We are almost at the abyss. It is a date circled on the calendar, like a dental cleaning, a car safety inspection or an execution. All of American history has shuffled forward to this moment. Collective histories and personal histories all converge – Independence Day, Pearl Harbor Day, my wedding anniversary and your children’s birthdays. These have all been dragged across time by the same string. All of us – in spirit – will be seated in some vast amphitheater. Ben Franklin, John Brown, Patrick Henry, George Washington and Curly Howard – the great players and the walk-ons, all will assemble to formally observe that our cumulative deeds have come to a sort of final resolution.

I anticipate a welling of anxiety, a sense of completion, but also a huge collective sigh of disappointment. If all the great events – the American Revolution, The Civil War, The New Deal, the Civil Rights Act, the moon landing – conclude in this moment of climax, could we not have unboxed a more worthy American fascism? Should not the greatest culture on earth have been ushered across “the foggy ruins of time” with even a small measure of solemnity? Do we simply hand the whole ball of wax over to some almost random dumb f*ck, a man half dead, with bad health habits and grotesque hair that resembles the insulation material poking out of your garage ceiling? This is a man who can barely count to 20, who would brag for years if he correctly named the months in order. “Nobody ever knew that January, February and March always lined up like that.”

The USA has performed some of the worst deeds in all evolutionary history. We stole every acre of land for our 50 states, and butchered the former inhabitants, who had no concept of “enclosure.” We not only allowed slavery, but designed our entire economy and our political institutions to fit the ambitions and demands of slave owners. We extracted and burned fossil fuels at an unparalleled pace, and nearly sterilized the planet with unnecessary but profitable tetraethyl lead. The US invented and (uniquely) used nuclear weapons, and has armed its populace with guns to blow each other up for sport. We provide weapons to almost every country on earth – drones, bombs and missiles – all the while calling ourselves the citadel of democracy. 

Still, we invented blues, jazz and rock and roll, sent tourists to the moon, photographed Mars from a land rover, and launched the Hubble Telescope and the James Webb too. Americans invented baseball, basketball, slant rhyme, the drum kit and Marshmallow Fluff. We are an ambiguous nation of improvisational zeal and wanton destruction. Whatever sum the total weight of our collective centuries might equal on the scales of eternity, we deserve better than a flaming implosion at the hands of a slapstick, wannabe Nazi imposter.

Last night I watched a comedy set on YouTube performed by Sam Morril – a notably irreverent standup – and he told one joke that sort of went like this:

Even though I am an atheist, I still don’t want my corpse dug up and sexually defiled.

That represents my feeling about the death of my country. I may be no patriot in the common understanding of the term, and every time I see an American Flag my imagination superimposes a big black swastika across the stripes, but our election of Trump will subject our corpse of a nation to an obscenity that curdles the imagination.

Like many people, I have absolutely no enthusiasm for Kamala Harris, but a Trump regime is like paving every road in the country a yard deep in raw sewage.

Conclude what you may about my voting plans.

Phil Wilson’s writing can also be found on Nobody’s Voice.

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