This Place, With Its Old Plantations
when I got here my wife said "if trump had gotten reelected I would've told you to wait before immigrating"
Before AI usurped the throne of supervillainy, there was the metaverse. Remember the metaverse? Surely AI is playing an inflated market. But it is categorically a machine that does things. Like all machines that do things, it will flash the pan of pop culture, then continue profiting in first world medicine and third world genocide. There’s no way to sell anyone that isn’t a suicidal nerd on an MMO housing market where you don’t even get to be a hot elf.
I could extrapolate desperation from the gaping eyes of the bizarro Luigi mask, the production value contrasting his purported riches, the way he didn’t even bother editing out his reach for the off button. But there’s a deader giveaway: his earnings, brilliantly highlighted, amount to a subsignificant fraction of a single American penny. His Borgesian Ingress is faithful not just to geography but finance.
This works out. Atlas Earth didn’t need to let you pretend you’re rich. Players subscribe to Rhonda Byrne thought: if you think it’ll happen hard enough, then it is certain to happen. They did the fantasizing all by themselves. Metaverse investment was merely their fetish object. By abstracting the bank account, you can be fooled into thinking the money flowing into your digital rent is coming from nowhere, even if it somehow translates back to real money.
(In a zero-sum game), player one’s gain is equivalent to player two’s loss, with the result that the net improvement in benefit of the game is zero.
Having never read Chomsky, I still like the phrase manufactured consent. To my idiosyncratic and baseless interpretation, it points towards a specific form of propaganda which forcibly informs you that you already agree with an idea. Everyone agrees. We just have to go through the motions now. Perform the ritual.
This, of course, did not survive contact with reality. Now another half decade of documentaries on immigrant hope and book club announcements about building community and op-eds that start with “Life in the East Palestine Ohio Exclusion Zone can be grueling. But for this gay Catholic, (…)”.
There is no unified American left. Any worthwhile communist, with good reason, has long abandoned the political institution. Whence, then, this maudlin outburst from everyone that isn’t a MAGA hat, from the grieving Democrats to those that (righteously) withheld their vote?
HOPE
I came into my teens during the Obama era. I’m a Mexican immigrant, but from a border city. Inevitable American enculturation. So I don’t remember a time when we weren’t all hoping. Maybe Mexico was maybe hoping that America would get less racist. Then Obama directed millions of immigrant deportations, and oversaw the development of a drone program which allowed American soldiers to bomb brown people without fear of retaliation.
That was a mild idyll. Democrats still gave their constituency enough consideration to lie. They hadn’t yet figured out that they can ride their own opposition’s gravy train for a tenth of the effort. Hope is an anachronism from a time when there were campaign promises. For as much as the genuine left resists being lumped in with Gazan genocidaires, the sentiment has trickled down.
There is nothing and no one to hope for. We are the imperial core, the top of the heap, the orderly concentration of global power. Plucky outsiders will not assemble against the dragon. There isn’t even going to be a politician who deigns to give us reason to leave bed. They know we know the rules, and the rules say there is nothing.
COMMUNITY
This one’s tricky, because it has the pretense of material impact. If you put resources, even just time and effort, into your community, it stands to logic that there will be more resources to draw from.
I work with an aid group to supply the homeless populace. There is zero guarantee they will do the same for us. They may never have enough resources to do so. Entropy claims all.
You might, with some luck, show some bigots in need that the minorities they consider monstrous are not in fact so. What about those that don’t change their mind? And what about those that were already nominally on your side?
Which doesn’t mean this is a waste. Supplying others among the more honorable things you can do without endangering your life. But you are not building a fightsome little utopia out of atomized goals and dreams, that somehow, always, democratically, choose what’s best for each minority, against the current of history
I grant: America is full of communities. What they do in the face of encroaching oppression is, for the most part, shrink. Even if all these groups were rock-solid with values and lateral empathy, the resources have to come from somewhere. The groups of people that have banded together to change the world have not been anything as minor as a community. They have leaderships and self-supplying mechanisms. They don’t need mustard seeds of faith, because they have the assurance that their work will achieve more than mere commensalism. They can expect more than just making it to the day after.
SURVIVAL
“Survival is resistance” is the left’s prettiest falsehood. If survival alone was resistance, no settler-colonial state would stand. The mechanism that allows monsters like Trump and Harris within striking distance of the anglosphere’s seat of power would be dismantled. The land would belong to the nations that stood before the Church of England exiled its precisians. Borders would be monuments, and the great-grandchildren of slaves would feast on centuries of repaid wealth. There would never have been slaves at all!
More presently, many people from your (yes, YOUR) minority group wield their identity as a cudgel for scamming, ally themselves with your enemy for reasons of ideology or personal benefit, and die petty lives of selfishness and apathy. There is no teleological benefit to being marginalized, because there is no teleology.
Survival, in truth, is a matter of fortune. It happens less to the multiply marginalized, and more to those that, despite marginalization, have money. In the worst case scenario, it’s toughness backed by luck, the ability to fend off countless attacks without your assailants getting lucky once, and not kill yourself in the process.
I’m going to do something I advise other writers against doing, and anticipate your questions. What’s the point of disenchanting a populace already scrabbling to make sense of the cruelty? Consider that America has not changed for all the years I’ve been conscious, and far longer. These methods have had the collective effect of hydrating with our own spit. Before we can change anything, we must despair of everything.