In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway has one of his characters ask another how he went bankrupt.
“Gradually and then suddenly.”

I think that’s how the United States are gonna go, too. We were never the perfect country. We were never CLOSE to what they taught us as children, with all the Manifest Destiny and melting pot and bright, shining city on the hill bullshit, all the mythic mumbo-jumbo every country propagates to justify itself. You learn about Lincoln ending slavery when you’re a child, and then, if you keep learning, you realize that Reconstruction was a trainwreck, that sundown laws and Jim Crow and segregated schools and water fountains, that lynching and Dred Scott and lunch counters and the Scottsboro Boys were things, that white people used to pass around picture postcards of dead Black people hanging from trees like they were Pokemon, and that our latest and possibly next President took out a full-page ad in all the New York newspapers calling for the execution of five innocent Black men.

You learn that Black veterans were whipped and blinded, that successful Black businesses were firebombed and leveled, that Emmett Till was mutilated and dumped in the Tallahatchie, and that right now, in Oregon, the overall unemployment rate is 4.2%, and the Black unemployment rate is 6.5%. You learn that it’s harder to get an apartment if you’re Black, that you don’t get callbacks for job applications if you have a name like Shaniqua, and that property values in your neighborhood go down as your melanin levels go up.

We’re a country founded on slavery, based on slavery, and our foundational documents (the ones the fascists on the Supreme Court use to okay bump stocks and voter suppression and pregnant women bleeding out in back alleys) are just as flawed and dangerous as all the other foundational documents in the world meant to cement the rights and privileges of the ruling classes, with maybe a sop thrown here or there to democracy—so long as democracy doesn’t endanger the REAL people in power. If that ever comes close to happening, if gay people manage to wrestle, with passion and blood and fire, a few rights, the wrath of the white straight god-fearing majority will come down on them like a tsunami.

If Black people ever become a dangerous voting bloc, the white majority will get rid of their polling stations, enact byzantine and torturous ID laws, end Souls to Polls, end Affirmative Action, end free school lunches, make it a crime to teach about our legacy of slavery, whitewash the slave-owning histories of the Founders, and, in Florida, start teaching that the slaves were taught valuable skills during their duress, like blacksmithing and animal husbandry.

Can you imagine how fucking frustrating it must be, right now, to be one of the sane people on the Supreme Court? We’ve got our Latina woman, our Black woman, our Jewish woman—and then we’ve got the Tradwife and the five evil men, including the one whose wife hangs the flag upside down and wants to punish the Pride Flag people across the lake, the one who drinks thousand-dollar bottles of wine with his insurrectionist wife in cozy ski lodges owned by his corporate doms, the frat-boy probable rapist who cried his way to confirmation, and the Chief Justice who KNOWS he’s going to go down in history as even worse than Roger B. Taney. If the United States survives as any kind of democratic, sane, kind and compassionate country, Roberts is gonna be down there on the lowest level of Hell getting his head chewed by Satan, along with Nathan Bedford Forrest and Joseph McCarthy.

But, let’s face it. The United States are probably over. Oh, sure, it will continue as a country, but it won’t be anything like it’s supposed to be. It will be Rome near the end, as the barbarians were massing on the borders. It will shrink into itself as Russia sweeps across Ukraine and toward Poland, as Israel white-phosphoruses Palestine, as China seeps into the spaces left by our withdrawal, as right-wing ideology recaptures France and Scandinavia, as the oceans get hotter and saltier and higher, and as migrants and minorities and the dispossessed and hopeless get gunned down behind barbed wire and barricades. White straight middle-class men like me will do fine, for a while (and GOD I’m glad I don’t have children), but in the end the world will get darker, uglier, and deadlier because the flickering, febrile light that America held up from her lamp beside the golden door—this Supreme Court, and this autocratic idiot prepared to retake the White House, and the slavering hordes of child molesters and white supremacists and fucking morons giving hand jobs to their boyfriends in community theaters—they will gutter it, gibber over it with their MAGA Nazi babble, and finally extinguish it.

I’m gonna vote for Joe Biden, of course. And I’m gonna keep sending money every week to the DNC, and to the ACLU, and to the Oregon Historical Society. And I’m gonna have moments, lying in bed at night, when I let myself feel a little hope that we can get through this, like we’ve gotten through other things in the past.
You may have noticed, earlier, that the verb I used for the United States was ‘are’, rather than ‘is’. We’re not united anymore. We’re pretty fucking far from okay. And those moments of hope don’t last long.

The Fairness Doctrine. Citizens United. Dobbs. The Electoral College. The Senate. Giving a fascist president the powers of a king. An entire political party wearing submachine gun pins, bragging about killing puppies, promising to kill or imprison its enemies, willing to abandon allies, to empower pollution and corruption and actual Nazis marching through American towns carrying torches and shouting “blood and soil!” Embracing fear and hatred and anger.

“Well, doctor, what have we got? a republic or a monarchy?” asked Elizabeth Willing Powell.

“A republic,” said Benjamin Franklin, “if you can keep it.”

Don’t think we can keep it, now. Gradually then suddenly, it’ll be over.