American Apocalypse

You know, I think popular entertainment is always a commentary of sorts. It's always a commentary and a critique, and an expression, of the society, of how the society feels and what the what the the culture is experiencing to one extent or another. I mean, I think that all of those post apocalyptic movies, you know, the zombie movies, the alien invasion movies, all of these things, You know, the Quiet Place movies, the End of Us, Leave the World Behind, all of those types of films. I think all of these movies arise from the collective cultural subconscious of America and reflects their realization that in fact America is in post apocalypse. America is a memory.

It's nostalgia for a bygone period of history that almost no American living today ever actually experienced. You know? And this is the appeal of make America great again. And you can't fail to detect the post apocalyptic sentiment or the post apocalyptic realization that's the subtext for that slogan, for that political motto, for that chant. Because you know that everything that The United States conceived itself as, the image that it curated and broadcast around the world, say in the nineteen fifties and early nineteen sixties, that world is gone.

It exists only in the cultural memory, While the world that you're living in, that you're actually living in, is a hellish landscape of moral chaos, of violence, tyrannical surveillance, and authoritarian hubris. The authoritarian hubris of the state that's arbitrarily restricting your every move, your every word, your every thought, while you exist in financial instability and employment drudgery under crushing debt and taxes and bills with no purpose, no dignity, no meaning, no respect, and with only a few hours here and there to sort of unplug yourself from reality and inject yourself with the anesthesia of entertainment day in day out until you die. The bright sunny world of a happy America. It's just like a story being told by a survivor of Armageddon to his kids, you know, about when there used to be birds in the trees and there was running water and cookouts in the backyard and so on. While they meanwhile are just trudging through the rubble of a city demolished by a nuclear holocaust.

That's why they have those movies because they're realizing even if unconsciously that they're living in the aftermath. Americans today are living in the aftermath. And make America great again, that's magical thinking. It's the ultimate example of the denial phase of mourning and grief. You're pretending that you can raise the dead.