Death of America
From Instapunk
from 
JoeUser Forums
JoeUser Forums
Over on the right in my "Go Here Now" section is a link to a place called "Instapunk." It's kind of a blog by some, what I consider great thinkers. I just read this article, and I'm going to copy and paste it here. LW, I'm pretty sure Laird wrote this. There's "foul" language in it. Don't like that? Don't read it 
I post it here because it's worth the read.
OLD. I've been tracking the Mayans and the Easter Islanders for close on 40 years now. The theories about their downfalls change with each new fad in sociology. The current wisdom has it that they perished because of environmental catastrophe. The Mayans experienced too much climate change, and the Easter Islanders cut down too many trees. They could have been saved, we suspect, if they'd had Al Gore and Hillary Clinton to make their governments protect them with the right kinds of laws and programs. Not to mention the fact that religion was always their worst enemy, closely followed by foreign imperial powers bringing unfair trade and disease in their wake.
The problem is, no civilization lasts for 500 or 1,000 years without encountering crises aplenty. Long before they lost their trees, the Easter Islanders suffered from the crippling diseases of inbreeding. The Mayans battled the unforgiving jungles of Central America for over a thousand years before they suddenly shut the whole enterprise down -- well before the evil Spaniards came. The first crushing defeat of Rome occurred before 300 BC, but the Romans rallied to rule the known world until the middle of the fifth century A.D. The Minoans of 2500 BC had indoor plumbing, but we're asked to believe that a single volcanic eruption ended their whole culture because there was no Red Cross to descend on the disaster like FEMA and pull their irons from the fire.
But here's a contrary idea that's actually backed by science: Ontogeny recapitulates philogeny. The experience of the one mirrors the experience of the group. Civilizations are actually like individual people. They age. When they're young, they're resilient. When they grow old, they're not. The not very mysterious reason for the fall of advanced civilizations is that they die of boredom, unbelief, and a consequent loss of the survival instinct.
Europe has been dying to die for a century at least. Why? They're exhausted. They've thought all their thoughts, written all their books, painted all their pictures, sculpted all the fountains they ever imagined, and fought every war they could invent a reason for. Now, all they want is to sit in their air-conditioned room staring at a TV game show and please don't bother them with bills or other obligations.
The United States of America was an extraordinary attempt to break out of this pattern. The distinguishing idea was not democracy, which had already been tried repeatedly, but eternal youth. This was a country founded on the idea that people who were vital and resilient at heart could leave the dying places and come to a perennially new world where youthful ideals, energy, persistence, faith, desire, and dreams could hold boredom at bay forever. Such people came from everywhere -- Europe, Asia, Africa -- and traded their grandparents' cynical resignation for a new covenant with hope.
It worked for nearly 200 hundred years. Longer than most fountains of youth, to be sure. But old age has a way of catching up to everyone. Now the Baby Boomers are a perfect symbol of their nation, which continues to think (and speak) of itself as young even though it's actually the oldest old fart at the party. (Yes, technically, Britain is older, meaning they've lasted longer without the facelift represented by a brand new form of government, but Alzheimer's is a cruel taskmaster and its absolutist amnesia is not rejuvenating.) America is no longer young, though. Under the highlighted hair transplants and inside the juvenile tracksuit tailored to show off silicon breasts and lipo-ed hips, America has grown very very old.
I say this as one who has also grown old. Ontogeny recapitulates philogeny. When I was young I never thought of blood. I was from New Jersey. Now I play CDs of bagpipe music and imagine myself marching with Bonnie Prince Charlie. As if I were more Scottish than American. I've never been to Scotland... but I'm becoming what I used to jeer at in all the old cosmopoilitan Jews I saw, who mysteriously acquired Yiddish accents as they sank into dotage, kvetching about putzes where they used to scorn presumptuous fools. But I'm not alone. This country which was once about citizenship as a conceptual union among the like-minded has become a nursing home common room filled with phony nativists from all the nations their ancestors sacrificed everything to leave.
What else do we old codgers think about in the nursing home? We want our pills, dammit, and we don't much care who has to pay for them or how long they'll be paying for them. We just know we've lived long enough and worked hard enough that it's someone else's turn to take care of us now. By the way, don't ever talk to us about making sacrifices for the future. Our future is measured in sitcom units, meaning 22 minutes plus commercials. And if the show isn't funny or diverting or all wrapped up after the last laxative ad, we're not interested. We may not be interested even then. Truth is, we're bored.
Did I mention that we're bored? I did? Well, it bears repeating. We're b-o-o-o-o-o-r-ed. So b-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-r-ed. We've already done it all, you see. All the eating and drinking and buying and working and fucking and child-rearing and sacrificing and paying and paying and watching and believing and getting the mail and getting fucked and getting watched and getting told what to do and getting fucked again and getting audited by our great democracy and getting screwed by ungrateful children and getting lied to by everyone and getting fucked again and again and again, so that all we want now is our chocolate pudding and possession of the remote control. And some nice big checks from the government.
Is God in the nursing home? No. We no longer care about the toughest question youngsters ask of God -- Why do bad things happen to good people? -- because we've lived long enough to realize that we are not good people, and given what we deserve, it would be better by far if He weren't there at all and life just ended when it looks like it does, with a stopped heart and a stone-cold brain.
Do we love "the kids" as much as we say we do? No. We don't. There are too many kids. When you're as old as we are they're all kids, and they're all assholes.
The little ones make too much noise all the time, which is why we endorse the idea of giving them sedatives for made-up disorders that are really synonymous with being young. We also chuckle to ourselves at the one great innovation of the last twenty years, binding them hand and foot in car seats and prams, so they'll learn what it's like to be us without all the intervening fun of invincible childhood.
The bigger ones are even worse. No one likes to be reminded that they're way past sex. And sex is the only thing they remind us of. The boys wear their pants below their cocks. The girls wear their skirts above their twats and do everything a girl's limited imagination can conceive of to flaunt their naked breasts. B-o-o-o-o-o-ring. Europeans have stopped having children because they're bored by sex, which is why they used to lispingly disapprove of Hollywood's naively unsexual sex comedies. Now our teenage and twentyish kids have acquired the vaunted European sophistication about sex, and we oldsters are even more bored than they are because sex was only fun for us when it was forbidden, dirty, unmentionable, and delicious. It's become the exact opposite of all those things, which means that not only are we incapable of it, we're also no longer interested in it. And as with so many things, the kids are following our example without being aware of it.
There are other kids too. Much older kids. Just as idiotic. Kids who are entering their fifth and sixth decades with lips still firmly locked on the government nipple, unmindful of the enormous pleasures to be had by running recklessly through life without asking for permission or an allowance. Mexican kids who think it's better to be a juvenile delinquent than a neophyte citizen. "Native American" kids who pretend that their ancestors weren't murderous short-lived savages but PhDs from the school of hard knocks who were true-green environmentalists when they were still moving on to build a new town whenever the privies got filled to overflowing. Black kids who still prefer the aliases and thievery of their fugitive great-grandparents to the capitalist responsibiliies and educational requirements that accompany life in the wealthiest nation on earth. Female kids who think the unfairness of life has to do with being female. Perverted kids who insist that everyone not only tolerate their most disgusting sexual practices but admire them as well and instruct all children in the praiseworthiness of the obsession to fit a square peg into a square peg and a round hole into a round hole. Atheist kids who annoy everyone with the proposition that the belief system which invented morality can't hold a candle to the unbelief system which claims that it has a monopoly on morality. Kids of every age who demand everything from their fellow man while acknowledging no debt or allegiance to any nation, people, or way of life.
Nope. We don't much care about the kids. But like all old people everywhere, throughout the history of human life on earth, we do enjoy fretting about bullshit. We like to see the mighty humbled. We like to rant and rave about possible future crises that will never affect us. Did we mention that we like our TV? And the movies? Okay then. We like disasters because they remind us that even people who aren't old can be suddenly killed, and we like it better if there's someone to blame. We like conspiracy theories because if there isn't a conspiracy, how did our life wind up so empty and meaningless? We like to pretend that we care about children, so keep the saccharine sob stories about abused, missing, and murdered kids coming. We like sports, because what else is there? And we like our pills. No, we love our pills. We want more pills. MORE, MORE, MORE pills. For free. And we don't like wars unless they're short, spectacular, and picturesque. Like a good war movie. Anything else exhausts our attention span. Unless you're talking higher taxes on all the people who are richer than we are. We can pay attention to that. Did you forget about the more pills part?
There used to be a whole country dedicated to youth and its potentialities. For the first and only time. It was called the United States of America. The youth thing was mis-labelled 'American Exceptionalism.' It was a place of unbounded hopes, new starts, second chances, naive optimism, sacrifice, hard work, opportunity, approximate equality, and belief in the purpose and meaning of life. But it's dead now because the people who lived there got old and they stopped believing in anything, and when that happened the sheer boredom of just existing made them start yearning for death. Not just their own, but everybody's. Because catastrophe is more exciting than a chair in the waiting room. That's how Rome fell. Although some of the know-it-alls here at the home are still blaming it all on the Little Ice Age. After all, you can't teach an old dog new tricks.
I post it here because it's worth the read.
OLD. I've been tracking the Mayans and the Easter Islanders for close on 40 years now. The theories about their downfalls change with each new fad in sociology. The current wisdom has it that they perished because of environmental catastrophe. The Mayans experienced too much climate change, and the Easter Islanders cut down too many trees. They could have been saved, we suspect, if they'd had Al Gore and Hillary Clinton to make their governments protect them with the right kinds of laws and programs. Not to mention the fact that religion was always their worst enemy, closely followed by foreign imperial powers bringing unfair trade and disease in their wake.
The problem is, no civilization lasts for 500 or 1,000 years without encountering crises aplenty. Long before they lost their trees, the Easter Islanders suffered from the crippling diseases of inbreeding. The Mayans battled the unforgiving jungles of Central America for over a thousand years before they suddenly shut the whole enterprise down -- well before the evil Spaniards came. The first crushing defeat of Rome occurred before 300 BC, but the Romans rallied to rule the known world until the middle of the fifth century A.D. The Minoans of 2500 BC had indoor plumbing, but we're asked to believe that a single volcanic eruption ended their whole culture because there was no Red Cross to descend on the disaster like FEMA and pull their irons from the fire.
But here's a contrary idea that's actually backed by science: Ontogeny recapitulates philogeny. The experience of the one mirrors the experience of the group. Civilizations are actually like individual people. They age. When they're young, they're resilient. When they grow old, they're not. The not very mysterious reason for the fall of advanced civilizations is that they die of boredom, unbelief, and a consequent loss of the survival instinct.
Europe has been dying to die for a century at least. Why? They're exhausted. They've thought all their thoughts, written all their books, painted all their pictures, sculpted all the fountains they ever imagined, and fought every war they could invent a reason for. Now, all they want is to sit in their air-conditioned room staring at a TV game show and please don't bother them with bills or other obligations.
The United States of America was an extraordinary attempt to break out of this pattern. The distinguishing idea was not democracy, which had already been tried repeatedly, but eternal youth. This was a country founded on the idea that people who were vital and resilient at heart could leave the dying places and come to a perennially new world where youthful ideals, energy, persistence, faith, desire, and dreams could hold boredom at bay forever. Such people came from everywhere -- Europe, Asia, Africa -- and traded their grandparents' cynical resignation for a new covenant with hope.
It worked for nearly 200 hundred years. Longer than most fountains of youth, to be sure. But old age has a way of catching up to everyone. Now the Baby Boomers are a perfect symbol of their nation, which continues to think (and speak) of itself as young even though it's actually the oldest old fart at the party. (Yes, technically, Britain is older, meaning they've lasted longer without the facelift represented by a brand new form of government, but Alzheimer's is a cruel taskmaster and its absolutist amnesia is not rejuvenating.) America is no longer young, though. Under the highlighted hair transplants and inside the juvenile tracksuit tailored to show off silicon breasts and lipo-ed hips, America has grown very very old.
I say this as one who has also grown old. Ontogeny recapitulates philogeny. When I was young I never thought of blood. I was from New Jersey. Now I play CDs of bagpipe music and imagine myself marching with Bonnie Prince Charlie. As if I were more Scottish than American. I've never been to Scotland... but I'm becoming what I used to jeer at in all the old cosmopoilitan Jews I saw, who mysteriously acquired Yiddish accents as they sank into dotage, kvetching about putzes where they used to scorn presumptuous fools. But I'm not alone. This country which was once about citizenship as a conceptual union among the like-minded has become a nursing home common room filled with phony nativists from all the nations their ancestors sacrificed everything to leave.
What else do we old codgers think about in the nursing home? We want our pills, dammit, and we don't much care who has to pay for them or how long they'll be paying for them. We just know we've lived long enough and worked hard enough that it's someone else's turn to take care of us now. By the way, don't ever talk to us about making sacrifices for the future. Our future is measured in sitcom units, meaning 22 minutes plus commercials. And if the show isn't funny or diverting or all wrapped up after the last laxative ad, we're not interested. We may not be interested even then. Truth is, we're bored.
Did I mention that we're bored? I did? Well, it bears repeating. We're b-o-o-o-o-o-r-ed. So b-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-r-ed. We've already done it all, you see. All the eating and drinking and buying and working and fucking and child-rearing and sacrificing and paying and paying and watching and believing and getting the mail and getting fucked and getting watched and getting told what to do and getting fucked again and getting audited by our great democracy and getting screwed by ungrateful children and getting lied to by everyone and getting fucked again and again and again, so that all we want now is our chocolate pudding and possession of the remote control. And some nice big checks from the government.
Is God in the nursing home? No. We no longer care about the toughest question youngsters ask of God -- Why do bad things happen to good people? -- because we've lived long enough to realize that we are not good people, and given what we deserve, it would be better by far if He weren't there at all and life just ended when it looks like it does, with a stopped heart and a stone-cold brain.
Do we love "the kids" as much as we say we do? No. We don't. There are too many kids. When you're as old as we are they're all kids, and they're all assholes.
The little ones make too much noise all the time, which is why we endorse the idea of giving them sedatives for made-up disorders that are really synonymous with being young. We also chuckle to ourselves at the one great innovation of the last twenty years, binding them hand and foot in car seats and prams, so they'll learn what it's like to be us without all the intervening fun of invincible childhood.
The bigger ones are even worse. No one likes to be reminded that they're way past sex. And sex is the only thing they remind us of. The boys wear their pants below their cocks. The girls wear their skirts above their twats and do everything a girl's limited imagination can conceive of to flaunt their naked breasts. B-o-o-o-o-o-ring. Europeans have stopped having children because they're bored by sex, which is why they used to lispingly disapprove of Hollywood's naively unsexual sex comedies. Now our teenage and twentyish kids have acquired the vaunted European sophistication about sex, and we oldsters are even more bored than they are because sex was only fun for us when it was forbidden, dirty, unmentionable, and delicious. It's become the exact opposite of all those things, which means that not only are we incapable of it, we're also no longer interested in it. And as with so many things, the kids are following our example without being aware of it.
There are other kids too. Much older kids. Just as idiotic. Kids who are entering their fifth and sixth decades with lips still firmly locked on the government nipple, unmindful of the enormous pleasures to be had by running recklessly through life without asking for permission or an allowance. Mexican kids who think it's better to be a juvenile delinquent than a neophyte citizen. "Native American" kids who pretend that their ancestors weren't murderous short-lived savages but PhDs from the school of hard knocks who were true-green environmentalists when they were still moving on to build a new town whenever the privies got filled to overflowing. Black kids who still prefer the aliases and thievery of their fugitive great-grandparents to the capitalist responsibiliies and educational requirements that accompany life in the wealthiest nation on earth. Female kids who think the unfairness of life has to do with being female. Perverted kids who insist that everyone not only tolerate their most disgusting sexual practices but admire them as well and instruct all children in the praiseworthiness of the obsession to fit a square peg into a square peg and a round hole into a round hole. Atheist kids who annoy everyone with the proposition that the belief system which invented morality can't hold a candle to the unbelief system which claims that it has a monopoly on morality. Kids of every age who demand everything from their fellow man while acknowledging no debt or allegiance to any nation, people, or way of life.
Nope. We don't much care about the kids. But like all old people everywhere, throughout the history of human life on earth, we do enjoy fretting about bullshit. We like to see the mighty humbled. We like to rant and rave about possible future crises that will never affect us. Did we mention that we like our TV? And the movies? Okay then. We like disasters because they remind us that even people who aren't old can be suddenly killed, and we like it better if there's someone to blame. We like conspiracy theories because if there isn't a conspiracy, how did our life wind up so empty and meaningless? We like to pretend that we care about children, so keep the saccharine sob stories about abused, missing, and murdered kids coming. We like sports, because what else is there? And we like our pills. No, we love our pills. We want more pills. MORE, MORE, MORE pills. For free. And we don't like wars unless they're short, spectacular, and picturesque. Like a good war movie. Anything else exhausts our attention span. Unless you're talking higher taxes on all the people who are richer than we are. We can pay attention to that. Did you forget about the more pills part?
There used to be a whole country dedicated to youth and its potentialities. For the first and only time. It was called the United States of America. The youth thing was mis-labelled 'American Exceptionalism.' It was a place of unbounded hopes, new starts, second chances, naive optimism, sacrifice, hard work, opportunity, approximate equality, and belief in the purpose and meaning of life. But it's dead now because the people who lived there got old and they stopped believing in anything, and when that happened the sheer boredom of just existing made them start yearning for death. Not just their own, but everybody's. Because catastrophe is more exciting than a chair in the waiting room. That's how Rome fell. Although some of the know-it-alls here at the home are still blaming it all on the Little Ice Age. After all, you can't teach an old dog new tricks.
