My Political Outlook: Picking Up the Pieces
My first political article is an honest assessment of the US, the West, and a path forward through the ruins
“Picking Up the Pieces”
We've been had; you say it's over.
Sometimes I'm just happy I'm older.
We've been had; I know it's over.
Somehow it got easy to laugh out loud.1
“I know it’s over.” In America today, those lyrics belong to the dissidents, and the words could apply to every fundamental building block of this once worthy but now decadent civilization.
The ‘United States’ are barely united, and the so-called national Union has turned into a precarious and violent imperial imposition, the likes of which its citizens have not seen since the mid-to-late nineteenth century.
Just to get the ball rolling, here are 10 of the most obvious American building blocks that have broken down and suffered catastrophic dysfunction in the current US order:
social cohesion
civic responsibility
academic rigor
scientific integrity
military competency
economic stability
the rule of law
a shared moral and mythic universe
a hope for future peace and prosperity
a fundamental connection to objective reality
And the list goes on and on. So many pieces are now jagged, broken, or missing entirely from our societal structure.
Many great thinkers across human history have written volumes about the importance and functioning of each of the civilizational cornerstones, and more modern contemporaries could provide a surgeon-like analysis as to how and why those pieces were first fractured, but I am simply not up to the task.
I offer Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas, as well as Livy, Tacitus, and Suetonius. But for more current and cogent commentary than mine, I recommend the Total State substack (and book), written by Auron Macintyre, who has been a dogged and prescient political commentator and columnist since at least 2020.
Suffice it to say that for years the ruling class have treated America’s building blocks like literal wooden pieces to be rearranged or removed at random in a casual game of JENGA.
Over the last two decades, and more especially over the last five years, the modification or “Jengification” of America became so brazen and blatant that it was impossible not to notice.
Most online refer to this phenomenon as ‘Clown World’. I call the current ‘Gay-NATO rules the West’ arrangement the “Trans-Transatlantic Union”.
“Hardy-har,” you say?
Well, to quote The Walkmen song again:
‘Somehow it got easy to laugh out loud.’
There is NO real objective to this North American Jenga game the elites play *except* the acquisition of power, wealth, and control. More specifically, the elite ruling class has sought totalitarian power, and the masses have ceded or been forced to cede it to a monolithic governmental religion, and the wealth was stolen from voting citizens, and near-total control over those citizens was achieved through the media, banks, various spy agencies and bureaucracies, and a never-ending flood of immigrants who cannot vote or be citizens under the old laws.
We’ve been had. And by now, it should be obvious to everyone.
That’s the meaning of the right wing phrase “Know what time it is.” It means understanding how close to collapse everything in this country and its broader empire really are, and to prepare accordingly.
So new laws were invented, new regulations enforced, and the culture changed simultaneously from the top down AND the bottom up through levers of power like voting laws, medical ‘expertise,’ revolting school curricula and special rules for special classes. Then there is, as ever, your friendly Commie agitators, who would like nothing more than to throw their fellow citizens in gulags or line them up against a wall. That’s your good ol’ astro-turfed Antifa militias that make up much of the ‘Democratic grass roots’ underneath the sunshine-and-rainbows peace and love Hippie Boomer facade and Zoomer children they hide behind.
*I* say it’s over; I know it’s over. The entire Jenga tower is about to break and tumble like an insufferably postmodern piece of performance art. I have seen such a video on X at some point, but I can't find it right now. And honestly, why bother? You can all picture it yourselves. I’ve certainly given the visual.
Sometimes I'm just happy I am older.
Let’s get personal. I am a Millennial, born around the time the Berlin Wall fell. I was aged 12 when the Two Towers fell. Because of the circumstances of my upbringing, age, and various experiences, I now consider myself a repentant Neo-Con and disillusioned Tea Party reformer and thrice-Trump-voting populist postliberal. As Michael Knowles has often quipped, I’m “somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan.”
I long for a return, or a RETVRN, as the kids say online. Whether the return is a largely Protestant Wild West or Western Catholic Feudalism (better known as Christendom), I do not care so much any more. I long for the regime to be broken up like a bad monopoly, and for better, smaller, more authentic things to take its place. But as always, the Devil’s in the details.
So, what is the imperium or rule for which I long? As one raised Evangelical, as a Catholic convert, and as a native of North Texas and resident of Fort Worth, the 13th largest city in the nation that still retains a conservative culture and voting record?
I advocate for Texas Nationalism, for it to really kick off, to join Florida's Florida-First nationalism and any other values-aligned like-minded red state: Oklahoma, Tennessee, wherever. I want TEXIT, and sooner rather than later.
We will not fall with the coasts. We may have to aid or conquer, or conquer and aid them later, but we will not fall under the Northeast or Northwest thumb. Such an admission may make me dangerous, could put me on a list, and perhaps I should not say such things with the current FBI, NSA, DEA, CIA, and IRS lying somewhere along an axis between the Stasi and the KGB. But such things have to be said at this point.
I write these words because the Jenga game continues, in spite of Trump’s attempts to correct the tower. The permanent government and bureaucratic consensus just can't keep the structure together on any level, even if they wanted to. Some form of balkanization seems inevitable. If history is any guide, the process of balkanization will likely be violent, but there is still perhaps some chance of peaceable and legal separation… maybe. Who knows, but God?
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” wrote Yeats. ‘#Jenga!’ I tweet in response, as mere anarchy is loosed upon the world to a chorus of seal clappter.
…Okay, I admit the conceit went wrong somewhere. The metaphor is a bit lost, but, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” to quote Yeats again.
However, this substack is not generally geopolitical in scope. It is devoted primarily to fiction and poetry, and more specifically to science fiction, detective fiction, and fantasy / faerie stories. I am trying to change the culture in some microscopic way through telling good stories, and I hope people read them. Literature is one of the most powerful vehicles of culture, and our literature and media have been awful for over a decade and certainly for the last 5 or 6 years. You can find a handful of shows worth watching now. You can find a handful of movies worth watching now, even when you judge only by entertainment value and not by merit of political/metaphysical/theological truth.
Something has to change. I decided that I would do my small part in changing the culture, and the only way I knew how was by writing, reading, and editing. I’ll be here in my little corner of the internet, telling people to start picking up the pieces. And here is what picking up the Jenga pieces looks like: sifting through the rubble, and making more of what’s left.
It could be sociopolitical commentary, or religious treatises, or advocating for a better polity than the collapsing one. It could be critiques of today’s pop culture. After all, there needs to be someone who criticizes the fiddling of Nero as Rome burns. Otherwise, when the fires are out, who will know how best to fiddle, and what music will heal the soul?
Perhaps this is a foolish errand and indeed a hopeless one. But I have always been Quixotic. I look to the fantastic science fiction book I read in high school, A Canticle For Leibowitz, which began with a nuclear war and went on to a second Mediaeval period and then to an Early Modern period and finally to a new postmodernity in which civil and global conflict seemed inevitable once more, and nukes were again about to be dropped.
We are living through a global-civil panic, and we will have to make it through it: the people who still believe in God, the people who still believe in law, the people who still believe in the actual Liberal Arts, in literature, poetry, philosophy, etc. - who believe in Goodness, Truth, and Beauty.
We are like the Book People from another of my favorite Sci-Fi authors’ best known works, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. That novel was a roadmap of the future, more correct than Orwell or Huxley because it was the synthesis of both dystopian visions. We are living in a time like the immediate leadup to the bombs dropping at the end of that novel. But if we are to survive the fires and the nukes and the destruction of our whole civilization, then we must remember what is worth remembering and pass it on to the next generations in a new form, whatever fallout we and they suffer.
The fireman protagonist of Fahrenheit 451, the original flame-starter and book-burner, eventually learned the Book of Ecclesiastes by heart. He desperately tried to hold onto it in his mind as his group journeyed to the rubble of the cities, so that the victims there could remember something worth remembering: the Bible. He remembered so that they could remember biblical wisdom and take comfort in their sorrows.
Here is the final quote of the book, that Guy Montag finally pieces together, as he and the exiled Book People make their way back to the ruins of civilization to help in any way they can:
“And on either side of the river was there a tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month; And the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.”
The American Collapse is not a question. Whether it is now, five years from now, or twenty or fifty years from now. Rome rose and fell many times; so will we. I have written cyberpunk fiction about the Collapse and its consequences. I say again, the American Collapse is not a question. The question is what comes after. But whatever comes next, we must hold on to the proper traditions and the things worth knowing and keeping, both those that predate the Founding of the US and those that helped bring out the best in America, so we can make a better post-America.
I’m talking about the Bible, Homer, the Aeneid, and all the shared wisdom and glory and sadness and heroics from the Western Literary Tradition, from Beowulf and Dante to Tolkien’s Elves & Dwarves and the talking beasts of Lewis’s Narnia. We must preserve the culture worth preserving, and make it new again. That is what is Picking up the Pieces means. I hope you will join me in this endeavor.
TRACK 8: We’ve been had
BAND: The Walkmen, an American Indie Rock Band formed in 2000.
ALBUM: “Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone”, released March 26, 2002, on Startime International.
I like your outlook.
We must preserve what is worth preserving, but we must also add onto that Tradition with things worth adding.