Our Constitutional Doom Loop
The struggle of being American and maintaining America is to always be conscious of and working to avoid our pending doom.
In the Bosnia of my youth, there was a wonderfully absurd expression describing a particular kind of chaos—a type of chaos so screwed up it eludes analysis or ordinary methods of problem solving: ne zna se ni ko pije, ni ko plaća. “You don’t know who’s drinking, and who’s buying.”
As an immigrant who chose America as my new home, I find this expression painfully fitting today.
For me, at the moment, this sums up the state of American politics. Nobody is really solving any problems, and as days go by, our government appears to resemble something eerily familiar to me: an ideological bureaucracy run amok rather than a country that thrives on creation and innovation.
We all know that these are strange times of upheaval but who can say exactly where this upheaval is leading? In many respects, it feels like just another exercise in futile guesswork. Almost all political analysis of American politics and life, at least in the way we used to practice it, seems meaningless. The new realities stump the experts who struggle even to understand the nature of the changes. Every analyst would love to be the one who predicts correctly how events will turn out. But do these predictions or polls even matter in the end? Who, or what, is actually governing us? Because it’s not ourselves. This is not self-government.
This leads to other questions. Have things always been operating this way in America and we just didn’t notice? Is this something new or just an awakening to reality? Does it have anything to do with complacent behavior and “going soft?” Americans have been called out for “going soft” as early as the 1950s (maybe even earlier!) and at this point, many people are softer than Wonder Bread. Perhaps it’s the nature of things to consider that one sees cultural decline, or perhaps it really is declining. Or could it be that this is our perception because we’re trying to navigate through the disorder of a time in history that questions reality itself, indeed one that values a virtual rather than a true reality?