The News in Parts 2: Your Hidden Menace and Mine
I found out today that we were still living in the Cold War. Or more accurately, it revealed to me. I have had a revelation come upon me. I was reading the Socialist Forum in my morning bathrobe and slippers- you know, like a real American- and I found an interview with legal scholar Aziz Rana. It was discussing how the U.S. constitutional system was heavily geared toward favoring control by elitists and plutocrats and therefore needed to be transcended rather than redeemed. That wasn’t what got my attention though, that’s just standard lefty fair. No, what stood out was when he mentioned how this veneration for a document written by slave owners, closeted monarchists, and one sort-of-funny fat guy (there’s one in every party) only really began in the 1950s. We were coming down off the high of saving the world from Fascism like big damn heroes and squaring up against everyone’s new favorite evil empire the U.S.S.R. So we needed some kind of post-war identity to coalesce around and define ourselves against the Rooskies. Now you can argue with Howard Zinn’s corpse about whether or not this was a deliberate effort by capitalists to mobilize anti-Soviet sentiment in the public, the point is that it resulted in the state becoming enshrined.
America now stood for democracy. That was an easy one, because we’d been standing for democracy all throughout both World Wars and we were the first major world power to try some form of it no matter what those Dutch bastards say. America now stood for God. Yeah sure, why not? I mean Communism is over there calling religion an opiate and the white guys in power over here are all Christians, so let’s slap “In God We Trust” on the money and not think too hard about it. America now stood for independence; rugged individualism, like we were all a bunch of cowboys strutting up and down past the town saloon. Everyone had a gun, everyone had a bible, everyone had a flag, all of this made sense because the founders planned it. We took a bunch of smaller seemingly-unrelated parts about ourselves and our history and frankensteined a national culture out of them, one that supposedly anyone could partake in no matter their status or skin color. We made a cult, a meme, the first shit post in an age before computers could do even a quarter of what your phone is doing right now, and the world was amazed.
And it’s not like it didn’t work. Sure flag waving and jingoism didn’t really contribute to making the Union crumble so much as good old fashioned material factors did. But it definitely kept the Left from getting power and the government from catching those terrible Communist sympathies. The cultural revolutions of the 60s and 70s hadn’t stopped the cult so much as reformed it and made it more appealing to people who either didn’t want or couldn’t afford the house, wife, and 2.5 children. The wall was down, the flag was up oh say say can you see it? We had what in any other age would have been an economic and military hegemony. And that was a big fucking problem.
What does a cult do when everyone sees incontrovertible proof that the devil it’s been keeping so many people united against for half a century is finally dead? The simplest solution is to find another one. I mean it’s not like the world ran out of dictators in the 90s. We had to pace ourselves though, so that we didn’t have this problem again. Noriega for one decade, Saddam for another, Gadhafi for the one after that. We probably would’ve gotten Kony by now, if we could ever find the fucker. Am I saying that all of these conflicts were fought with the specific aim of maintaining the cult in mind? No, they each had nuance like everything political does. But every time we found one more enemy to harden ourselves against, the cult got the blood it needs to sustain itself, ours and theirs. Although this was just a band aid really. These tin pots fell over too fast and the faith couldn’t take switching focuses so often. It needed something more enduring to hate. Some of you can already hear the towers collapsing. 9/11 was a tragedy for us, but a godsend for it, because now everyone was back on board. No more questions, no more meta-analysis. Get those flags up, let’s get Will Ferrell on SNL in nothing but a stars and stripes speedo, freedom fries motherfucker. It’s go time now boys, let’s bring peace to the Middle-East, let’s democratize Iraq in cooperation with a theocratic monarchy, deus vult deus vult, lets get the Crusade rolling.
And everything was dandy for a while. Sure a lot of people didn’t know what this violence was all about beyond just striking out in the general vicinity of what had hurt us, like an animal. And fine, the Muslim Americans were getting the treatment we’d developed for any minority we were beating up on for that year. But that’s all ok, because enough people believed there were weapons of mass destruction, and believed that we were in Afghanistan to save people from terrorism. Faith without action is dead however. Two terms of a Republican President willing to use the icons and idols of the cult to justify his actions. Another two terms of a Neo-Liberal who could wear the flag and call us the greatest country in the world, but could still drone a bitch. And then- HOLY SHIT!!
What… what just?…
That wasn’t supposed to happen. None of this was supposed to happen. You fool! You absolute orange rube, you can’t just say all the quiet parts out loud like that! If the cult could survive out in the open exposed don’t you think we would have built temples to it in every town square?!
The ark was smashed now. The hidden commandments, once reserved only for the high priests and heretics, were paraded out before the masses for everyone to see. America now stood for whiteness. America now stood for colonialism. America now stood for naked power and cruelty for cruelty’s sake. Analysts, academics, and activists had all known these things for decades, but here was as grand a confirmation as anyone was likely to get. And some of us still clapped. They didn’t care, they still don’t, or they rationalized it, because the cult is at the end of the day still a cult. 9/11 Wasn’t a terrorist attack, it was an inside job perpetrated by traitors to the cul- I mean country. That’s not my President, that’s a ChiCom agent plotting to take over America for the globalists or the Illuminati or the Jews. They rushed into the Senate floor, high on fervor and religious ecstasy. They paraded guns outside of capital buildings, denouncing Trump in one breath and in another praying for The Boogaloo: A reenactment of the cult’s genesis myth, a revival. It was every son against his father and every daughter against her mother, for Trump had come not to bring peace but with a sword.
Other countries got in on it too. Some chipped in for power or out of hate for their favorite Other, and some because the cult didn’t start in America so much as mutate there. It could be found all over. When members of the Thule Society pledged to defend the Teutonic people in Weimar Germany, all the while cheered on by women dressed as forest elves, they were dancing to the same drumbeat as the MAGA shaman. Different sect, same religion.
So now we have a little problem. The cat’s out of the bag and the cult can’t just pretend like they didn’t parade themselves down 5th Avenue with their pants off, although they’ll probably still try. Like I said, they can’t survive exposed to the sun. Their only options are going to be either directly claiming power and shielding themselves behind it, or dying out. I know which outcome I prefer. So how to make it happen, and how do we do it without losing electricity and clean drinking water? Casting them out as the afterbirth of the Cold War will work for some, sure, and the more of their preachers we de-platform the harder time they’ll have spreading. But the cult comes with this built in persecution fetish: Nobody knows how hard it is to be Christian in modern America, or white, conservative, or male, or whatever works. The more socially uncomfortable we make being in the outgroup, the more they’ll feel validated in their faith and retreat to their own ingroups. It’s one of the reasons why Trumpers are balls-to-the-wall ride or die for sweet potato Aaron Burr in ways even Bernicrats couldn’t muster. It’s going to be draining, and gross, and we’re going to want to punch them, but we will at some point have to talk to the sons of bitches. Not online, but in the open where we can’t be dismissed. We need to plant little seeds of doubt in their heads, little questions that remind them they believe in fairytales of a country that never was and never can be even if they had all the power in the world. They won’t be convinced, but they’ll still have to go to sleep at night with those seeds festering in their heads. Those little inconsistencies in belief will grow into big paradoxes, and the smart ones will eventually get up and go. The ones that aren’t smart will be rendered all the more impotent by the brain drain. These people can’t help but tip their hand on how terrified they are of post-modern criticism, so let’s bring it to them. Plenty of groups like the Atheist and Anti-Fascist communities already do this work in one form or another.
Meanwhile we will build without them. If we play our cards and our political capital right, we can show them that it’s possible to live without the cult. Not by reverting to the America that was before it- that still had all of the pieces that were ultimately fashioned into the current blight- but by focusing on the future. We have a crumbling infrastructure and an environment on life support right now, cultists will only maybe even care about one of those things. Let’s get practicality on fixing what ideology broke. Let’s give statehood to every U.S. territory, defund all the police departments, and tattoo 96 new genders into their precious constitution. Let’s send a manned mission to Mars with a space syndicate. If we bring into reality all of the things the cult uses to keep members in line through fear, and society doesn’t collapse from them, they’re going to have to fall back to more and more absurd shit. The way to destroy the cult isn’t by destroying the cult. It’s in the past, it’s already been destroyed and is constantly in the process of being destroyed. You can see it in their agonized little rictus grins. All we have to do is save who we can, keep them from dragging is into their open grave, and make their tombstone a new American dream. A better one.
https://socialistforum.dsausa.org/issues/winter-2021/reconstituting-democracy-in-america/
