One of the oddities of living overseas is that you get your information about home from the headlines only and not, so to speak, from the water cooler at work, the conversations you might have at the diner. To read American news from afar these past few years has been to keep tabs on a place which, if you did not know better, comes off as Yemen or Chad, some remote country you imagine as where blood flows in the streets. Mass shootings, political dysfunction, stupidity run amok--if American news is the only thing you know of it, America looks insane.
Today it looks cursed.
Powerful countries do not fade away altogether. France, once center of the world, still exists, still exerts cultural influence too. The sun does set on the English empire and yet even after the stupidity of Brexit people live there. I even know a few. Because of its military and wealth, as well as Silicon Valley and Hollywood, America will continue to be important. But it is not a stretch to say that America died today.
The general regressiveness of overturning Roe vs. Wade and the suffering so many women will be forced to endure is one horror, the thoughtlessness and cruelty today represents – women as solely responsible for all sexuality and pregnancy, children only matter in the womb, we can outlaw and criminalize what makes us uncomfortable – is another.
But also there is the horror of how today marks a final and fatal control of the political machinery by those who think themselves righteously correct: judges who lie in public, officials who gerrymander instead of govern, “public servants” who know only grift, who only look proud when they show lack of empathy or their unwillingness to contemplate.
Now what corporations want, corporations get.
Now what those who hate women want, they will get.
Working as tools of those corporations, exploiting those haters, and spurred on by their own greed and pettiness, a whole tribe of fanatical, evangelical, sexually immature legislators has won the right to terminate the American experiment.
In the name of justice and freedom, they have poisoned the institutions that make civility possible, including schools, including the voting booth, including, today, the courts.
While waving the banner of the child they have sewn pestilence, strife, and despair into our common future.
And to serve their god they have made a fetus and the woman who carries it a bomb, a weapon of terror.
The birthplace of democracy is damned by their acts, dead from this day forward.