Saturday, October 25, 2008

Dystopia

The Second American Civil War was not like the first. There were no grey and blue lines of burnt out and hungry men. There were no white mansions to burn and slaves to free. No Antietams or Gettysburgs. The second Civil War was more a sputtering candle, made from the pressed-together bits of the wax of the first.

The old, sharp lines of North and South were gone, but their ghosts remained, interwoven in across the land in hamlets and cities. The slaves, apparently free now, were ghettoised and imprisoned by a quiet racism of winks and denials. A white nostalgia for the mythic glories of a time past permeated through gun clubs and armchairs. The early twenty-first century America was always contrasted to Washington’s rebellion, or the old Civil War - the present and future always in disfavour. This backward gaze led some to ponder that that civil war of the 1860s never really ended. Rather, the loss of Dixie merely drove the war underground, into the sewers of the Union. There it remained, periodically coming up for air when a main broke and they shot a dreamer or two.

The catalyst for this second war began prior to the tense last American election of 2008. A young black man called Barack Obama defeated an old and senile white man: a former prisoner of war by the name of John McCain. Near the end of the contest, McCain rallies became more angry and mob-like. Shouts of “death to Obama” and open racism became the norm. It was said that near the end of the campaign, McCain saw the demon. In the calls for his opponent’s death, the poor man saw the beast, and, once, feebly, tried to talk it down. But by then it was too late. The inchoate masculine hate of a population poisoned by history, and drunk on the paradoxical mix of violence and Jesus, only saw this as weakness.

President Obama faced a lot of tragedy in his brief tenure. He tried. Oh, let no one say he did not try! But the combined horrors of the Second Great Depression, two losing wars on the far side of the planet, and a series of assassination attempts were simply too much.

In 2010, the Second Great Depression brought on by the subprime crisis contracted consumption and killed the just-in-time distribution system for food and goods. Unemployed and lack of savings saw the end of consumerism, which in turn killed the private trucking system that the nation relied upon for delivery of necessities. Government took over, but feeding and sheltering 300 million people was overwhelming. Frustrations grew and hate-fires stoked in the last election burned brightly as the old grey spirits found new hauntings. The Patriot Proclamation, rushed from the limbic system of a populist ultra-right radio DJ and emergent factional political leader, called for a rightwing insurrection, and the extermination of “liberal parasites.” Explosions and assassinations subsequently rolled through university campuses and urban centres. National Guards and the regular military were called out to impose order, but fuel shortages and the effects of a decade of war overseas made them almost useless.

We don’t know exactly what happened, but after the DC Riots of 2011, President Obama simply vanished when Washington was torched.

After that, the nation broke apart. The world was no longer capable of sustaining deference to the United States. And, more importantly, the US could no longer command it. The once mighty dollar was Weimar. A panicked Congress, operating in Maine, tried to find a way out. The new President Biden was also the last. Before anarchy finally swept the land, he managed to get the nuclear arsenal removed from the country or entombed deep in mines or their own silos filled with concrete and succeeded in creating defensive perimeters around a few regions in the agricultural northeast, but not much else. Eventually he attempted to broker a partition of the continental mass. Coastal areas in the west and northeast were to be safe havens and separate polis. The interior and south were to go their own way, with access to the Caribbean. Then insurgents or simply a lack of maintenance took down the power grid. This was followed by a harvest failure because a dead economy and no electricity meant there was no longer a means to manufacture and bring fertiliser to barren, exhausted soils, nor a distribution system to feed the population. The countryside went dark. Columns of refugees staggered into Canada. Prairie farmers awoke to find tens of thousands camped and shivering in their autumn fields, telling of armed militias, starvation, and mass graves in the US heartland, horror etched on their faces.

Reeling from the death of global capitalism, the rest of the world was unable to act. Even without the economic upheaval, there was little anyone could do when a nuclear nation of 300 million imploded. This wasn’t a tiny few countries in the Balkans. The generals said they’d need an army of 10 million, the GDP of 3 planets, and the oil prices of 1962 to save the US from itself. The world turned away. There was nothing to be done.

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