Same as it ever was…

How goes it here?

This is a life on this side of the globe — existence in a parallel hemisphere. 

Here the auroras don’t shimmer so brightly — we don’t see them at all. 

Here the men in long coats use truncheons and gas — cudgel as pacification.

Here our custom is the manifest destiny of consumption — we shit where we eat.

Here we’re mesmerized by bright shiny objects — we are eagles with bowerbird brains.

Here we were flawed from inception and bent to the will of capital — we repeat our behaviors and expect a different result. Insane in the membrane.

This is repetition compulsion American style — truer than the red, white and blue, ooo, ooo, ooo!

How goes it with you?

What I’m Reading:

It has often been said, in the twenty-first century and in earlier centuries, too, that Americans lack a shared past and that, built on a cracked foundation, the Republic is crumbling. Part of this argument has to do with ancestry: Americans are descended from conquerors and from the conquered, from people held as slaves and from the people who held them, from the Union and from the Confederacy, from Protestants and from Jews, from Muslims and from Catholics, and from immigrants and from people who have fought to end immigration. Sometimes, in American history—in nearly all national histories—one person’s villain is another’s hero. But part of this argument has to do with ideology: the United States is founded on a set of ideas, but Americans have become so divided that they no longer agree, if they ever did, about what those ideas are, or were.

— Jill Lepore / These Truths: A History of the United States