By Myles Ludwig
I am wondering if America’s grand illusions have become America’s grandiose delusions.
Have we passed the best-used-by date of that lovely and sacrosanct idea of American Exceptionalism: An idea so long the comforting quilt of nationalistic narcissism that warmed past generations, a vanity that expressed itself in the political rationale for genocide in the way-pre-Tesla bumper stickers of Manifest Destiny did, an idea that reached its apotheosis in the early 1960s when the choice between complete nuclear destruction and diplomatic conciliation seemed a fit and rational subject of serious debate in the hushed and dark-paneled conference rooms of the power elite?
Collateral damage be damned.
Has that idea, so fully and successfully propagated by the Dulles brothers and their backroom Wall Street buddies and transnational morally bankrupt cohort, finally reached its expiration date?
Maybe.
There’s no doubt the world of that fugue state has changed, though John Boehner’s America is still ruled by their political progeny, but I wonder if America is really keeping pace. Or has it just refreshed itself with the same old, albeit synthetic, GMO foodstuffs of the intellect.
We’re no longer living in a nice, neat unipolar world. Witness the current heads-or-tails conundrum currently facing the Ukraine. To euro or to ruble, that is the question. Iran has launched a mullahrized monkey in space. China has landed on the moon and, no doubt, will soon be sending chia su bao rolling through everybody’s dark matter, claiming the mineral rights for themselves before Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos or Richard Branson get a chance to send a backhoe up there. Does the idea that our country is the biggest and best in the universe still hold water?
Is that old devil moon, the old universe itself, cracked up to be what we once thought it was?
Consider the cautionary case of that dear old visionary, Galileo, confined to years of wandering in his garden during his embarrassing house arrest because the clerical authority of the times — whose current figura faces Time magazine, itself a form with highly unquestionable relevance in the current mediascape — disagreed with his empirical view of the galaxy.
Now we have a Ford Focus Pope. This is a pope who has made the liberation theology of the 1980s popular, as opposed to an evil communist conspiracy considered just cause for brutal American-backed wars conducted under the shredded antiquated banner of Manifest Destiny combined with the Monroe Doctrine.
Neither naysayer nor soothsayer am I, but is an America increasingly suffering from an economic caste system, an America increasingly suffering from a educational system breeding a less-than generation who believe it is perfectly OK to kill the kids in the next classroom week after week, an America in which Edward Snowden ties the pope for BMOC, and Macy’s interrupts every website I visit with a pop-up ad for an espresso machine I’m interested in buying as a Christmas gift, then links me up to its own site that warns me that the item is not available online, with an implicit “shame on you for thinking you could get what you want” — Is this the kind of America we want?
Do we want a postmodern America in which the oncoming generation is suspended between Wii and the World of Warcraft — a natural extension of my generation playing war in neighborhood vacant lots — and Goldilocks? Do we have a choice?
Are we getting the America we deserve?
Hang on, let’s rethink this thing. Even the president is doing it.
Maybe I am too preoccupied with existential questions that can never be answered even by 23andMe, especially since we are now learning there is a covert form of DNA within the DNA we’ve come to love, hidden like a nest of Russian dolls.
But isn’t that our job?
Does a dog question its destiny?
Myles Ludwig is a media savant living in Lake Worth.