I’m bouncing between articles this morning on the NYTimes and Washington Post. I don’t read my local local paper (technically the NYT is my local paper. But.) My periscope is out watching the events of the world as if I can do anything about them.
It wasn’t always this way. We aren’t actually meant to be able to consume as much news as we do. We have a limited capacity for information retention and empathy. This comes from having evolved as social creatures in small bands of no more than 100 other upright apes.
The news amongst upright apes probably tended to be a little dull, and very gossipy. Upright Urg tripped over his own club! What a dunce!
Now we gossip about global issues. Can you believe Upright Joe Biden evacuated Afghanistan and left thousands of people to a life of medieval servitude? What a dunce!
Because we have an extremely limited attention span (again, not our fault) we tend to forget things like the fact Upright Donald Trump abandoned our Kurdish allies in Syria who were then summarily slaughtered, ruining whatever shred of respect our meddling country once retained. Republicans at the time said this was a necessary evil. Now they say Joe Biden is unnecessarily evil. Consistency has never been our strong suit either. Neither is not repeating past mistakes. For those of you paying attention this is not the first time we’ve hurriedly packed our things and left a country we were attempting to prop up but where we occasionally accidentally killed thousands of its citizens in the process, which led, inevitably, to those same citizens not being entirely supportive of our presence there.
There’s some part of the American psyche that believes quite deeply that everyone in the world would like to live in, say, Springfield, Illinois. And that all it will take to become Springfield, Illinois is huge truckfulls of cash and some high powered assault weapons. We’ve done this over and over again. The success of the post-WWII Marshal plan, where we pumped billions of dollars into rebuilding Japan and Germany, convinced us that all our enemies needed is a solid drubbing, followed by the construction of a nearby Disneyland.
It seemed to have worked so we kept trying it in Korea, Vietnam, Iran, Iraq then Afghanistan then Iraq again, then Libya and on and on.
“Take our Democracy damn you! Become Springfield, Illinois!” We say, grabbing our latest beneficiary by the throat. “Don’t you want the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad and giant roasted turkey legs?”
Meanwhile on the Homefront our own version of utopia is in trouble. Our democracy is ailing mainly because of lack of healthcare and education. Half of our country derides these things as ‘handouts’ while being perfectly content to try to hand these things out to whatever place we’re trying to transform into to an idealized version of what we imagine ourselves to be. It’s telling that no one can tell you how much money we’ve spent in Afghanistan. One day it’s 800 billion. Then 1 trillion. Then 2 trillion. There’s a significant difference between 1 and 2 trillion dollars. No one seems to know. Or really care that much. Meanwhile at home we fight over opioid crumbs in order to dull the undiagnosed pain of living in a country modeled on an erroneous interpretation of Darwin’s theory of evolution. The strong survive! Actually, anyone clever enough to reach the age of fertility can procreate and continue their genetic line. After that it doesn’t matter if they survive. Fortunately we’ve become so creative that we’ve figured out how not to procreate, thus eventually putting an end to the short, strange genetic journey of the Upright Ape.
In closing, I should note that I love Disneyland as much as the next 47 year old American male who has failed to reproduce, but I’m also well aware that it is a Potemkin village made in the image of a mythical Western ideal. A bunting laced Mainstreet where people dressed as celebrity animals wave, dull eyed, to cheering masses who’ve paid large amounts of money just to admire the façade. No one wants to see behind the plasterwork though. It’s just a warren of tunnels running from one gilded castle to another.
thank you sir.
I think to be fair, there’s valid reasons for believing that everyone wants to be in Springfield Illinois. Immigrants keep coming here from all over the world.