Karma Comes to America

I was a student at Cornell in 1965 or '66, when 10 or 12 members of the SDS decided to try to block a ROTC awards ceremony, to take place in the gym. Reaction against them was fierce; the cops had to form a cordon to protect them, so they could leave the room unharmed. (Today, the cops would just beat them senseless.) Of course, in the fullness of time, they were proved right: our war on Vietnam was barbaric and unjustified, and the student body of Cornell—most of them, that is—were little more than brainwashed fools. Much like the rest of the country.

And so now we drift toward fascism, our karmic destiny. In May, I gave a talk at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and a young woman asked me: “Can you say exactly when the US will collapse?” It was funny, in a dark sort of way. I said to her: “Just look around. It’s happening even as we speak.” (I talked about the national debt, the daily massacres, the widespread corruption, the intellectual poverty of our universities, and so on.) The fact is that Americans are suffering. Economically, certainly, but also emotionally and spiritually. They are an angry, depressed people. And from one pt of view, they deserve to be punished; I personally believe they brought all of this on themselves. But the word "punishment" doesn’t really work in this context, because it implies that you understand what it is you did wrong. And Americans simply cannot grasp this; they believe they did nothing wrong. They may be naïve and stupid, but this response is honest, at least. Here’s what most of them might say:

-They told me to hustle, so I hustled. They told me life was abt material acquisition, so that ’s what I pursued. (And now, my life is empty, because consumerism is empty.)

-They told me socialism was evil, had absolutely no redeeming features. I believed them. (Now I see I could have benefited from an expansion of socialism beyond Social Security.)

-They told me that we were right to kill off the Native Americans, and shove what was left of them onto reservations. I agreed with this, although truth be told, I never gave it much thought. (I can see now, in retrospect, that the “kinship world view” seems a much better way to live than capitalist competition.)

-I cheered America’s wars (until we lost them), in Vietnam and elsewhere. Imperialism, genocide—these things were OK with me, because I believed America could do no wrong. Any country we opposed was by definition evil. -I rejected, ignored, or hated those Americans who provided fundamental critiques of our way of life—or really, any critiques. (There were plenty of these around; I didn’t want to hear about it.)

-I also looked with scorn on anyone who was different, who cared about the life of the mind, who didn’t think that becoming rich was a meaningful goal of life. I hated intellectuals, and I had no use for poetry, which I regarded as irrelevant, or even stupid.

Here is a critic whom Americans would have hated, if they even knew he existed: Wallace Shawn, in The Fever:

“Cowards who sit in lecture halls or the halls of state denouncing the crimes of the revolutionaries are not as admirable as the farmers and nuns who ran so swiftly into the wind, who ran silently into death. The ones I killed were not the worst people in all those places; in fact, they were the best.”

Looking back now at that SDS confrontation with ROTC: Who were the best people, in that gym so long ago? The SDS, who were trying to stop a cruel and immoral war, or the student body, who were blindly soaking in hatred for them, out of a misguided sense of patriotism?

And in general: Are Americans the best? My guess is that History will judge us as being among the worst. So let’s embrace our karma, in the form of Trump and fascism. It will ring down the curtain on one of the most violent regimes in the history of the world.

(c)Morris Berman, 2024