Listen:
America has come unstuck in time.
America has gone to sleep a woke force convinced of every possible racist moment in its history and awakened on the day of its birth to icons who were nothing more than the ultimate patriotic notions of togetherness. America has walked through a door in 1993, when the biggest rock star in the world cross dressed for a leading gay magazine and come out another in 1955 when women and children were seen and not heard. America has gone back through that door to find itself in 1985 when Ferraris and blonde models were the true sign of wealth and social capital. America has seen its birth and death many times, it says, and pays random visits to all events in between through decorated half-histories on 65-inch screens or a YouTube app.
It says.
America is spastic in time, has no control over where it will be next, and the trips aren’t necessarily fun. It is in a constant state of stage fright, it says, because it never knows what part of its life it will distort, destroy, erase, and cover up next.
It says.
In its younger and more vulnerable years its forefathers gave it some advice that it turns over in its mind continually.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” they told it, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” In consequence, America is always inclined to pursue all judgements, a habit that has opened many curious natures to it and also made it the champion of so many McCultures.
It says.
America prepared for Harvard in the South, the deep South dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts, listening, having to listen, to ghosts which still refused to die and let the South die in the long silence of notpeople in notlanguage. “Northern people have already seen to it that there is little left in the South for a young man,” America has heard. And America has responded in kind that it wants the South to be heard so that people whom the South will never see and whose names the South will never hear and who have never heard the South’s real name nor seen its poor wanton face will hear America and know at last why God let the South lose the war - the same war that made Southern ladies into Southern ghosts.
It says.
For America, nothing is ever lost. There is always the echo, the cancelled check, the smear of lipstick, the wet spot in the bed, the condom in the gas station bathroom, the baby shoes for sale but never worn. And all times are one time, and all those empires dead in the past never lived woke before America’s definition gave them new sentences of death. And out of those imperial shadows rotted eyes implore America for forgiveness and salvation because that is what America believes. And America loves truth.
It says.
When it was nearly thirteen, America got its arm badly broken at the elbow. When it healed, and America’s fears of never being able to play football were assuaged, it was seldom self-conscious about its injury. Its left arm was somewhat shorter than its right; when it stood or walked, the back of its hand was at right angles to its body, the thumb parallel to its thigh. America couldn’t have cared less, so long as it could pass and punt.
It says.
America is the chairman of the department of Hitler studies. It invented Hitler studies in North America in 1968. When America suggested building a whole department around Hitler’s life and work, the chancellor was quick to see the possibilities. That same chancellor went on to serve for the administrations of Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush (George the first) before he died on a ski lift in Aspen. America loves pop culture and loves to study it. Europe, however, has often noted “I understand the music, I understand the movies, I even see how comic books can tell us things. But there are full professors in your universities who read nothing but cereal boxes.” America’s defense is a simple “it’s the only avant-garde we’ve got.”
It says.
America is a weather prophet. The weather will continue bad, it says. There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The cancer of time is eating America away. America’s heroes have killed themselves on cable news and in the New York WaPo or are killing themselves in Twitter mobs over an avocado bagel being too Mexican and Jewish at the same time. The hero for America, then, is not Time, but Timeliness. We must go in step, a lock step, toward the prison of death in Los Angeles or Miami. The weather will not change and neither will America.
It says.
America watched a baby kill its mother in birth only to die itself. And after America had gotten all of the nurses and doctors out of its room, America shut the door and turned off the light. For America, it was like saying goodbye to a statue. After a while, America went out and left the hospital and walked back to Washington in the rain.
But, America believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before it. It eluded America in its past, but that’s no matter – tomorrow America will run faster, stretch out its arms farther to catch the nothing that is the wind….And one fine morning – America will cease to be America. So America beats on, a boat against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past forever trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.
It says.
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Credits:
Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
White Noise – Don Delillo
Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner
A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
All the King’s Men – Robert Penn Warren