America is the Fight Club of Countries

The things you own end up owning you.

Years ago, when I co-wrote the political road trip memoir, America, You Sexy Bitch, with Meghan McCain, I approached it with the hypothesis that Americans (and people around the world) want the same basic things: good jobs, good schools, safe neighborhoods. How we get there, I thought, distinguished the two parties. I now think that was naïve.

The essential premise is correct. Most of us are alike in most respects. Most us do want to make our own way with minimal help from the government. We do not expect things to be handed to us, but we do expect there to be assistance available should we need help. We believe in “freedom,” in the sense that we want enough elbow room to pursue our lives however we see fit, but we don’t so much freedom that people can just go around, say, shooting up movie theaters. We want affordable access to good healthcare and a dignified old age. And yes, most of us want a strong military. Even I, the McCain family’s “resident Communist,” as the late Senator took to calling me, value the necessity of a standing military, although I also think we could cut ours back by about fifty percent.

(I’m open to negotiations on this, if leadership wants to talk.)

I also said the political parties were more like protection rackets than anything else. They’ve monopolized the political markets in such a commanding way that it’s nearly impossible for a third-party candidate to win a federal election – certainly at the presidential level. There may be good reasons to maintain a two-party system, but if we make it functionally impossible for third (and fourth, etc.) parties to emerge, we risk greater political stagnation/corruption, which we see being played out today. I didn’t trust the parties then and I don’t trust them now.

I couldn’t find the name of the artist. It’s a painting of the ending of Fight Club, which I’m sure you already know. But maybe you don’t. What the hell do I know about what you know?

Here's where I think I got it wrong: I undervalued American fear and American greed. The two are related, of course, because American fear is rooted in American greed, the notion that some outsider or pernicious insider will come and take what you got. It might be Uncle Sam stealing your taxes or one of those South American fellows stealing your job or one of those trans weirdos stealing your toilet. Meanwhile, people are having to work harder and harder just to stand still. They want somebody to blame, and there’s a whole industry happy to throw scapegoats in their direction. They do so to obfuscate the fact that the new breed of oligarchs has been robbing the nation since Reagan.  

Tyler Durden, in Fight Club, says “The things you own end up owning you.” That’s where we are as a society. We’ve become so addicted to consumption that our national motto has gone from “Out of many, one” to “Whoever dies with most toys, wins.” The American dream has gone from one of shared prosperity to individual fiefdoms. It’s gross.

I undervalued government corruption. I don’t necessarily mean out-and-out bribery, which is so crass. I mean the entire interlocking system of patronage, lobbying, dark money, insider trading, and profitable media opportunities that turn public service into private profiteering

Speaking of which, we have a media extremely deft at pitting Americans against each other for advertising dollars. The Apocalypse brought to you by Tylenol PM. About 90% of this media is owned by six companies. Does that sound good to you? It doesn’t to me. But hey, bundling!

I undervalued the degree to which academia is in bed with the government, in particular the military and intelligence communities, which together fund so much of the nation’s scientific research. When people’s careers are dependent on governmental contracts and grants, they’re going to naturally pursue lines of inquiry which align with the government’s interests. That’s not necessarily a bad thing but it certainly might be.

I undervalued the perversion of our banking system, which, too, has been conglomerized (not a word) to the point that a handful of institutions manage the vast majority of American assets. As we saw during the 2008 housing crisis, these banks can be corrupt as they wanna be without fear of consequence. Financial instrumentation, the bland-sounding euphemism for monetary musical chairs, helps almost nobody, yet threatens everybody. So, in addition to the large number of bright Americans going to work for the military/military contractors, you’ve also entire battalions of new MBA’s graduating every year who devote their energies to figuring out novel ways to move money around instead of creating, literally, anything.

I undervalued American gullibility and overvalued American intelligence. Look, I never thought we had a pack of geniuses running around here, but when they believe fucking Donald Trump saying, “I alone can fix it,” it’s hard to come to any conclusion other than a significant percentage of my fellow Americans are fucking idiots.

I still think most Americans want the same things, but I don’t see how we even get ourselves to sit at the same Thanksgiving table. When I wrote the book with Meghan, we did so because we thought the Obama/Romney election was getting too divisive. Obama/Romney! Now we’ve got one of our presidential standard bearers calling American citizens, the people he is hoping to lead, “vermin.” If you’re not sure which candidate I’m referring to, it’s the one currently sitting in a criminal courtroom in Manhattan. When half the country supports somebody like that, how do you begin a conversation about comity?

Maybe this is nothing new. We’ve always been a schizophrenic nation. We’re the Fight Club of countries except that the first rule of America, unlike the first rule of Fight Club, is that you never shut up about it. That particular movie didn’t end well for anybody. If we don’t stop fighting ourselves, I’m worried the American ending might be similar.