For the past week-plus I've been working downtown. In the height of it, really. There's a few blocks in the center of Providence where...
Okay, there's yuppie and then there's this. Not the only part of the city where you'll see Black Lives Matter posters in the window, of course. But there's a craft store where they've spammed their display windows with notices on the evils of whiteness. A fucking craft store, okay? And a lily white one as far as I can tell. On the other side of the street is a tony liquor store where, in the middle of 2022, they still tell you that you need a mask to get in.
It's a funny feeling, walking through there. Like I'm looking at a theme park based on Blue America. Or perhaps better yet, a living museum telling future tourists what life in the early 2020s was like. Something in me tells me this is not a sustainable state of affairs.
Fellow Rhode Islander John Michael Greer has some ideas on the present and near future:
In becoming an empire, after all, the United States shed many of the things that Americans once took pride in. We gave up a decentralized federal system of government for a near-dictatorship of the executive branch; we gave up our regional cultures for a mass-produced pseudoculture wholly subservient to a corporate elite; we surrendered a galaxy of individual liberties in exchange for various scraps from the tables of power; we forgot about the culture of resilience that made “use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without” a matter of common sense in most American households, in order to fixate on the frantic quest to claim some of the goodies from the feed trough of empire. We’ve got a lot of work to do to recover some of what we lost, but it’s not as though we have many other options at this point.
And it wouldn't be too much of a surprise to find out that what we see around us is part of an empire on the brink. We'll see what develops from that.
2 comments:
Things are back to normal and nothing will ever be the same.
I had that thought yesterday as we drove around taking care of a few errands when I noticed there were lots of unmasked people out enjoying a rare decent afternoon, but the restaurant tables are still set up in fenced off locations on the streets and stores that used to be going concerns are gone. Yes, a theme park is a good analogy.
Greer's article this week was a very good one. I'm glad you found him when you did. The notion that our present trajectory will continue unabated, much like our Empire fascination, is in need of repair. Obviously, one can't project too far into the future, goodness knows neither can the weather forecasters, but we can stay observant and keep our fingers crossed.
Surprise, surprise, it's easier to break things than it is to put them back together and get them working.
The number of people who lost their livelihoods during the lockdowns is enraging, and all the more so when you realize we're not supposed to notice. And that means that fake business and ersatz culture have been installed to cover the gaps.
It's interesting to think about the end of empires when you consider, say, Ancient Rome. There's a city called Rome where Rome used to be. Large parts of the world, including most of the Americas, speak languages heavily influenced by Latin. The empire's version of Christianity still holds sway with hundreds of millions of believers. And yet the Empire itself is gone. It couldn't survive the loss of continuity.
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