America: the Zombie Nation
We Are Living in the Corpse of a Once Great Land
For much of the past decade at least, I have had a growing sensation that this country is on life-support. It staggers along, careening from one absurd episode to the next, seemingly with no willpower or impetus towards any higher goal. Our leaders hate us and are actively trying to replace us. We haven’t won a war for a generation, and if you exclude Gulf War 1 from the equation, we haven’t won a war for 80 years. This is despite spending more money on weapons and equipment than most of the rest of the world combined. Our culture is hopelessly fractured. Enrollment in civic organizations is plummeting. Our population, once comprised almost exclusively of people from a relatively small part of Europe, is a hopelessly tangled mass of people from every corner of the globe with practically nothing in common. Our federal government, as well as most of our state governments, is blatantly corrupt, sclerotic, and openly hostile towards its own citizens. By any objective metric, our standard of living is decreasing. Income disparity has reached previously unseen levels. In short, we are a husk of a nation, trundling forward through sheer inertia. We are a zombie nation.
This has been a difficult realization. Like most men of my generation, I grew up patriotic, full of love for my country. It brings me no joy to consider it this way. But I had to admit to myself that any love or devotion that I still feel for the country are for as it once was, not for how it is now, and certainly not for how it will soon become. It feels like I’m giving up on a brother with an addiction, or quitting a job that I’ve held for most of my life, or getting a divorce. I have always been proud to be an American. While living overseas I staunchly defended her culture, her history, her political leaders. To think this way now feels like something of a betrayal. But at some point you have to accept reality, even if it’s painful.
Try this thought experiment: imagine that we didn’t currently have a flag. Congress decides to hold hearings to determine what our flag should be, what it should represent. What are our values? What symbol do we want to display to the rest of the world? Consider the culture as it stands, consider the men and women in the halls of Congress. They wouldn’t even be able to reach a consensus on what the flag should represent, not to mention how it should be represented.
Our greatest days are behind us. Our infrastructure is crumbling, either through neglect or sheer incompetence. It’s difficult to tell which would be worse: that our systems are so dysfunctional that they ignore the basic maintenance of our civilization, or that we are simply not capable of that maintenance. Never mind actually improving things, we can’t even keep them functioning. In my state of Alaska, not a single new major road has been constructed in years. Small towns are still being supplied via air at exorbitant costs, with no thought for the future or what might happen in an emergency which would make such deliveries impossible. Even maintaining the roads we have seems beyond us. To think that in 2025 we are driving on roads designed in the Eisenhower administration is shameful.
Power outages are increasing, brownouts entirely routine. As further evidence of our decay, we can all agree that Something Must be Done about our energy situation, but no one can even agree on what it should be. Reduce consumption? Increase production? Design and build alternatives? The conversation continues endlessly with no progress being made. Most of our cities receive their power using technology developed over a century ago. Where are the tiny nuclear reactors? Geothermal plants? Tidal generators? Perhaps they wouldn’t work. Perhaps there would be challenges. Challenges such as those faced in the construction of the Hoover Dam? Which we managed to build, by the way, without computers.
Consider our culture. Who are the great novelists of our time? The great musicians? My children listen to music from the 70s and the 80s, and they’re not alone. What would you consider to be the American architectural style? If culture is the natural, organic outpouring of a people’s collective spirit, what does it say about our nation that our only real for of cultural relevance is the movie industry? Especially when most of the discussion about movies is concerning how terrible they are and how they no longer even manage to speak to the American people in any meaningful way. I’m sitting in the lobby of my child’s pediatrician, and the music playing is at least 40 years old. Thank God, honestly, when you consider that modern music is so banal and vile that I often wonder if it wasn’t created in a CIA lab as some kind of psy op.
What do Americans actually get passionate about? What brings us together in large groups? The only thing I can think of is professional sports. Talk about manifestation of a zombie nation! Huge, corporate organizations, utterly divorced from their local communities, staffed by men from all over the country (or indeed, all over the world). There is nothing natural or organic about it. There’s no sense that if you were to work hard and apply yourself, you might one day play for your town’s team. They’re playing sports that most of us don’t play, for teams that were probably originally formed in an entirely different place. Even going to watch them play seems like a weird, anachronistic impulse. The spasms of a corpse. Throughout the entire ordeal you are mercilessly advertised to, from the moment you fight through traffic to park at some huge corporate-sponsored arena to the moment you leave. None of it is natural or authentic.
I don’t know what will come of this. I don’t have any answers. I think the only thing even keeping the charade going is inertia. In a different time, we would have been invaded and conquered by now, or perhaps we would have fought the invaders off and in so doing, regained some semblance of a national identity. Fortunately, the rest of the world seems so chaotic and retarded that they couldn’t manage it even if they tried. And so at least for the near future, the corpse will continue to shamble forward, crashing and smashing things as it goes. We who live here will continue to cannibalize the culture of the past, or ape those of other, more authentic nations, in a desperate attempt to hold on to something, anything, more real than the slop that pours out from our phone screens.
I got several sentences in before I realised you weren't talking about England! How is this happening to all of us all over the western world at the same time? Literally, we are all feeling the same about our own countries. Same about the music too! My millennial and gen z children listen to mostly old stuff. The radio station I listen to doesn't play anything past the year 1999 and it's strapline is:"the most listened to independent radio station in the UK" - so we're all living in a time warp. I'm listening to the same Boston, David Bowie, Doobie Brothers stuff you're listening to 6000 miles away. We are all having the same thoughts: " any love or devotion that I still feel for the country are for as it once was, not for how it is now, and certainly not for how it will soon become. It feels like I’m giving up on a brother with an addiction, or quitting a job that I’ve held for most of my life, or getting a divorce." SNAP! Apart from my children, my family - parents, brother, aunts, uncles, cousins are all dead. The world they inhabited and I used to think was permanent seems to have vanished with them when I wasn't looking. It's all so effing weird.
Managed decline. The world population is falling much faster than we are being told, dropping fertility in the west means that in a generation twice as many die as are born, in white indigenous populations and that is before the real damage caused by the mRNA gene therapy is taken into account. Excess death is continuing, but not talked about. Look around you - our culture has been dumbing down for years, our built environment also is ugly and spirit crushing, uglification / shitification. Feminism has destroyed families and is destroying those who would fight back, the men who would once have been supported by their wives and family. They are even dimming the sun and growing fake meat from cancer tumours (yes, that is how they do it). Immigration to UK is 525,000 people annually. Bottom line - there’s less of us, we are less healthy, we have lost our fight, making us easier to manage and control, we are being replaced by people who breed at several times the rate we do, paid for by us, who have lower IQ and who are used to being managed as a group by their “community leaders”, a new low skill and compliant workforce. Presently, the Trump administration, Hungary and Russia are the last hopes for the world we used to know.