Who Will Rule in the Age to Come?

Who Will Rule in the Age to Come? 

Captain America: Brave New World; Caliphate Redefined; One Battle After Another; Eddington

I am apparently the last person in America who does not think that America is coming to an end.

In my last mega-essay on this blog, I posited that what has defined America and Americans most for the past hundred or two years has been a shared concept of heroism, which among other things has meant a shared devotion to death. Still, as I acknowledged at length in that essay, this heroic, mythological sense of America has been in actual history not the name of a nation or a nature or a people or institution or government or Empire, but merely the defining ideal of a particular Imperial elite, a homo imperialis. This nomadic elite has within the United States itself monopolized nearly all the positions of power in government, business, culture, and even religion once held by local and regional elites: and in the last century it has expanded its invisible networks of commerce and governance to encompass the entire world. For all that, as I suggested, its imprint on the ancient settled peoples of the world remains, like many Imperial predecessors, surprisingly light nonetheless. 

In the last few years, though, increasing drastically since January 2025, I have encountered people who seem to think, or who in fact tell me, that America itself is on the verge of ending: by which they do not merely mean that American global hegemony will collapse, or that the United States federal government will collapse, but that life as ordinary Americans themselves have known it will entirely cease to be.

Once again, it is hard not to be struck by just how profoundly the most basic, underlying assumptions of people in America have entirely shifted over the past three or four decades. For about half of my life, everyone I met assumed on the deepest, most inchoate level that America would last forever. By this they did not merely mean that some vague American cultural distinctiveness or territorial unity or economic and social life would last forever: they really seemed to mean that the United States Federal Government and the Alabama State Government and the US Constitution and c. 2008 consensus liberal capitalist progressivism and Alphabet co. and Coca-Cola, inc and Verizon Communications Inc and Starbucks Corporation and McDonald's Corporation and Dr Pepper 7UP Inc and World of Warcraft and Barney the Dinosaur and Captain America would all be doing just fine a thousand years from now. 

And so as a child I would scandalize people, sometimes deliberately, more often accidentally, by merely stating that all of these things would inevitably fall apart and cease to be: as indeed they will. As the ancients knew well, nothing intrinsically bound up with change and decay and entropy and corruptibility can conceivably last forever, because to do so would contradict its most basic nature and the most basic nature of the sublunar world. 

Of course, if America in some or any of these senses was not merely another cultural or political or commercial entity, but rather the manifestation or even fulfillment of a transcendent spiritual entity and/or pseudo-Hegelian world-soul and/or immanentized divinity acting through particular historical conditions and institutions, then of course things would be different, and we would expect this to last forever, at least in some form. And this, I really and truly believe, is what virtually everyone in America, from Evangelical Christians to secular humanists and from conservatives to leftists, deep down really and truly believed when I was a child.

When I was a child, the smart adults told me to watch Babylon 5, because it was a smarter version of Star Trek Deep Space Nine. Now that I am an adult, I can recognize that Star Trek Deep Space Nine is a profoundly great work of art, and Babylon 5 is a profoundly stupid piece of art. The primary (though by no means only) reason for this is that Deep Space Nine is in essence a television show defined by a fundamental doubt about whether it is in fact possible, and whether it would in fact be good, if the history of all peoples ended in a perpetually progressing American-liberal-militarist-Imperialist non-theistic-pseudo-religion immanentized-divinity technological-Geist heaven. On the other hand, Babylon 5 is a show defined above all else by the fervent, unswaying assertion that it will in fact be very, very, very good when the history of all peoples ends in a perpetually progressing American-liberal-militarist-Imperialist non-theistic-pseudo-religion immanentized-divinity technological-Geist heaven. In the final season of Babylon 5, after the US Military has committed a heroic and righteous and democratic military coup against the elected President of the United States, and after all the gods have been told by our American military/cult-leader hero to get the hell out of our Galaxy, the Interstellar Alliance is formed, a vast and vague liberal-democratic-proceduralist multi-cultural American government founded in a boring ceremony written by the prophet of a new non-theistic, pan-cultural religion, after which (to quote the inestimable "Babylon 5 wiki"):

"The Interstellar Alliance survived and fulfilled its duties for well over one million years after its formation, with the names of all major players in the ISA's creation remembered and even revered throughout this time. By this time the ISA had achieved mastery over organic technology, with some of its member races evolving beyond the need for physical bodies, becoming beings of energy."

To which the only possible response is AMEN!

Anyway, it is no longer 1998: and now instead people tell me that America and/or the world will end in a year or five years or twenty years. And I don't believe that either.

The secret to both of these remarkable states of affairs, I would argue, is one and the same: which is once again that despite having lost faith in the goodness of the immanentized divinities that have in modernity defined every institution and belief system, people still cannot help regarding institutions and peoples and realities in their light. If America ceases to be believed in as the final divine ending of all of human history, people assume deep down that America will simply cease to exist, or at least that its sleigh will stop running like Santa Claus' in Elf. And yet, most things in the world, even most human institutions, do not in fact cease to exist when people stop believing in them: that is, in fact, kind of the whole problem. 

This belief admittedly takes very different forms. If many right-wing people who host podcasts and have Twitter accounts are right, then after the desperate failed rally of Trumpism fades, America will be overrun with Third World barbarians and become a lawless gangland split between different Somalian and Mexican warlords. If the smart people who write for the New Yorker and are interviewed on NPR are right, then some benevolent divine entity called Democracy will abandon the earth and return to the heavens, another malicious divine entity called Fascism will descend in its place, and...well, for an awful lot of them actually America will again become a lawless gangland split between different Somalian and Mexican and Straight White Male warlords, while for others Adolf Hitler will return from the moon and start building exact-scale replicas of Auschwitz and Selma, Alabama while forcing everyone to wear vintage Nazi uniforms and goosestep. According to a recent Atlantic piece I read, America will for some reason become "feudal" early Medieval France.

What everyone seems to agree on, though, is that, as in all great epochs where great civilizations fall, the planets will stop spinning, the stars will fall from the skies, and on their thrones deep in the bowels of the earth the great powers will tremble: and when the dust settles, the world as we know it will have ended, and something totally new and strange and foreign will begin. 

Far be it from me to disagree with my superiors who run podcasts and write for the New Yorker, but as at least some kind of historian, I do not think this is in fact how history works.

I am not a Marxist: by which I primarily mean that I do not believe in inevitable dialectical historical progress, and hence regard the purported alternatives of violent proletariat revolution and accelerationism as categorically unhelpful. Nevertheless, Marxists when they existed played many positive roles in society, and one of them was reminding people that economics existed and that how people fed themselves was a rather important factor in history. And from this point of view, the idea that the territorial bounds of America will not continue to be the home of prosperous and powerful political entities for the foreseeable bounds of human history appears somewhat absurd.

A basic truth that should be repeated vastly more often is that from the perspective of the settled peoples of the world, America is not only a new country, but a very embryonic and drastically underpopulated one. In absolute and not relative terms, America has the largest amount of arable land of any country in the world, including India and China--and this, too, using the more restrictive definition of "arable land" to include not any land that could relatively easily be cultivated, but merely land actually under present cultivation for temporary crops. America, meanwhile, has about three times the land area of India, including vast amounts of land that could easily be cultivated and used to produce food. India, meanwhile, has about four times the population of the United States.

As I pointed out in my last post, the simple reality is that America is not an intensively settled country. Indeed, it is barely a settled country at all. This remains true not only relative to the famously populated nations of Asia, but even relative to the baseline of places like Europe. America has only about five times as many people as the United Kingdom of Britain, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, despite having seventeen times the land area.

Yet this fundamental disconnect is even greater than any statistics or demographics could possibly convey. Traveling across America is a fundamentally opposite experience to traveling across Europe. One does not travel from places through other places. Rather, one moves from one place to another through vast tracts of wilderness pierced by monumental, alien infrastructure built not to connect communities so much as to carry commodities from periphery to center. I have been frequently attacked since my childhood for saying that America is not a nation but an Empire: a statement that people usually interpreted to mean that I think that America does not exist, or that Americans have nothing in common, or even that America as a political entity is fundamentally evil. I do not really believe any of that, though: or rather, it has nothing really to do with what I do mean when I say that America is not a nation but an Empire. 

Perhaps the most fundamental way in which I mean this statement has to do, not with Americans' cultural unity or lack thereof, or the American government's repressiveness or lack thereof, or the prevalence or scarcity of Americans' post-1945 "overseas" military interventions, but merely with this rather basic matter of economic and political structure. America simply is not structured as a nation, where a government has arisen to embody and enable the communal life of a political collectivity of a settled people living for a long time in a place and sharing some kind of basic culture or language or religion or way of life in common. America is structured as an Empire: which is to say, taken as a whole, it is structured by a vast commercial and military infrastructure built from the top down over many different political collectivities formed out of people of many different cultures and languages and religions and ways of life. 

Even that, though, is rather too abstract to get at what I really mean, which is merely that most of America--most, even of American cities, let alone American suburbs and towns and countryside--consists not of places or things but of the empty space between things. 

All my life I have been fascinated by the human deserts of America--deserts not in the highly modern sense of a climatologically inhospitable place but in the much more ancient and fundamental sense of a place that is not human, where human beings do not live and where they are not welcome. For ancient Egyptians, these were the literal deserts, where only bandits and soldiers and nomads lived: for Medieval Germans, these were the great forests, where only robbers and monks lived. For America, though, these deserts are primal and absolute, and they are everywhere: they are both within and around every public building, only a few feet from every private home, outside and around and in-between every town and city and suburb and restaurant and coffee shop and gas station. 

If you try to exist in these spaces for any number of time, hang around them, wander around them, carry out any function of life in them from eating to sleeping to defecating to merely sitting and reading or thinking, people will regard you as a homeless person, a criminal, a gangster, a terrifying alien invader, a desert nomad, and there is a good chance that cops will come and arrest you. And this is, when you think about it, rather strange for places that are in theory public spaces. If you try to do any of these things in an ordinary American neighborhood, though, full of allegedly private spaces, you will find much the same state of affairs. It is increasingly true that even daring to live or letting one's children live in the primal deserts of one's own yard or porch or sidewalk or street is seen as suspicious deviant behavior. There is something rather bizarre about this American insistence on surrounding ourselves at all times with vast empty spaces, woods and yards and streets and parks and sidewalks and parking lots and parking decks and walls and fields and landscapes, that are not there for anyone human to live in or cultivate or use for any human purpose, but merely to pass through and act as background setting. Jean Baudrillard saw the desert as the primal scene and reality of American life, the true, original backdrop and screen in reference to which American life was oriented: and I think he was right.

In any case, this discussion is necessary to communicate just why I regard it as absurd to think that America will come to an end any time soon--as well as the highly restricted sense in which I think it possible that it will. The human race has from its beginning to its end shown a very strong bias for life over death: and in the long run, life always wins out over death. In the 20th century, the powers ruling the human race did their level best to overcome this ingrained bias with more enlightened counsels, setting entire populations to kill other populations down to the last child, scientifically gasing millions, turning ancient cities into piles of rubble, and for the first time deciding as a matter of policy that under certain circumstances they could and would kill hundreds of millions and render most of the earth's surface uninhabitable. Still, by the end of the century there were vastly more people alive than there had been at its beginning.

In a similar way, I have personally no doubt at all that in a hundred years, in five hundred years, in a thousand years, in two thousand years, there will be many, many people living in the bounds of what is now the United States of America: and I find it highly, highly unlikely that these people will be living in a filmic post-apocalyptic wasteland or a filmic Third World gangland. Even a substantial nuclear war with Russia or China, while always theoretically possible, would not change that basic calculus.

Of course, what I actually meant as a child when I said that America would not last forever had little to do with this: it was merely the (for me always obvious, though now confirmed by many thousands of pages of historical and philosophical reading) point that political and cultural entities always change and always come to an end and are always superseded and replaced by other political and cultural entities not because they are evil dystopias or tragically failed utopias or quasi-Gnostic failures to realize an infinite divine essence, but rather because all political and cultural entities are fundamentally secondary realities, existing only in and for the temporal world of contingency and change, and by their inmost nature subordinate to the actual personal and common goods of actual people, and for this reason necessarily changing as the practical needs or practical goods or unpractical whims of those people amid history require. 

To be honest, I see nothing particularly tragic about the idea that in five hundred years people living in what is now America will not be governed according to the originally-deeply-flawed and now long-superseded text of an 18th century written Constitution designed largely to prevent the regional elites in thirteen mercantile coastal colonies from using a national legislature to commercially and culturally dominate each other. In fact, it is the idea that they would be governed according to that constitution that strikes me as tragic and fills me with feelings of disappointment and sorrow: for it would necessarily mean that these future people were being governed badly, and also that they showed a rather severe lack of intelligence and imagination. The societies and governments of these people will hopefully be rather better than ours: they could conceivably be much worse: but in neither case will these people be living in America in the sense in which I today live in America, let alone the (extraordinarily different) sense in which people in 1790 were living in America.

Of course, it is certainly possible that these hypothetical future people will call themselves Americans, or call their political entity America--as they have every right to do. Some people get very mad at Medieval Germans and Italians for calling themselves Romans, as though Julius Caesar was likely to be upset about it: but after all, Julius Caesar was dead, and the Medieval Germans and Italians were alive, and they had every historical and human right to take whatever they thought was good in Ancient Rome, including the Ancient Roman language and the Ancient Roman name, and use it for their present purposes. So too I have no objection to the early American habit of calling themselves Romans; and no objection if in five hundred years people living in vastly different societies, whether in the bounds of what is now America or in India or China or Russia or anywhere else, decide to call themselves Americans. So great is my intellectual magnanimity that I do not even get mad when people in 2025 call themselves Americans despite having no substantial culture or values in common with their own ancestors of a few centuries ago.

Now the one thing I sincerely hope is not the case is that people in the future continue to believe in America--which is to say, in the modern legend of some kind of immanentized divinity expressing itself through the American economy or Constitution or government or way of life, who must be held to and worshipped and served regardless if He in any way helps or improves human beings' actual lives and even if He pervasively harms and destroys them. 

It is only if Americans continue to believe in that divinity, whether as the inevitable source of good or the equally inevitable source of evil, that I think there is any particular chance that they will find a way to prevent anyone from managing to live prosperously in the territory of America or calling themselves American in the future: whether by nuking the cities, salting the earth, fighting and winning the Great Gender War, building data centers everywhere that dry up all the rivers, preventing themselves or anyone else from having children, and/or in one of these ways or another making "American" into such a cultic name of fear that future generations shun it as they shun the names of Sodom and Gomorrah. Barring those unlikely scenarios, I think that, by and large, human life and history will continue: and so in some form will America.

What is actually going on in America in 2025, I would argue, is something quite different from the end of America or the world. It is merely another crisis of legitimacy, such as has periodically afflicted nearly every nation and government and Church and Empire and corporation and township from time to time, usually justly, and often for the good. 

These crises arise in essence from the unavoidable human fact that we are rational entities, and so act always in rational pursuit of some perceived objective good: and also the fact that we are familial and social and political entities, who cannot seek or gain any of the goods we desire as isolated individuals, but only as part of some institution or another. 

For both of these reasons, no institution can function except on the basis of some firmly-held belief on the part of those who make it up that the institution itself and its overall purpose and its particular rules and laws and policies and structures and acts and specific human leaders are all good in the sense of relatively rationally oriented towards the gaining of some thing genuinely desired and perceived as objectively desirable by human beings. And from time to time, in every institution to have ever existed, some people begin to think, correctly or incorrectly, that this is not quite true, or not quite as true as it used to be, or not quite as true as it should be. 

Of course, to some extent this will always be true some of the time for some people associated with every institution; it is only when this state of affairs reaches some point of extremity, both in severity and definiteness of belief and in numbers of people affected, that what results is a genuine crisis of legitimacy. These crises of legitimacy are temporary by nature: but for all that can last for decades or even centuries, or for as long as it takes for some genuine alternative to the present state of affairs to be proposed and desired and pursued by a sufficient number of people. In the end, though, after some kind of collapse or war or struggle for power or mass defection, either enough people become convinced that the institution and/or its leaders were just fine the way they were, or they change the institution and/or its leaders: and either way the crisis is resolved.

Anyway, I have for a really quite tedious amount of time been telling everyone that America was in a crisis of legitimacy--and I have not been the only one. Post-Pandemic, though, and also post-2024-election, the name and concept seems to be falling out of favor, replaced with other generally less legible and insightful concepts, from the birth of a new AI economy to the rise of fascism to America being great again. I still persist in regarding this as closer to the truth of What is Going On Right Now than any of those other options.

To "prove" my case, I will in this lengthy essay examine a number of recent works of art that in my view convey the contours of our crisis of legitimacy, as well as another work of art about a crisis of legitimacy in a Near Eastern power from 500 years ago. I apologize: this is simply my way. 

Trumpism on the Record

In 2015, I pointed out that the most obvious meaning of "Make America Great Again" was a nostalgist return to an era where America was a more straightforward, more self-interested, and (in many ways) more successful Imperial power. This was to me confirmed by Trump's statements that the time when America was great was the period from the early 20th century to the late 1940s: in other words, the effective peak of American Imperial power, when America was an industrial and financial and military powerhouse with colonies and logistical networks stretching around the world and a dominant exporter of both goods and capital to the rest of the world.

It seemed to me, therefore, that the main meaning of Trumpism was a renegotiation of America's status as global hegemon in order to ensure that the American mainland, and not merely elites, profited more from its Imperial status: which meant first and foremost finding similar ways to extract resources from the rest of the world and transfer them to the American mainland.

At the time, many people both left and right reacted with shock to this idea, insisting that Trump was in fact an isolationist whose main goal was to remove America from any involvement with the rest of the world: a vision not only absolutely contradictory to the past eras that Trump idolized, but also impossible to carry out without revolutionary changes to the basic structure of American domestic life and commerce.

Whatever truth there may have been in this, the simple reality is that Trumpism as a domestic policy has been a complete failure. One year into his second term, Trump has effectively abandoned all his ambitious domestic-policy goals, which from the beginning required institutional skill and personnel and concerted action that his coalition lacks. On a macro scale, besides random acts of cruelty and equally random affirmations of the growing American political consensus, Trump has achieved nothing on the domestic policy front except accelerating the existing institutional and social disruption and collapse from the pandemic. And I think he has realized it: which is why he has not tried to do anything on domestic policy for months now. From here on, I think it highly likely that foreign policy will be his first and only priority, as it has already largely been for most of the past year.

Anyway, I now feel that I can state with a very high degree of confidence that this was, has been, and will have been the primary significance of Donald Trump and of Trumpism writ large in history: (1) The return of America to the global stage as an Imperial power (as the recent National Security Strategy document directly stated) openly and overtly dedicated to interfering in every region and every country of the world to promote its own financial interests and maintain its own hegemonic status, (2) The renegotiation of the terms of American power away from dedication to a perceived universal rule of law or rights regime and back towards the governmental-corporate extraction of resources and possession of captive markets for the mutual profit of local and regional and national and trans-national elites the world over, and finally (3) The increasing reliance on America's status as a global hegemon to benefit at least the enfranchised members of mainland American society, and to fund and staff and cause to function nearly all the institutions of mainland American life, through various forms of resource-extraction carried out through concerted governmental-military and corporate-financial action. Again, the recent National Security Strategy document not only directly asserted a "Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine," but also ordered American diplomatic staff to see it as their highest priority to work with American corporations to promote American financial and business interests in the countries under their purview.

This is in truth not nearly as much of a shift from the previous era of American life as its overtness may imply. This vision was already largely in place for American elites under Bush and Obama, although opposed by other, more idealistic strands: and in some form, as Trump correctly perceived, it was more or less the state of affairs during the past eras of greatest American prosperity, and hence helped to shape many of the most basic structural features of contemporary American life, to such an extent that it would be very difficult to envision them functioning with it.

The question of how successful this vision will be is another one entirely. Carried out with some degree of skill, and in a way that actually led to financial profit for American citizens, it would naturally lead to great popularity for Trump and Trumpism; carried out badly, without seeing to that profit, it will become as unpopular as Bush's "forever wars." On the global level, carried out with due attention to the profit of elites in other countries and some kind of basic political and military stability, it is highly likely to be successful; carried out badly on either front, it risks undermining America's global status entirely, and imperiling further the already fragile nature of American domestic economy and institutions. On a more basic level, it is far from clear that Americans have the necessary skills and savvy to carry out this kind of Imperial policy, period.

Perhaps most fundamentally, such an overt reliance on global Empire and hegemony is not without its basic paradoxes for such a large and prosperous country as America: and comes naturally with many, many dangers, not just to the rest of the world, but to America.

Anyway, none of this should be misconstrued as praise for Trump or Trumpism, or indeed, as primarily directed toward blame either. It is simply helpful to know what is happening, and why, particularly when it affects so many so immediately.

Commemoration

During most of the history of the Church, important bishops in communion with each other would pray for one another during their liturgies. In the Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Empire, this was done via a list engraved on folded bronze plates, known therefore as diptychs. 

For many hundreds of years, likely from the fourth century to the eleventh, the Pope was commemorated on the diptychs of the Church of Constantinople. Every Pope upon election would duly write a letter to the bishop of Constantinople, and vice versa, and each would duly inscribe the name of the new holder of the see on their respective lists. While the Pope's inscribing on the diptychs did not in itself constitute the bond of communion--demonstrated via Eucharistic participation--and was not strictly necessary to it, it nonetheless was one of the most immediate signs of unity between the bishop of New Rome and the acknowledged First See of Christendom that the Pope was regularly commemorated at the altars of Constantinople.

Then he stopped being commemorated. And the truth is, no one really knows why or how it happened.

In 1054, the Patriarch of Constantinople Michael Cerularius wrote to the Patriarch of Antioch Peter and informed him that Constantinople no longer commemorated the Pope on its diptychs, and that he should do likewise. According to Cerularius, though, he himself was in no way responsible for this state of affairs: rather, the Church of Constantinople had simply not commemorated the Pope since the Fourth Ecumenical Council hundreds of years before.

Peter of Antioch wrote back in open bafflement. From Cerularius' description, it was clear that he had meant the Fifth Ecumenical Council, not the Fourth--and he also seemed to be unaware that though there had been a brief breaking of communion between Rome and Constantinople at that time, communion and commemoration had been quickly restored. And Peter could swear to eyewitness testimony that, at least as late as a few decades before, Rome had still been commemorated in Constantinople. 

A few decades later, in 1089, the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, in an attempt to improve relations with Rome, summoned the Holy Synod of Constantinople and asked the assembled bishops why the Pope was no longer commemorated in the diptychs of Constantinople, when this act had taken place, and if there was any reason why they should not add the Pope back again. In reply, the assembled bishops claimed to have been able to find no records at all of any ecclesiastical act carrying this out, and indeed no evidence whatsoever of when or how or why such an event had taken place. They asked, nonetheless, that the status quo be allowed to stand--and though the Emperor refused and ordered them to commemorate the Pope again, the matter was put off for a time.

Some scholars have argued, plausibly enough, that it was in fact Cerularius who took the name out, and that he then simply lied about having done so--though how he was able to do so while leaving no ecclesiastical record must remain a mystery. Others propose that the name was merely left off by mistake at some point in the decades prior to Cerularius' reign--in my judgment an utter absurdity given the nature of ecclesiastical life and the relations between Rome and Constantinople during the period.

During the ensuing centuries, though, the Pope's name was added back at times, and taken out again: but the norm came to be a lack of commemoration, not the opposite. Contrary to popular belief, though, at no point was any formal excommunication of the Pope ever carried out by anyone. Following the Council of Florence and the official Union in the 15th century, however, the Pope's name was once again added--then taken out again during the reaction against that Council in Constantinople, then added and removed repeatedly over the ensuing decades according to the dictates of policy. Not long before the Fall of Constantinople, the Union was once again proclaimed: and there can be little doubt that at the final Divine Liturgy celebrated in the Hagia Sophia, for the Emperor and both Greek and Latin defenders, included the commemoration of the Pope. 

Then the City fell, and the conquering Turks appointed the most anti-Roman ecclesiastic they could find to the office of Patriarch, and absolutely forbade any contacts with Rome: and they saw to it that the Church of Constantinople never again prayed for the Pope by name over all the ensuing more than five centuries: until last week.

On November 29, 2025, Pope Leo XIV participated in a public prayer service and Doxology at the headquarters of what remains of the Church of the Constantinople: which today, in the City itself, amounting to a tiny body of only a few thousand, dwarfed many times over by the (mostly migrant) Latin and Armenian and Chaldean Catholics present in the metropolitan area. At this Doxology, during the litany of hierarchs, the Pope was once again commemorated and prayed for by name as the "holy bishop and Pope of Rome Leo," in the litany's first position, just ahead of the Patriarch of Constantinople. And, at least for a moment, things were once again as they had been in 1453 and 1000 and 500 AD.

Of course, this is not (yet) full communion: but it is still a remarkable event, worthy of notice. 

American Hero: Detectives, Nomads, Artists, and the Future of Empire

American Hero:

Detectives, Nomads, Artists, and the Future of Empire

America is a remarkable place; this nearly everyone seems to agree on, especially Americans. 

One of the magical things about the present moment is the ability one has to instantly reach out across the earth, and see videos of nearly every kind of people under the sun. Not merely manufactured Hollywood versions, not merely posed photographs for adventurers or anthropologists, but the real thing: Amazonian tribespeople, Bedouin herdsmen, Papa New Guineans, Zulus, merely living their lives, wearing their clothes, cooking their food, doing their dances, every exotic sight that Europeans once colonized and conquered and killed to be able to see and gawk at and exhibit and anthropologically analyze. And in every such authentic, native sight, one can see these people holding smart phones.

The implications of this are vast, and in a sense unimaginable. There has never before been a cultural phenomenon quite like this, of so many peoples and languages and religious and anthropological ways of life brought into contact through a highly particular linguistic and cultural and economic and technological matrix. 

This has effects everywhere: and in the last century produced at times a very potent kind of existential terror throughout the world. In the nightmare visions of Jean Baudrillard, a deeply French and European thinker if ever there was one, the European dream of liberation was achieving its end in total, eternal hegemony: the creation of an infinite space of interchangeable symbols, where all particularity and singularity would be overcome by uniformity and exchange, all meaning and value negated in their own sign. We would no longer be Frenchmen or Arabs or Bantu or Mongos: we would no longer even be human beings, individuals, persons: our dreams and desires, lives and deaths, would simply be simulations.

Baudrillard's vision found its complement--as he himself occasionally acknowledged--in the spontaneous backlash to "Americanization" in the rest of the world: a backlash emerging from nearly every angle, anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, Leftist, reactionary, religious-conservative and indigenous-cultural and nationalist movement, every ideological or economic or cultural movement of any kind, anywhere in the world. When Pope Francis spoke of the dangers of "ideological colonization," he was referencing a tradition more than a century old, one that had born fruit around the world, both within and outside the Catholic Church: and in his Magisterial social teachings, he gave this tradition perhaps its most eloquent form to date.

Yet, in the year 2025, it is hard not to feel that something has changed, something so fundamental that it threatens to render this entire century or more of discourses simply obsolete. This change is, depending on how one sees it, either the final triumph of this tradition, or its total annihilation, or its transformation into something different still, and perhaps less strange.

Since I first travelled to Europe at the age of 11 and encountered Frenchmen eating McDonalds and arguing about George W. Bush, I have been pondering this mystery, day by day and hour by hour, thinking about it, in one form or other, in nearly every waking moment, even dreaming about at night. What I encountered in France was not just France, but America: but an America even stranger to me than anything foreign could ever be. 

This was not the America of the places where I grew up, the overshadowed valleys of Birmingham, AL, not the America where my mother grew up, the intensively settled, social and familial world of the Appalachian hills and farms of Eastern Ohio, not the America of my Jewish relatives in New York or Florida or Ohio, no America that I ever found at anytime in any place, but the thing that somehow unimaginably ruled them all, that even Americans, I suddenly realized, related to as something distant, something foreign, emerging not from their hearts or souls or lives, but from somewhere infinitely far away, a placeless place, a desert.

And in that time, I have gone back and forth, many times, between rival images of what I was seeing, rival images of just what this infinitely foreign America truly was. 

The most obvious answer to the riddle is merely that America is an Empire: the greatest Empire the world has ever seen. This Empire, like all great Empires, was not merely the rule of a certain kind of settled people over another, but of an essentially manufactured breed, a homo imperialis, moving among over all peoples, including my own, with the self-assurance and strangeness of shepherds among sheep. It was not that the farmers of Coshocton, OH were ruling over the herders of Afghanistan and the townsmen of Strasbourg: there was a certain kind of people ruling over all of us, who in all of our native places had come and established their military bases and depots and arrayed their tools and entertainments. 

Wandering France in trains, and finding everywhere intensively social, intensively political, intensively French people full of outrage and discourses and opinions about the American President, the first impulse of most Americans, I think, is merely confusion. It is only when I realized that he was their President too that the picture started to come into focus. 

Still, this Empire was in a genuine sense American: and as an American, I was in some ways a beneficiary of the overwhelming, iconic power of its culture, its entertainments, its projected image of itself. Resources were taken from the ancient, settled peoples and transferred to places closer to me: to the towers and shopping malls and Internet hubs I could see emerging all around me, as if pulled out of the aether. The homo imperialis overseeing all this was a manufactured breed, true, but he was made mostly from people like me, or at least sorts of people familiar to me, so that in a sense I could understand it better than most, was closer to its cultural nexus, than a Frenchman or an Indian or an Indonesian. 

Everywhere I have been in the world, I have been mistaken for this kind of person, or at least compared to it. A beautiful Italian woman told me, with delight, that I looked like an American: a Romanian man told me, with an odd disappointment, that I did not. I have been in American-themed restaurants in Greece and Italy, with pictures of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and scrawled English text on the walls, and in them eaten food that in no way resembled American food, but was in a sense trying to resemble it.

In a sense, this is nothing new. There is always a glamor and attraction and in the proper sense charisma to Imperial power to the people ruled over it: there is always a drive to adopt the language and culture and way of life that has in some mysterious sense enabled one people to rule over another. 

It is too often forgotten today, in a very different climate, that at its height, the American Empire had not only a breed of bureaucrats, not only an exported culture, but a certain, highly potent political legitimacy. Frenchmen denouncing George W. Bush still praised America's salvation of France in WW2, still instinctively related the French Revolution to the American Revolution, saw our President as their own not merely in power, but via some genuine political relationship.

It is hard, today, to convey precisely the sense of outrage that greeted American denunciations of French perfidy over the Iraq War: the sense, not at all of America as a hated foreign power, but as a betraying friend, almost an unfair parent. What struck me even at the time was the overwhelming gap between the reality of this outrage and the way in which it had been described to me via mass media while in America. There was nothing at all in it of the sneering disdain that all Europeans, in American art, are supposed to show for the simple and sturdy pioneers. It was in truth the exact opposite: an outrage of admiration, the disappointed anger of someone finding their moral exemplar going on the spree, going off the rails, betraying not just your principles but their own. 

Most puzzling of all was the sense of betrayal, betrayal of a relationship that I had never known or imagined we had with anyone else. This was not the annoyed regard of a servant or distant cousin, but the outraged feelings of an abandoned spouse, complaining not that we were imposing on them but that we were disavowing them, renouncing them, refusing to recognize just how much the French were truly bound to us, how much their own actions and reactions were for our own benefit, how much they belonged to us, how deeply and completely they loved us. 

I can still remember an older Frenchmen, born and raised in WW2, weeping as he told us that, while Americans might think that the French had forgotten how we had saved them from the Nazis, how they might think they were being ungrateful in not supporting the Iraq war, the French had not forgotten, would never forget, would never cease remembering their debt to us, their friendship with us.

I wonder at what stage the truth dawned on that man that it was we who had forgotten; or rather, who had never remembered. I wonder at what stage the rest of the world realized how little they truly meant to us.

And yet...I feel, deep in my bones, that this picture has changed since I first went to Europe: that everything has changed. A strange coldness has settled over the eyes of Europeans when they contemplate America. Their feelings are no longer the feelings of an abandoned spouse, a betrayed friend, but something far more distant. When they look at the American President, they no longer feel he is their own. 

This is not merely, or primarily, a cultural change. With the rise of the Internet, the rest of the world has in a sense grown far closer to America and Americans; the average person in France or Thaliand has seen far more American films, American videos, heard more American jokes, watched more American porn, engaged far more directly with American politicians, and argued with far more Americans on Twitter, than ever before.

Yet I cannot help feeling that the gig is up, that the trick has been seen through: that they have realized, one and all, not only that American President never cared about them, that American politics and culture were never really their own, but that Americans were never really worthy of their admiration at all. In the age of the Internet, American cultural and political power has merely become a technique, a technology: one eagerly adopted by ordinary people and elites the world over. In the age of the Internet anyone can put out a video of themselves cooking or reviewing movies or having sex: anyone can be an American. They have seen through the magic trick, in the way that all children inevitably do when they realize they can do it just as easily themselves.

In truth, I think there was always both more and less to American power than it seemed at its height. In the year 2025, America is in a sense more powerful than ever. Peoples the world over, even more than in 2003, want America to be powerful, want the American President to tell them what to do, to negotiate their treaties for them, to make their trade deals for them, to make movies for them, to run the Internet for them, to manage the global market for them, to sell Kentucky Fried Chicken to them. Yet there is a cynicism to it all that to me is somehow more shocking. The glamor is gone: the admiration is gone: the legitimacy is gone: the love is gone. 

What is true in 2025 of most of the world looking at America is something much harsher than any hatred or disdain: that the world simply does not see an alternative to America.

When I look across the world, and see everywhere the ancient, settled peoples of the world possessing and using American commodities to speak to each other and buy and sell and entertain themselves--when I look across the world, and see everywhere the ancient, settled peoples of the world using the American language as a means of trade and diplomacy across ethnic and national divides--when I look across the world, and see everywhere the ancient, settled peoples of the world using the techniques of American politics and culture and business and social media and military technology to rule over their populations--a strange, creeping feeling comes over me, and the image shifts, and the angle changes almost imperceptibly, and I no longer see America at all. I forget that there ever was such a thing as America: and I begin to think that they have forgotten too.

What is true for the rest of the world is true, to a much greater degree, for Americans themselves--that strange, perpetually shifting melange of peoples out of which the homo imperialis has been manufactured. 

Whatever American power means for the rest of the world, for Americans the question of what America means is neither economic nor political, but existential. 

But since he went a fever of homelessness will often shake me. I am troubled by rainy meadows and mud cabins that I have never seen; and I wonder whether America will endure.

In 2025, the question of what America is for the rest of the world is intimately bound up with the question of what America is for Americans, what it is in itself and for itself. Indeed, I think that in the deepest sense the latter question is dependent on the former: what America is in the future depends more on what the rest of the world makes of America than what America makes of itself.

It is the belief of Europeans, of Chinese, of Mexicans, of Bedouin and Vietnamese and Iranians and Nigerians in America that has sustained and fed Americans' faith in themselves throughout history: and never more than now. That faith has been lost again and again throughout American history; and in the year 2025 exists perhaps less than ever before. And in a way nearly unique among historical cultures, America without faith in itself simply cannot endure.

Aristotle was a very smart man, and like all very smart men said a lot of incredibly stupid things: but the smartest thing he ever said is the one most objected to by most moderns, namely that the telos, the purpose, the intention, the end, the goal, the final cause, is always and everywhere and for everything the cause of causes, the preeminent thing that makes a thing what it is. This is really, even profoundly true: and never truer than about societies and cultures and cities and nations and Empires. What defines a people is what it is aiming at. 

For Aristotle, a state's purpose is supposed to be simple one: the self-sufficient prosperity and health and virtue and happiness of its people. In this sense, America is not, and never has been, a state. Like a few other great Empires throughout history, it has always aimed at something quite different, more tenuous, but infinitely more exciting: an ideal, an image, a way of being. 

Chesterton said that America was a nation with the soul of a Church: which raises the question of just who, exactly, this Church is supposed to be worshipping. American intellectuals right and left have for the last sixty years or so said that America was a proposition nation, defined by assent to certain ideas, certain beliefs: but they have rarely agreed on just what those beliefs are.

I have come to believe something rather particular. I agree that America as a political and cultural project has always been held together by a goal, an ideal, a belief: but I do not think it has for centuries really been a belief in liberalism, or human equality, or even utopian social organization. 

Hence the thesis of this essay: that America, at least since the 19th century, has been most bound together by a religion: and that religion is a cult of heroes.

I really think that if one were to really understand the image of the American Hero, one could deduce, as if by magic, nearly everything that makes America as a project unique and powerful in history--even deduce, to a degree, its likely fate. And that is the goal of this essay.

Short Story: Election Day

Election Day

“It’s election day today…will you do your duty?”

“Of course, monsieur,” Farouk said, bending slightly over Mr. Wedgewood as he slid the gold-enameled pot of Turkish coffee onto the bone-white saucer atop the white-and-silver tablecloth with a single white-gloved hand. With his other hand, he carefully set the white sugar bowl down to the right of the saucer, with the centers aligned, then laid the silver sugar spoon on top of it at a precise 220-degree angle.

Farouk was a tall, slightly stooped man with a long thin face wrinkled like a raisin under a round head covered in tightly-packed, jet-black curls. Customers often asked him if he dyed his hair; each time they did, he would smile primly, pressing his thin lips together, and not answer. They also often asked him how old he was: each time they did, he would open his lips, revealing carefully-polished teeth, and say, “Forty-five, monsieur.” Then he would chuckle once–a quiet, rich noise from deep in his throat–and continue his rounds. These moments were some of the happiest in his days.

But Farouk would get no such pleasure today. “I’m sure you know what’s at stake this election,” Mr. Wedgewood said, eyeing him a little coldly from behind his OmniGlasses, and not picking up the cup. He was a rather corpulent man of fifty or so, with dark skin and a totally bald head that he ran his fingers over frequently, as though searching for his missing hairs. “If the Neo-Revanchists are able to get the Presidency this time…well, that’s it for Democracy. If you’re not scared, you’re not paying attention.”

“Yes, monsieur,” Farouk said, smoothing out a wrinkled spot in the tablecloth. “Would monsieur care for one of his usual Pistachio Creams?” He avoided looking into Mr. Wedgewood’s eyes: though Monsieur Beauvilliers had emphatically taught the importance of eye contact with customers, Farouk had found the shifting melange of light and color that danced across the semi-transparent surface of the OmniGlasses gave him a headache. He stared as courteously as possible at Mr. Wedgewood’s star-shaped diamond lapel pin instead.

“I would think you would take this more seriously,” Mr. Wedgewood said, a little louder. “You know it’s people like you and I who will be the first to suffer.”

“Of course, monsieur,” Farouk said, bowing slightly and stepping away from the table. “Your humble servant will give you a moment to think about your order.”

He stepped over smartly to Mrs. Kumar’s table, bowing again before rapidly removing the remains of her cake and coffee. “Would Madam be wanting anything else today?” Surreptitiously, he brushed the cake crumbs off the tablecloth: Mrs. Kumar was a messy eater. 

He straightened up and waited; but after a moment realized that Mrs. Kumar had not noticed him. She was glued to the images and text on her OmniGlasses, her mouth slowly open to reveal yellowing teeth. “Madam?” he repeated, touching her lightly on the shoulder. “Would you care for anything else?”

“Dammit, Farouk,” she said, shoving him roughly away, so that he stumbled and nearly fell. “Can’t you see I’m upset? That damned Liberal Transhumanist Greenway is going to win the Presidency again.” She glared at the little screens again, her upper lip projecting, small tears glittering on the edges of her eyes. “Oh, damn you, bring me some of that what’s-em-you-call-it, the, um, you know, what I had last week.”

Farouk straightened up, then bowed once more for good measure. “I believe Madam is referring to our Vanilla-Cardamom Cream Cake. Madam has again made an excellent choice. Would Madam be wanting any tea or coffee with that?”

“You know what I want,” Mrs. Kumar said. “Just bring it to me, God damn you. Before these fucking do-gooders wipe me out and I have to start begging.”

“Yes, Madam, a rose-water tea as Madam prefers,” Farouk said. “Your humble servant will make sure it arrives promptly.”

No Artificial Intelligence!

No Artificial Intelligence!

Recently, and intermittently for the past eight months or so, there have been what are called "No Kings" Protests. In my own neck of the woods, these have mostly consisted of small knots of sexagenarians lining the major roadway by my house, holding signs that say things like "HONK IF YOU HATE ORANGE CHEETO." In other parts of the world, including in adjacent downtowns, these have been impressively large: by one account, the largest single-day protest in American history. Like all protests for the last five years, though, they have had no political effect whatsoever.

This is, of course, not an accident, but almost entirely by design: for they were not conceived of as political protests. America, in the year 2025, has never been a less political country: and has never had a less political population. Indeed, people today, in America, are more or less incapable of thinking in political terms, or engaging in politics as people throughout history would have understood it.

I am still, after five years, in deep mourning over the catastrophic failure of the Black Lives Matter movement. It was the greatest spontaneous mass movement of my lifetime, and it did not achieve a single lasting political gain. All it sufficed to do was to inspire a backlash: or, perhaps, merely give one more pretext for a deeper and growing perversity in American society, an obsession with the techniques of power and punishment, a willful blindness to the suffering of the weak, a overwhelming indifference to justice.

I don't know who came up with the name "No Kings": if they were not a GOP political operative, I certainly hope they were at least paid by one. This person did more good for Donald Trump and the Republican Party than anyone since Joe Biden: they deserve to be paid at least as much as Kamala Harris profited off her losing political campaign.

A protest is really only an effective political tool, and indeed really only a political act at all, when it is clearly and efficiently tailored for a single end: rapidly applying public and media pressure to existing rulers to get them to immediately carry out certain political acts or make certain political legal or policy changes which can be relatively rapidly achieved.

For this, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s is an obvious exemplar. The NAACP carried on their campaign of popular protests and civil disobedience quite intelligently and tactically, deliberately picking fights that they could either win on the local level, or rapidly escalate and so translate into greater political leverage on a national level. In 1961, Martin Luther King made certain demands of the new President John F. Kennedy; when these demands were not granted, he accelerated protests to apply pressure. As a result, he was in the White House negotiating with the President of the United States less than six months after children faced dogs and fire-hoses on the streets of Birmingham. Less than a year later, the Civil Rights Act passed, after one of the most brilliant tactical acts of political pressure ever carried out, the March on Washington, sealed the deal. MLK and his allies certainly had their grand aspirations and utopian ideals; but they understood that protests were not a path to victory, let alone a decisive weapon, but in essence a negotiating tactic.

Another way to think about this issue would be to put in military terms: protests are a tactic, not a strategy. As a book I just read on the failures of the German Imperial military, Absolute Destruction, lays out very carefully, tactics is what wins battles, but only strategy wins wars: and strategy is inevitably and necessarily not merely military, but political. No war in human history has ever been aimed merely at military goals, or been won on the battlefield: rather, war is a political act aimed at achieving political goals, and military tactics, battles and advances and victories and defeats, merely one of many means for achieving those ends. As such, tactics are only effective where they are tailored to overall strategies and subordinated to clear political ends. 

Where militaries forget this, even tactical victories end up inevitably as means, not for victory, but for defeat. The Germans implemented a tactic of unrestricted submarine warfare in World War 1 knowing that it would inevitably bring America into the war against them: because it promised (and indeed in the short term delivered) a tactical victory over the British. Many wars have been lost by winning battles--including both World Wars, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the current Israeli war in Gaza.

The Black Lives Matters protests, to do them justice, were in their origins political: they were inspired by genuine, widespread anguish at the death of George Floyd, were aimed at applying pressure to politicians currently in power, and at achieving truly political ends of justice and reform. Where they failed was largely in translating their urge for justice into any widely acceptable and rapidly implementable policies and political acts. Most immediately, they lacked an agreed-upon, respected, politically astute leadership, capable of actually negotiating with those in power, as MLK and the NAACP had been able to do in the 1960s.

There was no Black Lives Matter Act passed by the national Congress; no Executive Order by the President; and precious little even in state laws or city ordinances. Instead, local governments and police departments, lacking guidance, took their own paths of least resistance, altering their policies and enforcement priorities and tactics in unwise ways to avoid conflict and bad PR--and then changed them back once the backlash set in.

The No Kings Protests have no chance of being anywhere near that effective. The BLM Movement had political ends capable, with sufficient political intelligence and will, of being translated into tangible political and legal reforms. The No Kings Protests do not. They have a slogan, a painfully parochial slogan that, if taken seriously, poses the entire movement, not as aiming at achieving any actual political goal, but merely at preventing a transformation of the United States government into a monarchy--a defensive act that is, depending on one's perspective, either fantastically early or much too late. 

Black Lives Matter started out as a hashtag: it was still a much better and more political slogan. It expressed a positive sentiment, one with obvious political implications, and demanded political action. No Kings expresses a negative sentiment, at best personal hatred of political figures, at worst a mere stubborn resistance to political trends.

I am told by reliable informants that numerous signs at a major northeastern protest seemed to be taking the theme literally--posing the entire protest in opposition to the British monarchy of the 18th century. As Chesterton pointed out, the American colonists were hopelessly parochial and out-of-date in thinking that the British monarchy still governed England, let alone America, in 1776, rather than committees of wig-wearing Whig businessmen. In 2025, one would think the American colonists would have figured this out. But perhaps they are right; perhaps it is King Charles II who still runs America today. After all, he is on television.

I am, of course, being facetious. I am well aware that, despite occasional whimsy, the "No Kings" slogan is merely an expression of a much more basic concept: commitment to democracy, by which people today mostly seem to mean respect for the orders issued by unelected federal judges. I am also aware that most of the genuine political energy of the movement is in fact generated by, and aimed at, expressing personal dislike for one or more current politician(s). Understood properly, that is the real significance even of the slogan: merely one more hazy way of expressing one's hatred for Donald J. Trump. 

Hating Donald Trump, alas, is not a political position. It is not even, in most of its typical forms, a political sentiment: which is why it mostly expresses itself, still, to this day, in various jokes about his skin color and hair and affect. It is most definitely not a clear legal or policy goal capable of being rapidly implemented by existing rulers: especially when those existing rulers are precisely the thing being protested.

Compare this, again, with a contemporary protest movement against an unpopular President currently going on in a country with many intellectual and cultural ties to the US--but a country that, almost uniquely in the Western world, still retains actual democratic politics. I mean, of course, France. As we speak, there are people on the streets all over France protesting Emmanuel Macron, the well-groomed, intellectually-pretentious, deferential-to-investment-bankers President of the Fifth Republic. These people, though, are not merely protesting Macron as an individual: his precious mannerisms, say, or his penchant for fashionable scarves, or his inability to communicate in plain, non-meandering sentences, or his marriage to his former high school teacher, or even his famously autocratic and insular way of making decisions. They are protesting actions, real and proposed, by his government. 

In particular, Macron insists that, to reduce France's deficit and attract outside investment, the government must cut pensions and raise the retirement age. The people affected by these actions, by and large, do not want this: and so they are in the streets protesting these government actions. Some of them, mostly on the Left, want billionaires to be taxed instead; some of them, mostly on the Right, want immigration restrictions. A large majority would prefer it if Macron resigned and allowed new Presidential elections to be held. But virtually all protesters are clear on what they individually and as a group want, and all parties agree completely on what they do not want, and view their protesting as a means to communicate that to the government. This is politics.

And it has, in fact, worked: after elections handed Macron a crushing defeat, and after multiple Prime Ministers were voted out by parties beholden to the protest movement for proposing budgets that slashed pensions and raised the retirement age, Macron has backed down. He has not resigned: but then, for the protestors, that was never the main thing. They have certain political goals they want to achieve; and they want rulers to either serve them, or get out of the way. And this, too, is politics.

Americans, once again, are the least political people on the planet. They do not view protests as political acts, aimed at communicating or achieving something: they mostly seem to view them as extensions of opinion polls and online product reviews, expressing their personal likes and dislikes for particular government services and service-providers. If a service-provider gets low enough ratings, they assume he will eventually, somehow simply disappear; but they have no particular plan for achieving that goal, let alone one into which protests fit in any obvious way. 

They also, increasingly, view protests as a social outlet, in a country that is getting lonelier and lonelier with each passing year. Themed protests have been a thing for a long time, rising in parallel with the inability of Millennials to attend actual themed parties. When I was in grad school, the local protest movement held rave protests and handed out ice-cream and snow-cones. Another way to process the "No Kings" hashtag, and accompanying puzzling anti-British content, is merely as a fun party theme. Protest King George! Wear your best wig and waistcoat! Pretend it's 1776! After all, it worked for the Tea Party--and progressive politics in 2025 are among other things an increasingly desperate copy of right-wing populist politics from ten years ago. 

I should be clear, however, that my disappointment in the "No Kings" protests is in no way based on an endorsement of Donald Trump. As President, Trump has done many unjust and monstrous things, and continues to do them: and it is eminently right for the populace to take action to stop him doing these things. I not only support protests with these ends: I encourage them. Nay, I demand them.

I very much support protests calling on Donald Trump to stop his campaign of mass deportation and deliberate terrorization of the immigrant population of America. I very much support protests calling on him to restore humanitarian funding to key projects in the developing world. I very much support protests calling on him to end the war in Gaza. I very much support protests calling on him not to let food stamp funding lapse on November 1st, plunging many American citizens into something approaching starvation.  I very much support protests calling on him to stop the wave of brutal repression meted out against the poor and homeless across America.

Certainly, some or all of these causes motivated many people who joined the No Kings Protest. Nevertheless, their voices were not heard; and their protest was in vain. Fearing apparently to offend anyone, we crammed a thousand disparate grievances against Trump, real and nonsensical alike, into one overall protest whose only publicly-accessible message was a statement against the symbols of 18th century Whig monarchy--a symbolic and political regime that has about as much to do with the actions of the American government in 2025 as the empire of Genghis Khan.

This is a proem, though, to another cause that I very much wish we could protest; a cause that has far more public and universal support than condemnation of deportations or even personal dislike of Donald Trump. It is also, importantly, a cause that could relatively easily achieve its goals given popular action.

This cause is, of course, the halting of the current AI technological regime and the economic and political dominance of so-called tech companies: who as we speak seem poised to crash the global economy and destroy the natural world for the sake of bad chatbot technology.

Mirrors and Magic: Fifth Business, Islam in Pakistan, Solaris

Mirrors and Magic: Fifth Business, Islam in Pakistan, Solaris 

"We don't know what to do with other worlds: we don't need other worlds. We need a mirror."

-Solaris

What are we looking for? And would we know if we found it?

I recently read and/or watched a number of works that raise this question, in rather different ways. All three also reflect on a related question: is our desire ultimately for something other, or only for ourselves? Is our desire ultimately for truth, for reality, or can it be fulfilled in illusion? Is there something out there?

This is a question central to modernity; and even more central in the much-advertised age of AI. AI, as I have again and again emphasized in this space, is mostly false advertising, and even then mostly not new. Nevertheless, it is not without its genuine effects. The rise of Large Language Models has, thus far, done little or nothing to increase economic productivity, encourage creativity, aid discovery, increase leisure, manifest a generalized god-like intelligence, or accomplish any other goal touted by its creators to garner venture capital. It has, however, helped a few kids commit suicide, driven a few more insane, and successfully imprisoned a growing number of people in obsessive intellectual and faux-religious and faux-personal relationships with mirrors. And that is not without significance. 

Hence, in this issue of my patented "Three Extremely Different Works of Art in Different Mediums Reviewed Together According to A Philosophical or Social Theme" (TM) series, I will be examining two books and a film that all, I think, ultimately center on this same all-too-human problem, this same disconnect between what we think we are looking for and what we actually encounter, out there in the world: between our desire for the other, and the comforting, imprisoning facsimile of the mirror.