Dear Embattered Americans,
There is no use mincing words: we are at the End Stage Empire. As I write this, merely a few hours ago, there was an assassination attempt (staged or real, who cares?) on a presidential candidate and the media took their sweet time crafting the narrative to bring us this:
A fall. Does it even matter? We’ve become so familiar with and accustomed to bread and circus that we’re part of the show.
It’s useless to mention that if TPTB wanted him dead, he’d be dead.
And it would bake your noodle just as much to ponder if no matter how grand the theatre is, don’t actors still fuck up their lines? The play doesn’t matter. Only how it makes you feel matters.
But every circus, sooner or later, has to pull the flaps of its tent and strike the stakes of its Big Top. The empty shells of the fire-roasted peanuts will litter the floor, the mud tracks of countless footsteps will harden under the blazing sun, and the stage bills will be picked up by the wind only to end up stuck in a pasture somewhere nearby. I’m not going to pretend that the demolition is going to be a light-hearted affair. I’d like to say America has had a good run, but there are oh, so many, many, MANY countries around the world that would strongly disagree. And they are surely popping the corn and pulling up their front-row seats at this very moment. Heck, some of our own fellow Americans are doing the same.
So, let’s give them one last big show. The world is watching.
Wipe off the flaking makeup. Put your smile back on. Turn the house lights back on. It’s time to break the fourth wall.
Dear Embattered Americans,
We can no longer ignore the set pieces falling around us. The more we engage in arguing in the stands about what we’ve been sold to believe, the more time the naked emperor is prancing around without anyone pointing at him. Even if you think you have escaped one reality for another, the hall of smoke and mirrors is endless; getting out of the maze requires not only knowing that we’re stuck in the maze in the first place but also our collaboration. Yes, past the identifying markers of what we look like, who we vote for, or who we invite in our beds, we’re a people of a relatively still new nation; a nation made up of all the different people of the world. Can you imagine if we left the stands of the arena empty, the empire’s thump frozen in mid-action, and we went to grow community gardens instead?
The storm is upon us. The empire uses our labor to pay for its avarice; it asks for the sacrifices of our children for its glory; and it engineers our consent to hold up the illusion of governance. No more. The line has to be drawn here. No further. The dissolution of big government might be painful but it has to be done. Participating in the voting process only prolongs the inevitable death. Holding your money in the banks is buying into the magic trick. Sending your kids to school is providing new generations to indoctrinate. What if we really did stop acquiring licenses, getting certificates, registering for events, asking for permission, paying taxes…?!?
What if we learned how to cohabitate in harmony not because it pissess off the empire (although, bonus!) but because deep down the spirit in me recognizes the spirit in you and it knows we can break bread together, and laugh together, and maybe, just maybe, find a way to make America OK again.
And look, there won’t be any applause at the end of this. No one is gonna be giving you a bouquet of flowers or sticking around for autographs. The marquee lights won’t flicker off immediately. But by then, the dust from the empire’s fall would fill the wings and we wouldn’t have to wait around inhaling its poison.
It’s time now. Leave the costumes and the props behind. Where we’re headed, no need to play pretend.
Blessings to you all
This post was made in response to Kathleen Devanney’s call for citizen’s SOTU addresses.
I also wanted to play around with some of the AI Lip Synch tools, hence the video. Of course, the irony as I ask folks to stop play-pretend is that I’m using the biggest play-pretend of them all: Artificial Intelligence. Maybe that’s a turn-off. Or maybe that only helps expose how much of an illusion we really do live in.
But a funny thing happened on my way to export: I either don’t know what I’m doing or there is some kind of safety mechanism built in for catching unsavory rhetoric because I was only able to export half the video, the rest kept blowing up with error messages. I changed my specs several times to see if it was a length issue or a size limit issue, but I could never get the other half of it out, finally letting it be in the wee hours of the morning. So. I hope you’re reading instead.
Kathleen, thank you for prompting this exercise. Even if I’m not quite a proper American, I still love this country. Not many places that will let you go around saying this shit.
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SOTU: So Over This Ugly