Brace for Impact

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For empires, as with people, when it’s over, it’s over.

It is extremely uncomfortable being a citizen of an empire that is circling the drain of history. Like passengers on a doomed airplane, we can watch the onboard movie with all the concentration we can muster, we can pull the shade on the window and deploy earbuds all we want, but we know. We are going down. The whole vast structure of society, stressed by the spiraling descent, groans and warps as it tries to hold together for a little longer. 

There are places, and times, in which it is relatively easy to ignore reality. But not completely, and not for long. Like the knowledge of our own inevitable death, we can avoid thinking about it for years at a time, yet it is never not with us. Events that do not touch us directly cast a shadow over us, darkening our skies — to use Winston Churchill’s brilliant metaphor — like a gathering storm. 

The signs of necrosis proliferate. One of the dead giveaways, so to speak, is the fact that our public squares are infested with lunatics. They rant and cavort in ways that just a few years ago would have earned them a 70-day involuntary admission for evaluation in the nearest psycho ward. Today, it gets them TV shows and high offices. 

But the clown show is not the worst. There is another kind of madness afoot, a suicidal, homicidal lunacy involving spraying schools, churches, stores, concerts and random street corners with high-velocity bullets from assault-style semiautomatic weapons. The fact that the government at every level stands flatfooted and helpless before this brutal threat to innocent, vulnerable citizens is testament to the onset of rigor mortis.

Like all empires, ours has impoverished itself in the pursuit of world military domination. The Congress that terminated support for school lunches on the grounds that it was too expensive, lavishes on the military an amount of money that is another form of insanity. Last year the War Department (sometimes mistakenly referred to as the defense department, which of course is satire) was authorized — without debate — to spend $800 billion dollars. That is more than the combined total spent by the next nine biggest military spenders on the planet.  

With this money the military builds hideously expensive weapons that don’t work very well and deploys special forces to as many as 135 countries (can you say “Imperial Storm Troopers?”) They are not there to defend the empire, but to impose its will. They are not there to uphold democracy, but to make sure it does not get out of hand.

When I said the empire has impoverished itself, I did not mean that it is short of money. It continues to enrich the oligarchs, the deal-makers, the money-changers and the like as usual. But the poor, who have not seen a change in the minimum wage for 15 years, remain impoverished; the sick and the injured, who pay the highest prices in the world for medical care and medicine, are impoverished; women, who have just lost the right, in a large and growing segment of the country, to an abortion under any circumstance, are increasingly impoverished.

The imperial government has become adept at showing us shiny objects to keep us distracted. For example, a recent “reform” allows Medicare to negotiate drug prices and is expected by many to lower drug costs. But a reading of the fine print shows that the reform does not take effect for four years and at that time allows negotiations on exactly 10 of the 20,000 prescription drugs on the market. Can you say bread and circuses?

The trajectory is downward, and we will soon be out of airspeed, altitude and ideas. It’s going to be hard to enjoy the rest of the flight, however fervently we might hope that our pilot is Sully Sullenberger, and that he will put us down safely in the Hudson River. But we are going to have to try, for the simple reason that there is no alternative.

(Wait. Sully, is that you?)