Will 2024 Bring Progress or More Sound and Fury?

“The mind of America is seized by a fatal dry rot -- and it’s only a question of time before all that the mind controls will run amuck in a frenzy of stupid, impotent fear… Oh God, give us anything but reality!” — Hunter S. Thompson (September 26, 1958, from NYC)

Our apparatniks will continue making 

the usual squalid mess called History: 

all we can pray for is that artists, 

chefs and saints may still appear to blithe it. 

— W.H. Auden, “Moon Landing”

The obituary of 21st century America becomes tedious to write once the Vietnam War and the federal government’s response are identified as causes of death. After losing a war, several options exist, but doubling down on failed strategies and failed ideologies shouldn’t be one of them. If you consider the last five decades—from Nixon’s resignation to today—as more of the same, then an entire generation has been wasted. 

How did USA lose Vietnam? Asymmetrical warfare and immorality, the latter which caused “American leadership” to become oxymoronic for years. How are America and the EU losing the current Likud-Hamas and Ukraine-Russia wars? Asymmetrical warfare—drones, tunnels, speedboats—and the usual moral failings involving civilians. Even without a Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib, non-idiots can see something dishonorable about the the entire West ganging up on a former WWII ally—one that marched into Berlin to remove Hitler—and a Western imperial outpost terrorizing civilians while calling itself the “most moral army in the world.” It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Most of my life, being part of the West was an honor.

“America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect. Such a confederation must be one of equals.” — President Eisenhower (1961)

I remember Gorbachev and Reagan agreeing to nuclear de-proliferation.1 Today, only an incompetent buffoon would reduce proven nuclear capacity. With diplomacy disappearing worldwide, the threat of nuclear strike or AI-directed counter-strike has become the only credible deterrent to foreign invasion. Consequently, developing and partner nations are forgoing aligned principles and demanding something more reliable for access to markets, airspace, and waterways: the “uranium handshake.” Full-scale wars may no longer pass anyone’s cost-benefit analysis, but skirmishes and proxy wars facilitate weapons-testing and establish trading routes using OPS—other people’s soldiers—and are therefore kosher. Meanwhile, no generation anywhere believes it lives freely, so voters everywhere are willing to risk chaos to find a better balance between security and liberty.

I remember when GDP and other economic trackers were reliable indicators of progress. Build a bridge there, a condominium here, and numbers would magically reveal future outlays and revenues. In a nuts-and-bolts economy, a neighborhood’s foundation wasn’t only concrete, but the ability to plan ahead and work with taxpayers and banks to share expected and unexpected costs. In a less tangible service economy, especially one prioritizing intellectual property,2 numbers are specious at best, misleading at worst. How much is a “like” of a video on a Bangalore-based server worth when an American views it? Is it possible for a digital trail to extinguish potentially coercive externalities like surveillance? (The trip from an eyeball of a video online to establishing currency strength, currency use, and total loss of privacy is shorter than you think.) Today, the informal economy and formal debt have expanded such that economic numbers are less reliable than political connections. Moreover, I have yet to discover a statistic or formula that conveys the harm a country suffers when its best people move to other countries. Can anyone calculate, to the penny, the value of Eduardo Saverin and James Dyson in Singapore rather than USA or Britain, or Elon Musk in USA instead of South Africa? 

Most fondly, I remember paper copies of Sunday newspapers and a dictionary at arms-length forcing me to think. The Second Amendment, abortion, and death penalty opinions were not yet capable of gerrymandering politically-safe districts. Prior to taking symbolic logic, my teenage subconscious absorbed rules of argumentation and linguistics sitting cross-legged with ink-stained fingers. Today, the world’s biggest libraries are at my fingertips online, but I see no reason to read anything by a living American political writer. Comedians seem more truthful.

Most importantly, I remember major differences between my country, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. Today, I wonder if the main difference between eastern Communists and Western capitalists is that the Communists focused more on space and nuclear innovation while the capitalists preferred consumer marketing and digital conduits (all the better to promote multi-national finance, aka debt).

The Stasi would be proud.

America’s leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment… The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist… We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. — President Eisenhower (1961)

A new year, regardless of election cycles, does not automatically confer progress or change. Work, whether white or blue collar, is never easy if meaningful. We are buried under mountains of debt, partisan lawyers, feckless journalists, and a citizenry incapable of connecting inflation, misinformation, war, and a winner-take-all society. “Live Free or Die” may be America’s unofficial motto, but I offer an alternative for 2024 and beyond: “Live Truthfully or Perish.” 

© Matthew Mehdi Rafat (January 2, 2024, from Singapore) 

Footnotes

1. See Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, 1987. 

2. Sadly, a “Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich” has nothing to do with food.