A song to illustrate the American decline.

Detroit is now a dead city. The longing blues has probably turned into an incoherent, nerves wrecking rap.

It is not the only dead city. It is not the only place terminally struck by the plague of change. Many will put the blame for the pitiful state major cities in the US find themselves now on the socialist/progressist (now woke) ideology and practical action the local Democrat administrations embraced. A true but insufficient reasoning.

Local politics and governance only complement the older trend insinuated into the American way of life. A trend that turned everything upside down.

The material, productive world was replaced with a virtualized world, ubiquitous, unpalpable, impossible to subdue to human needs, unaccountable. The ‘services’ instead of measurable labor, ‘communications’ instead of direct human interaction, ‘PR’ instead of hard truth, ‘computing’ instead of thinking, ‘virtual reality’ instead of… reality.

Remember the first major crash when the millennium turned was the dot com crash. Just saying.

What was reserved, with already proven bad consequences, to the financial realm, spread everywhere, trumpeted as the unavoidable and desirable future. The productive man was scorned. The know nothing, outside his very narrow realm, flimsy dreamer was praised. Illusion replaced the solid. The American dream turned fully into a dream only and seriously risks to become a Matrix-like dystopia.

Meanwhile, the spiritual world was persistently dragged into the mud, tainted with unending innuendo and overblown accusations, forced into an entirely telluric role, entirely slave to the social instead of being a servant of God and conduit for the faithful.

The academia sanctuary was also desecrated. The place for ideas exchange and philosophy became the feud of conflicting ideologies and, eventually, conquered ground for the current triumphant, ultimately nihilist, ideology.

The material was dematerialized and the spiritual was despiritualized, this is the perfect recipe for utter disaster.

Is this conclusion valid only for America ? No, it is just easier to observe the phenomena there, maybe due to the relative freer flow of ideas which operated until recently. The contrast with the not so distant past is also sharper there than within the decrepit European former empires where the seeds of destruction were planted earlier. Thirdly, US is the place where things truly happen, Europe is just mimicking.

What is to be done ? Not much, just reverse the trend. Shouldn’t be so hard, even if it looks downright impossible.

Happy new year, America, wherever you still are !