Should I Stay or Should I Go?

What to do when your country chooses to self-destruct?

Here I am again, trying to formulate some cogent thoughts on the ongoing collapse of the United States. While in Portugal, I keep reading, surveying, studying what’s happening. At any moment if I want to feel my blood pressure spike, my nervous system tense up, the fight-or-flight part of my reptile brain flash “emergency” in blinking red letters, all I need to do is flick on another YouTube episode of Meidastouch, The Bulwark, HasanAbi, or other relatively sane commentators. Or I can read the latest and greatest from The Contrarian, Lucid, Ken Klippenstein, Seth Abramson, The Ink, The Atlantic, The New Republic, or a host of other outlets churning out moment-by-moment exegeses on the horror show that is our political reality.

I feel the masochistic desire for another fear-based cortisol-spike quite often, apparently.

For more bad vibes, I visit my Facebook feed as well as certain WhatsApp groups where I remain connected to “Burners” and crypto people who went full MAGA/MAHA. They still believe the techno-feudal takeover of America is going great — as long as it enriches them, I guess. I used to party with these people into the wee hours under gigantic art cars shaped like rubber ducks, dragons, pirate ships and so on. We thought we were quantum teleporting together into the best tech-utopian-occult future. Now they say it is a great time to “buy the dip” in Tesla shares and stock up on Bitcoin. I flick to the former Twitter, now X, to read the latest baldfaced lies — widely disseminated by Ketamine-addicted man-boy and his Nazi pals — artificially pump-and-dumped to the top of my feed.

Wasn’t there a time, not so long ago, when we collectively agreed that Nazis were a bad thing? Apparently no longer. How did “Nazis now kind of okay” get normalized so quickly? Is this America’s nightmare or is it Russian “political technology” — memetic mind control — at its finest? How did we reach a point where protecting Jews from Anti-Semitism is an acceptable pretext to destroy our universities while rap stars sell Swastika t-shirts?

Having made my usual twenty-minute foray into brain-damaged madness, I will then try to reflect on it, rationalize it, put a spin on it, somehow slightly “sane wash” it, as the alternative is too disquieting for my Psyche. This sane washing may include fantasizing about some deep state “fifth column” within the U.S. military rising up against our enemies from within. Or I might meditate on vast cycles in the evolution of organic life and cosmic consciousness. I zone out, imagining magical movements for positive transformation growing rapidly to reach billions, ending the nightmare… Anything to produce a dopamine bubble of hippie-ish hope.

But now, sadly, let’s get real.

First some observations on the last few days of news and events. The targeted assassinations of Palestinian journalists Hossam Sabat and Mohammed Mansour and the public lynching and kidnapping of director Hamdan Ballal, who just won the Academy Award for his documentary No Other Land, are terrible, inhuman acts. They tell us the Israeli war against the Palestinians is entering a new and horrifying phase. They tell us the new rules of the road are dictators do whatever they fucking want. “We will coup whoever we want to coup,” Elon Musk Tweeted a few years back, before he bought our government for a pittance.

It is hard to escape a midnight-dark forboding that Israel intends to undertake a massive reduction of the Palestinian population, perhaps a complete genocide. I still find it unbelievable, unreal, that Jews are perpetrating this, considering the Holocaust and our people’s history of persecution.