A blog of fragments.
DISPATCH 7
Note: If you are interested in repairing the nation, then you are in the wrong room.
America, so it goes, is being seized. A tyrant-king and his fake gamer friend are purging bureaucrats and military officials (as in, they are getting fired — what other purgings have been waiting in empty halls all this time?) and the beloved nation of delicate balances and dignities is at risk.
We used to rule the world, some tech reporter bemoaned, terrified that his favored type of domination was shading into something less shiny. Another person, in trying to defend the importance of the US postal service, wrote They are only [sic] provider of complete mail services for overseas military bases.
The liberal imagination’s compulsive fixation on the weakening of US global power reveals a foundational investment in domination and extraction abroad; the problem of empire, to them, is its particular color; the weight of it in single family homes and condos; the terms of its legibility and how passive its grammar.
With Trump comes an auspicious inflection point for concerned citizens; more nuanced conversations are scattered in the face of an exceptional evil that threatens the good. Even the most privileged beneficiaries of oppression can imagine themselves the rebels to Trump’s personal regime. The Substack-able question of What can we do to fight? eclipses a more modest yet foundational query that they love to fail to answer: What does it mean to be a vaguely uncomfortable citizen of empire?
These are tired insights already largely discarded. There are few tools more favored than urgency (though civility remains peerless) to dictate what can and cannot be considered, by whom, and where.
Can a body be seized by its own hands?