23/04/2022
As a young child my Americophile grandfather told me the story of the Alamo, I’m not sure I understood at the time what a Mexican was or when in history it was supposed to have taken place. Sometime between Odin and 1066?
We all grew up in America, even those of us who didn’t. The culture permeates the globe. The Marshall Plan Vassal States are fed ever increasingly with American ideas in cultural globalisation. As a British person sharing a language with such an alien nation is ever taxing in trying to maintain a separate identity. 9/11 has had a bigger impact on my life than 7/7 ever did and I had to look the second one up.
American politics rule in the Atlantic world. European opinion polls on American presidents as if Europeans are supposed to have an idea of who the president is and what they stand for implicitly. The French, the most resistant to Americanisation, have begun to cite American universities as the source of their political ills, a wonderful scapegoat.
As America ages and its face is smeared with decades of realpolitik shit the world’s “hero” has become a joke. America seems unable to find a puppet to lead it that isn’t a farce. At least Trump was entertaining. America was unfortunate to be in the lead at the time of great informational dissemination, any previous empire didn’t have to tackle the issue of armies of shit-posters mining at its foundations. On the other hand, no previous empire had the ability to give its population destructive catharsis through any niche media form the corporate parasite-ridden mind of a crypto-human could want.
The real issue as a non-American facing the colossus is, it isn’t evil. “America” has found itself at the centre of a global system it has no choice but to perpetuate for fear of what replaces it. Boundaries were drawn in the Zero Hour of 1945. A new destruction myth for the world to replace our creation myths, it’s no wonder we can’t think of anything better with that as our foundation. Our new foundational myth allows us to think anything away from that is better, it must be.
The world we live in was forged from a hell, the fires of hatred and raw unfeeling science gave way to a world of deep fear and the understanding that fear it turns out makes a lot of money. It’s been known for a long time now that the best way to move product is to fear the absence of it. Food, shelter, armies, nukes. Anyone born after 1948 has had a gun at their head in the form of an interlocking system of hellfire at the tip of rockets only stopped if everyone can just learn to behave. Sure, we have more food than ever before but annihilation in the most horrific way possible is closer than any medieval prophet could know. Don’t let Fukuyama fool you those nukes are still out there.
Since the rest of the world destroyed itself in ritual sacrifice America was the only source of cohesion left. A middle-aged man in an elderly care home America propped up and attempted to modernise an aged system. Anything they found in their new elderly adoptees sellable they packaged and sent away on the next freighter home creating a cultural swirl where you’ll see a Sailor Moon sticker that passed the Panama Canal in an Afghan market. Cities mirror each other. The human habitat becomes uniform. It’s not America’s fault its their parasite the corporation. They want you afraid and detached.
You must fight the fear, let the fear consume you and you’ll cling to the metal mothers like scared baby monkeys of modernist religions. Communism or fascism won’t save you. Both seem a good way to fight the corporatist structure that seeks to atomise you to the point of ever entering transient fandom-religions that reaffirm your most uncertain beliefs. These commodify your beliefs in a way a pre-Lutheran indulgence merchant could only dream of. Share yourself with the world as an act of kindness, know you are good and that you can create good. Seek not to sell yourself into the bondage of capital you are not a brand you are a human. Pay artists in secret, never pay for entertainment. Support the obscure and meaningful and do away with the known and vapid. Balance the weight of flesh with the freedom of the mind do not get trapped in either. You are both God and Mud.
Choose your hill, defend it. Feed the corporate brain worm when you must with the things you loved as a child, know that you can never return. Build your shamanistic cult in the woods, create your online zine, build strange constructions out of driftwood on beaches, and design your myths to inspire greatness in others, and spread them. Share these things with your people and create the world you deserve. Don’t be turned to the factory output of beings that don’t care about you. If you have no voice scream your spastic moans into the void until someone is forced to listen. Assert yourself onto the world until there is no place left unshackled to a cold algorithm.
Build your Alamo and defend it, no one else will do it for you.