Even if you don’t read the news (I’m on a very, very light diet of News Items), it’s impossible not to know that things are pretty ugly out there. This article by Tim Kreider, one of my favorite authors (We Learn Nothing) has written a lot on the general state of the USA and the world in his newsletter The Loaf. His latest is worth reading in full.
Americans have been infatuated with authoritarianism since before we were even free of it, when George Washington’s officers proposed, to his horror, that he be crowned king; they’ve flirted with fascism since the thirties, culminating in a Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden, presided over by a towering portrait of (once again) involuntary conscript George Washington. World War II was just another battle in a war that’s been going on for all of history, one that has to be fought all over again in every generation. What turns out to have been the brief idyll in which I was born—the relative stability of the Cold War standoff, the alliance of Western democracies against totalitarianism, the priority of education and science in America—was only the aftereffect of that war, which killed eighty million people and wrecked the infrastructure of half the planet. Humanity was, briefly, shocked by what it had done to itself. But the resolve “Never Again” has proven to be as ephemeral as a vow to Never Drink Again once the hangover fades. Now the fascists are holding a gun to all our heads: immigrants, women, minorities, trans people, academics, researchers, journalists, artists. We may not be the Greatest Generation—we might actually be the Worst—but unfortunately we’re the only ones here. So once more unto the breach, I guess, God fucking damn it to hell.
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