Where have all the Americans Gone?
It used to be that one could say something about the American character. They were brash, arrogant and charming, oblivious with facility, daring and bombastic, ignorant but crafty. They had a character, and a national flag. They were patriots. They were Great, even if they failed at being good. Whatever their state got up to seemed to be an extension of the people, who were, at once, a single organism, despite the dividing lines of race and class, which seemed more like the colours in a marble pillar than what they appear to be now; the unstuck pieces of an ill-considered plasterwork.
George Bush's presidency, for all its strange and hypnotic weirdness, was perhaps the last truly American presidency. I would include the first half of Obama's, too - it felt like the promised arrival of the wholeness of a nation whose lives were so strangely apart. And yet this arrival seemed to only prove the truth of the Buddha - that life is eternally plagued by unsatisfactoriness, and that in trying to keep your cup full, you curse yourself to fetch water till you die. Trump, despite his complete lack of charm, style or visible compassion, really does embody so many things intrinsically American. There is almost nothing about him that is, in any way, un-American, for good or ill.
His administration is not radical, it is a return to form. Protectionism and chauvinism, bragging and posturing, bluffing and bulldozing. His border policies are the same as his predecessor's, his trade policy a return to the 1970s, and his nepotism mirrors every ruling family in modern American history, only he doesn't hide them in the colonies like the Obama crowd did with their kids in Ukraine, or secure industry placements like the Bushes, or vacuum up favours through the donersphere like the Clintons, he didn't even use intimidation and bribery to secure votes like the Kennedys. Nah, he just propped them straight on the stage and said, "so? Everybody's doing it."
But this time, people reacted differently. As Dave Chapelle put it, Trump is America's first white president. After Obama, going back to white was... going back. He wasn't just some right wing fart-arse, he was Hitler's infernal avatar, come to purge the nation of melanin and estrogen and make everyday a Scorsese/Eastwood marathon show - cowboys and gangsters, with a hint of Klan. And once someone is branded with the scarlet R, the respectable must join in the admonition. And so the final split has arrived. Nobody even talks about Americans anymore. When I pick up a news article these days, the writers only mention America as a location, a citizenship status, a state - they do not believe in the nation at all. They see only whites, blacks and "latinxes". America is a figment of the outer party's imagination.
What makes America American? It once was that notion of an arc bending towards liberty, but the narratives have diverged - liberty is a white man's invention, to excuse inequality, the nation was founded in 1619, as a nation of slavery and genocide, it has no right to exist. And so what is being done is to segregate out Americans, to leave an inner circle of unnamed people, variegated in complexion but uniform in mentality, who believe that anything that calls itself American is a poisonous white dodder sucking sap from God's colourful flowers with the tendrils of state and capital. Law and property, liberty and freedom, self-reliance and autodidactism are replaced by a bureaucratic culture of homogenisation through persecution, micro-management and unbridled resentment. Their task is the gathering together of the client classes, demanding ever more centralisation, ever more concentration of power, ever more intrusive pseudo-moralism, and most importantly, as much bread and circuses as the plebs can stomach.
Out of their God-given sense of superiority, Europeans are only too happy to endorse this strange antimatter Americanism, this anti-America, growing like a damp mould from the quiet recesses of the academy, creeping into the bodies of the civil service, and shaking its spores out across the world. It would be easier to see America and its bizarro-world symbiote if we all hadn't become a bit American ourselves. The British employ American jargon, Tony Blair mutilated their constitution to more resemble the united States - devolved, and presided over by an unaccountable, politically charged Supreme Court interpreting, not a single document with the aim of extending liberty, but an infinitely varied 800-year corpus of arcane and byzantine legal archaisms, to be bent to the nutritional necessities of the great unnamed fungus. What could be more American (or Anti-American) than the constitution of the European Union?
Even our clothing is American. The most isolated rural Ukrainian dresses like an inner city Chicago thug, jeans and tracksuits and baseball caps, thick chains and plastic shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses. Nothing remains of the European manner of dress, except in the boardroom where, even still, the great pressure of "cool" begins to strip away the uniform of anonymous respectability to reveal the inadequacies and inequalities of fashion. We drink Coca Cola, we watch Hollywood and Netflix, we listen to hiphop to show we are progressive and open-minded even though it has become as common as restaurant Muzak, unremarkable elevator music.
America is so thoroughly the backdrop to our cultural experience that we can no longer see America, only the broken pieces that once made her whole. There are the whites, who are all always evil, except when they grovel for forgiveness, but are still to be blamed for all the ugliness of this world; and there are the blacks, let's not judge them too hard, it's not their fault. And then there are the mishmash of others, all stuck into a great blender of "colour", to be treated as an undifferentiated placeholder, nothing more than their status, nothing less than their narrative role. Fresh off the boat - the great American story?
No, I'm afraid not. The storytellers of today don't want them to come off the boat to succeed for themselves, they want them to come over and succeed against America. It is the raison d'etre of the left, whose Russian counterparts, having achieved everything they could have dreamed of, and saw it turn to ashes, died like cancer dies of chemotherapy, wasting away the body of the patient. If they had nothing to fight, if they killed the patient, Anti-America would wither on the vine, but not from noble rot. They would fall, as they already do in every victory, to factionalism, vicious infighting, and the agony of collective suicide.
Perhaps it is by the grace of emotional distance that I appreciate this with a twist of humour and schadenfreude. Had political circumstances been different, I could have been an American myself. My grandfather was an American, though I never met him, and my mother and her sister both applied for American citizenship. My aunt, successfully, in '85, and my mother, unsuccessfully, in '89. By then, the sanctions against South Africa had reached a feverish intensity, and perhaps due to some opaque face-saving logic, the embassy refused to return my mother's documents of her father, nor grant her citizenship.
If I were an American, and I were faced with the unavoidable truth that my blood marked me for a scapegoat of all America's problems, that all it's sins were my cross to bear, as they are in my native South Africa, I would have one consolation: America survives only on the fumes of it's arrogance and self-hatred, and I would be a drop the fuel that carries forward her rusting glory.