaking into a vacuum is further intensified by the manifest censorship among political outlets that took place in rising waves in 2016, 2020, and now 2024, preventing skeptical voices from gaining a foothold because that would supposedly have helped the fascists; democracy has had to be spurned in order to preserve democracy. Political writing strongly correlated with literary writing in this period, as the censors, in the name of a peculiar form of bland establishment wokeness, destroyed whatever remained vital in American writing, and have now reduced it to a cipher in terms of pure literary value. After a mere handful of interesting novels published in America in the 2000s (Hemon, O’Neill, Hamid), in the succeeding fifteen years I have found almost no American literary fiction to be of interest, and have pretty much stopped reading it. It’s no surprise that eventually political writing should succumb to the same pressures. Many of the iconoclastic journalists of the 2000s, such as Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi, have become Trump-adjacent, unintelligently selling populist myths that make me yearn for good old-fashioned liberalism. It wouldn’t be the first time in my life I have come to see plain vanilla liberalism as a healthy mental refuge from abstractions that can’t even be captured adequately under the rubric of conspiracy theory, so I’m used to personal course correction. It happened to me in the 1990s, when I confronted the actually existing ills of poverty and corruption in the developing world, as opposed to the fantasies spouted in Western academia, and it has happened a couple of other times, so I feel like I am prepared to exit from the cult of unhinged populism that has overcome my own confreres of the recent past.
I wrote a lot about politics in the early years of the Bush administration, particularly after 9/11 and the War on Terror, when very few journalists were willing to criticize the Bush administration’s gross violations of civil liberties. It felt necessary at the time, and I knew my words were reaching the right audiences in large numbers. Once the Iraq War went awry, and it became permissible for other writers to step in and start filling the vacuum, I felt like my voice was less necessary, so I retreated more fully into writing fiction, poetry, and criticism. I didn’t take a complete break but wrote only occasionally when I felt that something needed to be said that wasn’t being said, and then I would retreat, having said my piece. This was largely true during the late Bush years and the Obama presidency, but when Trump and Bernie both announced their candidacies in 2015, I felt compelled to step in again and wrote a lot about the failures of neoliberalism leading to the populist insurgencies on left and right. I wrote an enormous amount in the first year of Trump as well, trying to understand to what extent he did or didn’t fit the fascist model (particularly the Mussolini one, which I was most familiar with, having written a novel on Italian fascism), whether or not white supremacy was really a thing, and what was the true history of migration in this country, in the wake of the Trump attack on migrants. I spoke to leading scholars in those fields and enjoyed conducting in-depth symposia on these subjects for national publications. By the end of 2017, however, I felt that I had said what I needed to say, and embarked on an orgy of novel writing, which lasted until 2023, during which time I wrote many novels, as well as a memoir. I used up all the material for fiction I had accumulated over a lifetime during this intense period of withdrawal during the late Trump years and then the pandemic era isolation. When the pandemic began—I fell victim, unfortunately, to a serious bout of Covid right at the beginning of the pandemic, which affects my health to this day—I realized that except for momentary lack of access to university research libraries, nothing about my lifestyle had changed at all. Apparently I had been in quarantine my entire adult life, but just didn’t know it. The one exception I made to the self-imposed restriction against political writing was to pen an enormous amount of material in support of Bernie Sanders’s movement in 2019 and early 2020, despite being aware that his second run was much less authentic than his first one, and was bound to lead to disappointment. I regret the loss of time involved in that period, when I should have kept to my exclusive focus on writing fiction. There is a book waiting to be put together from the essays of that period, illuminating the obstacles to a genuine progressive movement inside or outside the Democratic Party, but I don’t have the heart to pull it together and have it published.
If you are interested in what I was writing throughout the 2000s and 2010s, you can look up my book Confronting American Fascism: Essays, 2001-2017. For my approach to immigration, you can read A Radical Human Rights Solution to the Immigration Crisis, a subject that has once again become relevant in 2024 in precisely the same ways as eight years before, and for a chronicle of the seminal 2016 campaign, Why Did Trump Win?: Chronicling the Stages of Neoliberal Reactionism During America’s Most Turbulent Election Cycle, which would have to fundamentally be my explanation for the 2024 election as well, since we are essentially repeating what has gone on before. I have enough material for a book on neoliberal culture as it has manifested during the last decade, another book on the evolution of modern white supremacy and the alt-right, and one on why Bernie lost in 2020, as I said, but I don’t have the energy to do anything about these books. They will probably remain unpublished.
One of the first things I wrote in early 2017, after Trump was elected for the first time, was an essay called “Quit America.” It got quite a lot of attention, both pushback and agreement, but I have to admit that in a practical sense I didn’t entirely live up to the ideals expressed in that essay, although the mental readjustment was real and lasting. I advocated that if one had a choice, given favorable age and financial status, one should leave America, and invest one’s time and energy in some other land, in some other venture—anything but to keep poking into the rotting carcass of the dying empire. One thing I have never wavered about in my decades of writing about politics is the trajectory of the empire’s final years, which was clear enough to me in basic outline, if not in specifics, as early as the late 1990s, when I first witnessed the rise of authoritarianism—amid a certain rage that keeps mutating—manifest in the body politic. All the dates I had in mind for the unraveling have come true so far, with 2030 a key one, and a final denouement by 2050. Every form of engagement, from activism to intellectual labor, seems to me not only a waste of time but counterproductive, because engagement only strengthens the empire and keeps the show going longer than is necessary.
I feel this more strongly than ever now and I am anxiously waiting for the opportunity to completely exit, in every sense of the word. Otherwise I would be a hypocrite. I did disengage in whatever form was materially available to me in the years after 2017, for instance by stepping away from the malicious and absurdly competitive literary world, which doesn’t mean disengaging from writers and communities I like and appreciate, but only the larger cauldron, which is not conducive to mental health. In the last twelve months I have been traveling the country in what I initially called “America, the Farewell Tour,” which constitutes for me an extended goodbye to a land that has long ago seen its best days and shows evidence of disintegration everywhere you look. Though I started on the journey a year ago with an open mind, nothing that I saw in the entire western half of the country disabused me of the notion that apocalypse in all its forms was either already manifest or was well on its way to doing so. Nobody has shown as much sympathy over the years for the liberal class’s bête noire, the “white working class,” even when it was obvious that their agenda was directly opposed to my own personal interests, but after traveling around the country to the extent that I did, I’m sorry to say that racism, much more than economics, is the ultimate explanation for the fascistic reaction that has been escalating ever since the end of the Cold War. I have no sympathy left for these people. These racists deserve the worst, and I hope they get it.
All of American politics today, in essence, amounts to a trap to get you to engage. This is what explains the “tawdriness” of the 1990s (the Clinton sex scandals), the idiocy of the 2000s (Bush as village idiot embarking on a civilizational crusade), and now Trump the alleged fascist (taking the comic elements of classical fascism, such as embodied in Mussolini, to an American carnivalesque twist). It is all a spectacle, designed to get you involved, to commit to America one way or the other. (Bernie may well mount a comeback of sorts in 2028, as a last act, when the time to start a third party was in 2016 or 2020, but it would be one more way to keep you engaged, to keep you believing, rather than have it amount to anything, as it would have during those earlier opportunities.) The ultimate aim of the nonstop theater is to drain your energy, your spirit, your mind, whatever of value you bring to life, and leave you in the end with nothing.
After the 1990s, I started feeling that the entire objective of American political culture was to rope in the dissidents and dropouts from the rat race, to cordon them back in somehow; this is how I interpret the Waco and Ruby Ridge cataclysms, intentionally inflicted upon those refusing to collaborate as a signal to all the others. Making it physically impossible to survive as an artist or writer on small amounts of money by converting the cities into playscapes for the ultra-rich and by then, over the next decades, eliminating every form of physical escape, seems to have been very much by design. I view the immigration theater in the same way; it seems to be intended as much to keep people in, to prevent them from leaving, as to keep them out—perhaps more the former.
I argued in my 2017 “Quit America” essay that there was no trigger point I could foresee where Americans would withdraw allegiance from the regime, including nuclear war. I specifically used the example of nuclear war, because I remember well the late years of the Cold War, when the fear became literalized to such an extent that the regime, in the form of concessions to Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika, had to take those fears seriously. But that was forty years ago, and the population does not seem to have the critical ability to respond to nuclear war in the same manner. In 2017 I was overwhelmed by visions of America dropping tactical nuclear weapons on Iran and laying waste to entire cities. That was the concrete image I had in mind at the start of the first Trump administration. I raised this scenario with friends and activists, asking them if they thought that would be a point of no return for Americans to stop believing in America and all that it mythically represents. Of course I had no takers then, just as I will have no takers now, even in the wake of the genocide. To repeat, there are no known trigger points for this population of 350 million accomplices, none whatsoever, even if all of humanity were to be destroyed; they will go on with their merry ways, posting on Instagram and complaining about the price of whatever cheap good they want to possess while bashing China. In essence, my fear of the nuclear annihilation of parts of Iran has come true in Gaza. The amount of bomb tonnage dropped on the tiny strip of land is many times the firepower visited upon Hiroshima. The effects, even the visuals, are very similar to nuclear war. And yet the Gaza genocide, if we are to take polls about the question seriously, barely registers on American consciousness. If you want to engage with America in any way—as someone who works here, as someone who teaches here, as someone who makes art here, as someone who just lives here and pays taxes and subsidizes commercial enterprise—you are part of a nation that endorses genocide. And it is not just genocide, but genocide magnified to the millionth degree, in a form we have never seen before. We never saw the corpses pile up in Bangladesh or Rwanda and even Yugoslavia to a large extent, so we don’t know what that looked like.
My assertion, as I have argued before, is that the televised spectacle of the genocide is intentional, it is one of empire’s final ploys to get us involved and engaged, to get a rise out of us. Let that sink in. It might sound crass and heartless to put it this way but since the start of the genocide I have been able to come to no other conclusion. It is a strategy for ratings, to maximize the Nielsen eyeballs (or view counts in the modern iteration), for a project that has completely failed, and has been well past being on its last legs for the last thirty-five years. To see scholars, journalists, activists, and even ordinary citizens apply the perspective of conventional international relations paradigms to the Gaza genocide, and whatever Israel does or does not want to achieve in the Middle East, is ridiculous. It reminds me of the early 2000s when the left was convinced that the Iraq War was about oil. I would get into arguments with people like Eric Alterman—does anyone remember Alterman?—who asserted that it was about oil and resources, but that as soon as the lies, lies, and lies of the Bush administration were exposed, the people would see the light and support for the war would vanish. I countered that at some level of intuition the American people understood that this was a war of empire and precisely the reason why they endorsed it; they withdrew support only when they saw in 2004 that the war was unwinnable, not because they suddenly came to a realization that they had been lied to about the weapons of mass destruction or that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11. In any event, oil had nothing to do with Iraq. The empire destroyed Iraq, just as it has been destroying one Muslim country after another for about fifty years now, just because. That’s your answer for the Gaza genocide too. It’s what empire does, throw its weight around in a scattershot way, even if this accelerates its own demise; it is compelled to act in this way, if you are familiar with the history of empires. With the American people, you are dealing with an entity that for the most part at a subconscious level fully understands what the war of annihilation in Gaza is all about. And now they’ve gone ahead and reelected Trump, who doesn’t even make any bones about the subhuman level of Palestinians and Muslims and Arabs and migrants and Mexicans—in fact, many of the same people he dehumanizes, particularly Latinos, support him in growing numbers to assist their own annihilation and that of their own communities.
Haven’t you wondered why Biden and Harris both refused to say a word to stop the genocide, even if they suspected it might cost them the election? All they had to do was to win Michigan, along with Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, states that naturally favor them still, yet they refused to do the one thing that might have won them the election. Take away the Arab and Muslim vote in the blue wall states, and politically informed young people and students and minorities repelled by the genocide in those same states, and you face an unfavorable outcome. The final difference was no more than 250,000 votes—a very small number of the total—across those three swing states. Yet, knowing this, they were willing to lose an election to the alleged fascist Trump. It’s not stupidity, it’s not happenstance, but a feature of the system. Seven million fewer people voted for the Democrats compared to 2020, but they kept you worked up for a whole year, up in arms about genocide, engaged with the process, even if engagement meant making a big deal out of not voting for anyone. It’s a different thing than retreat which is what I have been advocating for a long time.
My key point is that there is no distinction to be made between the American government and the American people. The American people are the only ones—both liberals and conservatives—keeping the government and its policies in place. As I have been writing for a quarter century, they fundamentally agree with the impulses of the empire, including when it involves genocide, or torture or rendition or extrajudicial killing or drone attacks, or whatever is necessary to keep the unearned hegemony in place. The American people understand, at a fundamental level, that if violence isn’t exercised in this brutal manner—to keep, for instance, dollar hegemony intact—then the empire will collapse, and their own standard of living will be extinguished. The biggest subterfuge an activist or thinker employs in continuing to engage with resistance or dissidence or protest or consciousness-raising is to make this false distinction between the people and the government, for which there is no basis in reality, and never has been. Can you think of a single meaningful policy change that came about as a result of public input since the end of the Cold War? They gave you neoliberal deregulation and welfare state evisceration, a free-for-all for the financial industry, the Patriot Act, Real ID, privatized healthcare (not even the public option), mass deportation of longtime residents, extreme tax cuts for the wealthy, and the kind of inequality, in absolute terms, that the world has never seen before. During the last year-plus, not an inch has been yielded over the genocide in Gaza, as is true of the Ukraine war as well. Even now, with the election over, the regime in power will do absolutely nothing to save one life in Palestine, because they want to hand over the mess intact to the next government, to formalize the final steps in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
What is one to do in the face of such powerlessness, is my main question. Just as I have been asking, what do you do as a citizen when your government and the people who support this government are genocidal toward your own people? At the very least, my answer is to disengage, in every form possible, in order to avoid the taint of complicity. To want change, of any kind, is to be complicit in the atrocities committed by the empire, unless you can show me evidence that over the entire era of empire’s hegemony your activism has resulted in a single positive change. It has always struck me that those most vociferous in attacking Trump as fascist and for his depredations against “democracy,” taking particular issue with what they call the Jan. 6 coup, the so-called plot to overthrow America, happen to reside on the farthest left of the opinion spectrum, many of whom I have been associated with in the past. I can think of several genuine Marxist outfits which have been up in arms about Jan. 6 since it happened, in a more disciplined manner than even MSNBC or any DNC-influenced outlet you can think of (the same is true of their advocacy for pandemic lockdowns). If you look at the range of opinion on the socialist or authentically Marxist left today, you come away with the impression that they want to preserve the hollow shell of “democracy”—meaning American empire in the form it currently exists—more than any other segment of the population. If you were a real Marxist or socialist, why would you want to preserve American democracy (which is just the political expression of American capitalism)? That has never made any sense to me, but it shows the ultimate shallowness—or really, selfishness—of the actual American left, I mean the doctrinaire left, when it comes to protecting the empire at its most fundamental level. If I were on the left, I would welcome a “coup”—wouldn’t you?
Another question I have raised for many years with friends is why anyone from a Muslim country in particular would want to migrate to America today. When I migrated, and when many of my cohort did, America presented itself as a different proposition. It was before the onset of neoliberalism and the wars of neoconservatism which went on to target all fifty Muslim countries in some shape or other. It was before the Iran-Iraq War, the Persian Gulf War, the sanctions against Iraq, the annihilation of Libya, Syria, and Yemen, the assassination of every threatening Muslim and Arab leader over fifty years, and finally the genocide of Gaza. If you’re coming from a country like Bangladesh or Algeria or Malaysia or wherever, you’re coming here to better your economic prospects. It’s highly unlikely that you intend to pursue the social sciences or humanities (and let’s not even talk about the brainwashing involved in these areas, from history to literature, which are certainly not innocent of the motives of empire, as only the most naïve and uninformed about academia could believe) and take the learning back to your country to benefit your own people. Most likely you as an immigrant from one of the countries under attack is going to be an engineer or physician or computer scientist or in some lucrative profession that will benefit and strengthen the empire. In the seventies and even into the early eighties, there was some justification for migrating. Infrastructure and opportunities were limited in those countries, and the imperial mask hadn’t come off in this way, even in the age of Reagan, and certainly before that, when you could at least make a theoretical case for American idealism. Culture in all its forms, from music to the movies, was still a going proposition, as were writing and art. If I were a potential migrant from Pakistan, in the year 2024, what possible reasons could compel me to come here? I came for purely idealistic reasons, because I would certainly have been better off economically in Pakistan, but today, supposing that I were poor and out of options in Pakistan, how could I possibly ignore fifty years of what has happened since our consciousness of these crimes became as stark and brutally penetrating as it has?
We have had a year of genocide in which the most powerful figures in the community I am theoretically part of, namely the literary community (which is almost entirely submerged in academia today), refused to utter a single word of protest, as they continue to do, even after the electoral “loss” (which is not really a loss, but a victory for hegemony, if you grant my perspective; they are the last ones to be affected, they are the last people to have any reason to leave the country, though that is what they are claiming at the moment, just as they did eight years ago). After disappearing for a whole year—and during the year of genocide, as I noted once it started, they took a complete break from their identity politics outrage of the day, which had been going on since the Obama years, and picked up pace during Trump 1.0—they showed up en masse in public forums on the eve of the election, only to express their personal anxiety and worry, without explaining what exactly they were worried about. They swallow the whole propaganda about Trump as fascist in direct opposition to the Democrats as upholders of moral virtue and democracy for fact—100% of it. These are the idiots par excellence who rule the artistic and literary worlds, and for the most part academia too. (Not too different from them are the well-meaning activists and academics who have been claiming for a year that Israel cannot possibly win the war of attrition against the Palestinians. Israel can, and has. What good are dead Palestinians in the cause of freedom?) Once the results of the elections were known, they expressed worry for their own safety—who is going to come after these credentialed professionals, the most protected people in the country?—and immediately turned to declarations of the need for self-care for each other. Then, just as quickly, they disappeared en masse again, without saying a word about where they were positioned ideologically and why they were so disappointed. These are your intellectual leaders, teaching young people, getting grants and awards, writing op-eds and appearing at conferences, who have now decided to decamp for Bluesky one and all, where they can converse with each other in a safe space.
In the spring and summer of 2022, once the Ukraine war got going, I was asking my friends which Muslim country would be annihilated next. I could never have predicted Gaza—you never know the specifics, only the general direction—but a year and a half later, it came true. I was asking my friends then what possible goal except strengthening empire could activism or writing or participation in any form accomplish? Dissidence is complicity, as my interlocutors often admitted, but there is the matter of family ties, financial and other commitments, employment and future opportunities, the very substance of life, which is tied up heart and soul with the progress of empire. The vision that I had of Iran burning up in nuclear war has come true in Gaza eight years later, and the vision I had in the late Trump years, as I often articulated it then, of streets on fire due to civil disorder, came partially true in the 2020 George Floyd protests, which then took a weirdly outward turn, because empire doesn’t make it possible for dissent to be expressed in a healthy direction.
Now the “common-sense” consensus (and that’s your real fascism) is that we must get a grip on the idealism that was on such forceful display in 2020, with regard to criminal justice reform, empathy for migrants, and strengthening the social safety net not just in response to the pandemic emergency but under conditions of precarity aside from that. My point in this essay is that any form of association with anyone who still believes in America—that is, the project of America—is to morally taint yourself, to rot your brain. I pointed out in my essay on the podcast bros before the election how the so-called left-leaning podcasts all seemed to have become Tucker Carlson or Joe Rogan adjacent; shortly after that, Rogan scored his biggest scoop ever, when he interviewed Trump, and both agreed on “common-sense” approaches to migration, climate, trade, criminal justice, in short the whole spectrum of opinions that is actually fascistic (and which are about to be translated into policies that destroy the working class). The self-declared “independent media” is very much a part of the degeneracy, destroying my brain every time I listen to what is supposed to be my own side. I was shocked that a few days after my essay, Krystal Ball suddenly mounted a meta-critique of “independent media” on Breaking Points, alleging that podcasts were part of the same grift they criticized, manipulating opinion to boost their ratings rather than searching for truth. It was as if she had read my essay and was cleansing herself from guilt by rehearsing it point by point. Kyle Kulinski, her husband, has recently been tweeting weird self-attacks on what they still insist on calling the “independent media” (i.e., the podcast bros). Yet their level of intelligence remains mired in the same place where cable news was in the 1990s and 2000s, unable to look at matters from outside their own narrow base of knowledge and personal stakes. The “independent media,” my own supposed fraternity, have zero intuition. I feel like I lose brain cells, as I allegedly would in a bout of heavy drinking, each time I give them my attention, just as I felt I was doing when reluctantly watching C-SPAN in the 2000s or MSNBC later in the decade, to keep up with the frantic pace of the “news.” The podcast bros were convinced that abortion and democracy would trump economic reality, which is insane, buying into the entire propaganda reel the Democrats unveiled throughout 2024, buying into the fake polls, overlooking the reality of their own eyes in terms of the price of groceries and cars and homes and everything else, and the manifest devastation of the wars. I watched Matt Taibbi, once a journalist I respected, and Walter Kirn, once a novelist I respected, celebrate Trump’s insane Cabinet picks for bringing a sense of necessary upheaval to established agencies; they are so fucking white, these guys, their joy and relief comes from such a position of privilege. They went on and on about fears of nuclear war in Russia, but they have never had a word to say about Gaza, at least not that I’ve heard. Anti-war sentiment, as with Trump’s picks RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, is directed to white people only, hence the tears over Ukraine. For this reason alone, for fear of eroding my intuition bit by bit in order to experience the false pangs of optimism, I feel like I must completely disassociate. The post-election analysis rests on diagnosing what the Democratic Party did wrong and how it can be set back on course, as if this party which smartly took over the tatters of empire from Trump 1.0 and recharged it so adeptly all over the world, makes mistakes from ignorance or misjudgment. Doesn’t the liberal establishment already know the causes of the loss? The entire “independent media,” including the outer bounds of left sentiment, is still trying to save empire, by acting, as Alterman did in the early 2000s, as if it is a matter of getting the right information out, in this case about how to speak to the working class in a way that they’ll listen.
For a long time I have noted how utterly predictable the collapse of empire has been. 2020 and 2023 turned out to be the milestones I had expected, and all the other dates since the turn of the millennium have likewise proven to be true. I am expecting another big turn in 2027 and then in 2030, after which, for all intents and purposes, the active phase of empire, the war-making one, will come to an end, and growing irrelevance will be its fate. Even then, there won’t be the introspection necessary to ponder a fact such as that for more than a year the empire has put on the greatest spectacle it can think of to pull in ratings, namely the televised genocide, just as it is now going to fuck with our heads for four years with respect to everything the alleged fascist in the White House will or won’t do with respect to the vulnerable at home. This whole Trump reboot is designed to keep us engaged, until yet another election which will of course be declared as the most important one of our lifetimes.
It was easy to predict in 2020 exactly how the next four years would go down. Biden’s job was to incrementally retreat from the social safety measures—rent and eviction moratoriums, prison furloughs, child care tax credits, student debt forgiveness, put in place by the alleged fascist at the height of the emergency lockdowns—over a reasonable period of time, before restarting the forever wars and reinstating the rhetoric and practice of empire, which he did of course, beginning in Russia a year after his installation. And then he restarted the Middle Eastern wars, which was also foreseeable. I personally thought he would resign after the 2022 midterms and hand it over to Kamala, but he didn’t, although he probably would have, had the 2022 midterms been less favorable for the Democrats. The point is that every twist and turn for at least a quarter century has been completely predictable, if you use any intuition at all, rather than be fooled by propaganda. The reason why you can predict it so easily is because there is a complete moral vacuum, pure evil at the center. If it wasn’t, and empire wasn’t so close to its expiration date, there would be uncertainty. But if you begin with certain parameters derived from unequivocal immorality, then all the rest easily follows. I don’t want to be part of it anymore. What am I doing, even posing pictures of the genocide on social media? That too is a form of participation in the evil. Who am I posting these for? The American people know exactly what’s going on, and they’re fine with it. I condemn this empire, and all who come from abroad to give it strength and succor, and all who are already here who for their own economic self-interest refuse to step away from it, even if deep down they recognize the reality.
As I said, I wrote my original “Quit America” essay in 2017. This opens me up to the charge of hypocrisy, because why am I still here? Trust me, it’s not for lack of effort, I’m working on it, and I won’t be here much longer. Anything—taking care of sheep and goats in the mountains of Afghanistan, or teaching orphans in some poor country—is better and more real than the spectacular dystopia that is America in the 2020s. You would have to be blind not to have foreseen every part of what is unfolding years and even decades before the fact. It doesn’t require genius, it only requires honesty. I am not willing to bargain away my intuition by letting myself be touched by its faintest trace. I interviewed some of the young Jacobin editors in early 2020, shortly before the start of the pandemic, challenging their naïve plan that a workers’ revolution must take place over decades and generations, in order to win back rights which in my perception had already been granted long ago and existed well into the seventies but were then willfully taken back by the overlords. The time scale, and the pressures that can or cannot be brought to bear upon a functional democracy versus an empire in its last gasps, all seemed off to me, but of course Jacobin, like its fellow young upstarts, is committed to salvaging the empire. Bernie Sanders, as I noted, is making a comeback after the election rebuke, so are some of us going to take him seriously again, perhaps even expect a final presidential run at age 87 in 2028, even after he betrayed the movement twice already? But he didn’t actually betray it, as I have pointed out in the past, he has offered not a word of critique of empire per se, as was true of most of his young American followers who just wanted free college and healthcare without an end to surveillance and wars, so he played his role to perfection. Long before Roe v. Wade fell, and while the abortion fight was still going on, I predicted to the Jacobin editors that contraception and IVF would soon be on the line, but trust naïve believers in the American project to mount a sincere fight to preserve those rights as well, as if they were okay with starting all over again. For thirty-five years—actually longer than that—people have been acting on issue after issue as if they’re making a fresh start, because the American ideology doesn’t allow recognition of the actual degree of regression. This is a people so naïve, so full of fake optimism, that even history’s first televised genocide won’t sway them a bit. Damn these people and the cancer they are upon all life on earth. I used to think in 2017 that humor—the real thing, not the fake satire on TV—was a good way to bargain with the curtains of grief falling all around oneself, as the fake American fascists went out merrily crushing the vulnerable, using 100% American ideology and founding principles. But it takes too much energy even to laugh at the whole spectacle, so I’m not willing to go that far either.
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