This is the America We Live In Now
By Daniel Greenfield
SUltanKnish.Blogspot.com
The two white beams memorializing the lost towers
cut diagonally across the sky. On the empty white
panel of a broken phone booth someone has scrawled
"Free Kim Davis". And on another one and another one
following someone's zigzag route through the East
Village's maze of hipster joints.
This is the America we live in now.
We will spend 9/11 debating the merits of letting a
terror state that
helped the 9/11 hijackers go nuclear. #PeaceWins
#LoveWins. The heat and humidity is broken by a
thunderstorm. The faint lights vanish behind the
clouds.
History must have grown tired of repeating itself
because no one talks about it. That old kind of news
has become a formality. Our news is a crazed jumble
of Kardashians, pet videos and social justice
outrages. Media is an ADD lifestyle section where
all the outrages that matter are petty.
The big stuff, wars, moon landings, civilizations,
doesn't matter. Everything has been reduced to the
lowest common denominator of personal insecurities
masquerading as politics and entertainment reduced
to fame for fame's sake celebrities. All of it is
calculated to match the workday routine of a
twenty-something female college graduate working in
media. Because that is mostly who writes it.
Today's Time or Washington Post make the old
Entertainment Tonight look like serious journalism.
What used to be the media is a Tumblr of someone's
favorite TV shows, celebrities, cat gifs and
outrages of the moment. Its grasp of politics does
not extend beyond its hashtag. Beneath its old fonts
and styles is a jumble of social justice warrior
phrases of political destruction.
Enemies are "Called out" in tweets and "Destroyed"
by viral videos starring failed comedians. These
enemies engage in futile "Freakouts", but are
promptly destroyed once more by someone's abused
three-year old who is encouraged to recite their
support for trannies, eliminating borders or banning
plastic bags by their pierced off-camera Munchhausen
progressive politics-by-proxy stage mothers.
Then the failed comedians say something
"Problematic" and are "Called Out" in turn and
"Destroyed". Until it is learned that those who
called them out have their own "Problematic" history
and are "Called Out" and "Destroyed" by the fleas
who live upon the fleas of the American dog. And so
it must be until there is no one left to call out or
destroy.
These are the wars we fight now. Share if you agree.
You will be amazed at how we nailed losing 9/11. How
these formal memorials perfectly capture the
experience of losing a war to terrorists and their
leftist allies will bring tears to your eyes. What
happens next is not what you think. But mostly it's
exactly what you think. It's wasted time, wasted
minds and wasted lives.
This isn't America. It's just the occupied space
where its culture used to be. It's a depersonalized
culture of personalities. Its frivolity inversely
proportional to the despair of its consumers. But
it's also the America we live in now. It is the
arrogance of its rulers, the mindless maze of their
minds and the inner despair of their hearts.
Politics and pop culture are only a few of the
mirrors of that despair. The Weimar Germany cabaret
pop stars celebrating the end of an empire with the
destruction of its culture and the politicians
glorying in their liberation from any common
covenants and lawful limitations are symptoms.
There is still a nation under the shadow of that
despair struggling to be reborn, but it does not
know how. Its culture is occupied. Its lines of
communication are hijacked by frauds and crazies. It
has learned that its good intentions count for
nothing and so it has learned despair instead.
This is the America we live in now.
Its common currency is contempt. Hope was a fraud.
Hate is real. Every enemy of social justice
destroyed makes the world a better place. Anger is
righteous. Knowledge is meaningless.
9/11 has no place in this world. It's a puzzle piece
that doesn't fit between the cat videos and the
Kardashians. There's way to social justice it up.
It's the elephant in the room. Steel and fire. A
rain of ash. Falling corpses. People fleeing past
coffee places. Panicked cops shouting wildly.
It's the end of the world. And the world we have
built carefully insulates its consumers from the
knowledge of its own shocking fragility. Its
algorithms pile on distractions, feeding mass media
to mobile phones in techniques garnered from casino
slot machines. Buttons are pushed. Shallow momentary
emotions are felt. Families fall apart.
Civilizations fall apart.
The 9/11 lights cut across a night sky, but they
can't stop the weapons of mass distraction. They are
a futile protest against a memory hole big enough to
swallow that terrible day and all it meant.
Despair at its utmost becomes celebration. When
there is nothing more to live for, nothing more to
hope for, life becomes momentary, its fragmentation
an escape from the future, its purpose impossible to
grasp, its contradictions easily escapable and its
end, impossible to conceive of.
In despair, destruction becomes celebration. When
the solutions are difficult, they must be destroyed.
When they remind us of how low we have fallen, they
must be denounced. These acts are joyful because
they liberate the destroyers from responsibility and
accountability. They free them from hope. They offer
them an imaginary future that lacks the difficulties
of the real one.
The only religion at the heart of Islam is a deep
despair, in humanity and its own civilization. Its
truest expression is the purposeful destructiveness
of ISIS. But it has always been what Islam is. That
despair is just as present in the heart of the left.
Theirs is not the despair of the savage confronted
with moral creeds, with empathy and nobility that
beggar him, or with technologies that mock him.
Theirs is the despair of the egotistical idealist
who would rather destroy the world than tolerate its
flaws. It is the despair of tyrants that hardens to
a cynical amused brutality at the exercise of power.
Our civilization is coming apart.
There have always been many Americas, but they are
infinitely fragmenting. The culture that aspires to
bond them together has become an insane egotistical
monster trying to survive its own crippling
insecurities with the personal destruction of
others. Millions walk away from it, but have nowhere
to go. They tell their own isolated stories on
islands of social media, scrawl things on walls and
howl at the night. They feel a sense of infinite
loneliness at the nation and the culture coming
apart.
This is the America we live in now.
We don't have to give in to despair. If we do, we
are lost. Lost the way that the left is lost. Lost
the way that the Muslim world is lost.
We are not savages and feral children. We are the
inheritors of a great civilization. It is still ours
to lose. It is ours to keep if we understand its
truths.
We are not alone. A sense of isolation has been
imposed on us as part of a culture war. The task of
reconstructing our civilization and ending that
isolation begins with our communication. We are the
successors of revolutions of ideas. We need to do
more than keep them alive. We must refresh them and
renew them. And, most importantly, we must practice
them.
We are not this culture. We are not our media. We
are not our politicians. We are better than that.
We must win, but we must also remember what it is we
hope to win. If we forget that, we lose. If we
forget that, we will embrace dead end policies that
cannot restore hope or bring victory.
What we have now is not a movement because we have
not defined what it is we hope to win. We have built
reactive movements to stave off despair. We must do
better than that. We must not settle for striving to
restore some idealized lost world. Instead we must
dream big. We must think of the nation we want and
of the civilization we want to live in and what it
will take to build it.
Our enemies have set out big goals. We must set out
bigger ones. We must become more than conservatives.
If we remain conservatives, then all we will have is
the America we live in now. And even if our children
and grandchildren become conservatives, that is the
culture and nation they will fight to conserve. We
must become revolutionaries.
We must think in terms of the world we want. Not the
world we have lost.
This is the America we live in now. But it doesn't
have to be.