Carnie America

Editor’s Note: Though this is a literary magazine, we occasionally publish essays which we believe are insightful and relevant to our readers.

Of late, what I most want to pinpoint is when, where and why America decided to self immolate. As the process of restoring America to a new Golden Age kicks into gear–the recent passage of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill provides the funding and legal cover–I think it is critically important we understand why everything went so haywire. Each new generation has to learn old lessons if we are to avoid repeating the sins of our fathers.

Why did the greatest country that has ever existed, at the absolute peak of its power and influence no less, decide to turn the prodigious machinery of its global mastery upon its own citizenry, and, from the inside, eat itself alive? Just in whose pockets did our Cold War peace dividend end up?

How is it that the very institutions that were once so essential to outlandish success during our furious Cold War ascent simply absolve themselves of their missions? Practically overnight the full fathom of their force, power and, perhaps most distressingly, ire, turn on its own native citizens? As the British management consultant Stafford Beer reminds us: “A system is what it does.” For the far majority of American citizens, our system tortures, injures and seemingly tries its damndest to cut our throats while we sleep.

Born in 1980, my earliest memories are of a vibrant, buoyant America, a place of vitality, energy and prosperity. It was the America of Tom Cruise’s Maverick, positively reckless and hopelessly charming, yet incredibly effective at picking off Soviet Migs.

Of Axel Foley and his gregarious laugh, fighting crime while also taking the piss out of the stuffy LAPD, yet without a hint of racial resentment. Axel was just happy to be in sunny LA. It was peak Reaganite Kitsch in the form of Wrestlemania. People were thin, happy, excited. There was no malaise. There was no guilt. We were not medicated en masse. There was still a middle class.

Less than half a century later, our nation is one big charnel house of destruction and profit. The width and breadth of our markets, once the envy of the world, are now in fact our worst enemy. Industry today is quite obviously involved in an ongoing effort not only to sicken and disturb us–whether in the form of fast and slow foods engineered towards cravings, customer service offshoring intended to frustrate our efforts at getting what we have paid for, or social media apps designed to literally infuriate us–and then profit off our illness and misery.

Our giant food conglomerates, once the marvel of the modern world, spend their prodigious marketing and development budgets not in ensuring they fuel a healthy and vibrant populace involved in driving innovation and creating the next waves of prosperity for ourselves and the rest of the world. Instead they obsessively engineer food “products” they know–without a shadow of a doubt–will make anyone dumb enough to consume them more than once or twice sick, fat and god knows what else.

When did these companies go from feeding the country, and the world–a great cultural, economic and propaganda victory–into bastardizing the food supply so tragically that most other countries–even those who also clearly hate their own citizenry–cannot, in good conscience, allow American food to be sold to their citizens?

Except us. Except the U.S.

Were these great companies always acting this way and we just never noticed? Or is what we see and feel today simply the ill effects of decades of poisoning catching up to us?

Did their virtue erode over time step by step? Or did their efforts, their corporate directives, actually collapse at some crucial moment?

Then, when the job of sickening us is done–it of course never is, especially in an era of never ending mass immigration–Americans (and our foreign guests and illegals) are shuffled down the line to a secondary round of destruction, namely pharmaceutical companies and the medical establishment, so that they too can treat us and profit off us in perpetuity for the various chronic illnesses the food industry, and now themselves, gleefully bestowed upon us. This can’t simply all be the fault of Earl Butts can it?

The healthcare industry has extended life but are those extra years well lived and worth it? How much money do we spend keeping dying people alive for a few more days, weeks or months?

Obviously there isn’t one culprit or calamity one can point to and say that, that was the moment when corporations abandoned any sense of civic virtue they may have once embodied and decided, “Fuck it, pedal to the metal on profit maximization by all means and it doesn’t matter, in fact, it might even be the prize, to see who can kill the most Americans in the worst way possible, first?” The message was clear, that’s ok, we’ll just import more people and call them Americans.

All the while the ghouls at AEI and The Wall Street Journal declare in autistic unison: GDP Line Go Up!

Of course, there are those, we know, who will simply turn around and say “Wall Street made us do it. The free market. If I didn’t maximize profits they’d replace me with someone who would. So I did it. I’m sorry.”

Except even that apology is never offered, is it? And in the rare moment such a voice emerges, it is quickly and roundly labeled conspiracy. The idea of ever again seeing or experiencing any semblance of accountability from anyone in a position of authority or power is gone forever. What’s worse, the culprits fail upwards and move on to the next, and no doubt even greater, horror. Dr. Fauci wasn’t content to prematurely kill tens of thousands during the AIDS epidemic, he had to up his game with Covid, lying to Congress about it, only to finally receive a full autopenned-pardon.

What ever happened to The Buck Stops Here?

Was it a loss of our mission and purpose as the Cold War ended? Do people need a grand unifying story and vision for why their nation, their tribe, their people, must succeed and therefore, a civic duty to look after one another, or at the very least not maim and murder ourselves? Did this sentiment not somehow seep up from the cultural firmament into the board room?

Was it Bin Laden’s attacks upon our homeland that so thoroughly fried the great managerialist Cold War mainframes–and when they reset–decided that Americans were the problem, the new marks, the virus to be eradicated, but not before we can weaken and suck every last ounce of value from?

Is this why mass immigration followed?

Because who cares if we sicken, maim and murder the native and heritage populations when we can just replace them with millions of new ones, and we’ll call them Americans too. In fact, we’ll redefine what it is to be an American! That’s the ticket!

I remember in the late 2000’s, starting to see horrifically, comically obese Latin American families crop up in New York City. Cross the various borders to our South, break the law and put your family at permanent risk, ensconce oneself firmly in an American city, live ten to a tenement among distant cousins, just to give yourself, and your children, type 2 diabetes? And call it the American dream?

When you’ve seen an 11-year-old indigenous kid–with wide face and broad nose–casually slurping down a 2 liter of Coke in the time it takes a 2 train to make three local stops, it’s hard not to feel that berserk feeling deep in your guts. One wanted to stop that family, take them aside on a hot humid platform, brush off the old Español and say, “For God’s sake, leave this infernal place, you are killing yourselves, go home, cross the rivers and borders in the opposite direction, go back to your slums and favelas and eat your native foods. There’s nothing wrong with beans and rice and Fanta made with cane sugar, but Jesus Christo, folks, this stuff is not for you.”

In retrospect, most illegals never stood a chance, the poor fucks. I am no longer in favor of immigration of any kind and believe we need a decades-long pause, as well as mass self and forced deportations.

America needs to be for Americans so that we can understand once again what we used to know by rights, that we’re all in this together. If a CEO has little connection to his workers beyond the economic and transactional, it is easier for that executive to divorce himself from any deleterious impacts his products and services might have on the populace at large.

But if a global underclass is ushered in, that belief simply breaks down. That belief in fact doesn’t stand a chance. Heck, it happens with a global overclass too. If the profits keep rolling no matter what, then sickening whoever is here is fine because they’ll simply be replaced by new rubes and marks too stupid to see what’s so obviously in front of their lying eyes.

At least most well educated, well-to-do Americans could see, or at least sense, that if you consumed most, if not all, American mass food, you could, absolutely not be healthy by any means. This is probably why wealthy Americans make the time and take the effort to shop locally at farmers markets, farm stands, CSA’s and the like. And that hobby farming and ranching is growing in popularity among the wealthiest. And though that class are physically the healthiest, spiritually and intellectually, they are as entrapped and impoverished as those chunky Guatemalans. They are quadruple vax’d, soyjack’d and infected with TDS.

When did we incur this spiritual debit? Was it dropping the bombs on Japan? Was it the killing of Kennedy? Was it Vietnam? When did our goodness get so corrupted?

Where does the buck stop?

I want my fucking country back.