I have been a US critic for quite some time now.
My criticism is quite widely scattered, but it centers mainly on the idea that a state (or society) must care for all even if this demands a sacrifice from those better off, and at best can demand from those it helps that they curtail the future costs of this exposure. My criticism entails that the US has been a force for outright ruthlessness in the world, in that it fosters the values of enterprise, freedom, personal empowermenth over the values of humanity and society.
I have argued over this with very dear friends and loved ones, and I have stopped arguing. In the last year I have come to denounce what I call “soulless libertarianism”. I denounce the free market where it destroys human lives or human potential, and I denounce the current systems where these systems perpetuate bureaucratic waste, inefficiency, ‘the tragedy of the commons’, and infantile populism.
I can not longer abide with a world that is hypocritical about values, where it routinely marginalizes the majorities. I can no longer abide with a world where the rich get richer at an obscene rate, and threaten to destroy the fabric of civilization itself by their mere effects on the world.
I have spent the month of February in the United States of America, and have seen the insanity up close, and felt it like an iron gauntlet clenched around my heart.
A loved one has been locked up for close to four weeks in a senseless immigrations procedure. This friend has suffered isolation, physical harm, severe pain, humiliation and considerable fear, apart from the effects of uncertainty and ennui. This person was vulnerable, with a gentle and sensitive mental temperament, and the mere act of having to isolate her in a male facility, in protective custody on grounds of being transgendered, was barbaric by any standard.
She could hear men in adjacent cells talk to her as human beings. She could also hear men in adjacent cells express their intense hatred and loathing and prejudice of her. She could men in adjacent cells masturbate on her effeminate voice. Without any doubt she knew that for a month she was one wall away from a general prison population of which several would instantly rape her and viciously attack her, solely on what she is.
Yet all this abuse cost the US taxpayer more than a thousand dollars per day, for close to 26 days in guards, facilities, corporate costs, food, electricity, transport and a flotilla in legal and bureaucratic activities. And all that time my dear friend could have meaningfully worked, studied, consumed or worked on projects. The waste, the waste.
All that amounts the price of a small family car, or the price it costs to make a young man go to college in my country and get a good education. That is waste far beyond what is sane.
This system is broken. The United States operates at some level of outward functionality, but it is in effect a tangled up cancerous mess that is falling apart.
I have often alluded jokingly to the perception that my life has on occasion been led by a strange sequence of events, a destiny if you will, and I may jokingly conclude that my arrival in the US coincides with a critical moment in US and effectively global history. As the flames of revolution ignite across the globe Algeria, Egypt and Libia have fallen and others are sure to fall in this sequence of Dominoes . There is a greater mechanism at work here, mundane or otherwise. In the past I have alluded to oil depletion, to macroeconomic corruption and to many other causes. These causes are no doubt exceeding complex, and the actors in this drama no less paradoxical or hysterical.
The US is not what it says it is, of that I am certain. The US is a scam, a pyramid scheme and at its heart nothing better than a country run my gangsters. The people of the US have become in effect tangled up marionettes. I have met the most beautiful and inspiring people you can imagine – Dan, Alison, Denise, Willow, Teri, Rachel, Keith, Renee, Samantha, Jay, Sean, Andrew and so many I can scarcely remember by name.
America is full of people far less bland and boring than the often so excessively tedious people at home – the Dutch are really frightfully bland and parochial – This is an amazing country – but the country is in a mess. It is as if this whole place is in a state of adolescent puberty, wracked by the pain of growing up into an actual mature society.
But it may die.
There is a tumor in his country, and yes, it transcends blind socopathic government bureacracy, populist futurophobic republicans and conservatives, lame eunuch ineffective liberals and democrats, the fly-over-countries, the shellshocked minorities (that almost invariably are the ones left doing any real work) or even the rampant financial and corporate systems that have laid waste to the infrastructures, morale and moral fabric of this country.
This place has been racking up a massive debt in the last decades, and the United States is patently unequipped to dig itself out of this hole. It is maneuvering to a collapse and no side in the political trench warfare is able to break this stalemate. It is like a bunch of naked grown men soaked in olive oil all trying to strangle another in the dark. It is a very slow and messy death struggle.
At the same time this country throws real economic resources in the ovens of history as if there is no tomorrow. Immigrations issues as indicated are just one. Massive teeming prisons. Swollen bloated government systems. Massive ghettos and systemically underprivileged underclasses. Society-wide contempt. People, even people very smart, that are categorically unable to express their concerns or feelings or emotions, and let small resentments simmer to the breaking point, out of a deluded idea of personal accountability.
This showdown is coming to a close literally this month. I arrive in the U.S. and as far as I can call it it may be 1989 in the United States of America, and there may literally be a collapse unfolding before my very eyes, almost identical in theatrical idiocy as happened in the Soviet Union twenty years ago.
Right here, right now.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HL1IlmEyFo&w=480&h=390]
I may try and report on this, from my perspective, and as incarnated manifestation of the Goddess that doesn’t take shit anymore, and I’ll try and convey what I see, feel and think is relevant.
Maybe the only one that can make sense of this mad mad country is someone as nuts as I am. 🙂
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